SpenSUSE received some good feedback from several good sites. In the British computer press, for instance, you would find this review of OpenSUSE 10.3.

On the plus side, you can save a lot of money by making that move and if you want to give it a try, the Opensuse distro is easy to install and use, well supported and a good introduction to the open source platform. Should you get the Linux bug, it makes it easy to switch to the fully supported Novell product too.

Here is a person who chooses OpenSUSE over Fedora.

So, overall my personal preference is for openSUSE, I think the advantages out weigh the downfalls but at the same time I believe both distros could learn from each other.

Here is a similar story.

So a couple months ago I mentioned that I was running Fedora again as my primary desktop due to some problems I was having with OpenSUSE 10.3 But that I would try it again after a couple months hoping that patches will have addressed my problems. Well here we are a couple months later and I’ve installed OpenSUSE 10.3 on my primary AMD64 machine. This time through things worked the way I had expected them two a few months ago.

And another similar story, this time involving Gentoo.

As for SUSE, I'm running KDE now, and.. it's OK. Livable. Not bad. Portage broke down on my old gentoo installation and I finally got sick of it. Time to spend as little time managing my computer as possible.

Jeff Jaffe (of Novell) praised some of the recent moves in the OpenSUSE project.

Last month, openSUSE announced its guiding principles, including its means for governance, and we appointed the initial board for openSUSE. It is instructive to look at Novell’s motivation in supporting these principles.

Here is a new profile of another member of the OpenSUSE team. This time it's James Ogley.

The Planet SUSE sysadmin, James Ogley, was interviewed by us. Apart from managing the biggest openSUSE blog aggregator, he is also part of the openSUSE GNOME team packaging lots of GNOME/GTK applications.

A couple of days ago, the release of OBS 0.5 was announced, just before people go on vacation.

[opensuse-announce] openSUSE Build Service Version 0.5 Release

The openSUSE project releases the version 0.5 of the openSUSE Build Service. This code drop does provide the functionality as provided on https://build.opensuse.org/ the first time as official tar ball release. Pointsettia provides the complete infrastructure to build single hardware architecture distributions. System images can be created via KIWI

Overview of a few enhancements in Pointsettia: * Improved repository generation. Repositories get generated out of process of the scheduler. This makes the scheduler faster and more reliable. * Improved signing for repositories. Each project get now its individual gpg key for the repositories * Convenient project deletion now available. * Bugzilla linkage. Link added to create new Bugzilla reports for certain projects or packages

The openSUSE Build Service (OBS) is designed to host sources of packages. It can reuse sources from other source repository systems like svn or cvs, but it is more often used to maintain all necessary files around a tar ball release from another open source project.

The OBS features the project modell, which allows easy team building around a set of packages and allow the cooperation between upstream software developers and multiple packagers. It does also enable developers to adapt existing packages and to offer different flavors of them for their use cases.

The goal of the OBS is to become a complete open development platform for the openSUSE distribution. Therefore it does focus esp. on consistent package building via automatic package rebuilding in case of changes of dependend package changes to guarantee always a consistent build.

Next years developing will focus on improving the collaboration features to allow submissions requests to all projects, what will allow direct contributions to the openSUSE distribution. Later on we will complete the necessary features for creating installation medias and improving the End-User interface.

Links: * The Build Service development takes place in Novell forge at http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/project/?opensuse * The version 0.5 can be downloaded from http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/Special:Downloads/opensuse/0.5/ * Packages are packaged in the OBS itself http://software.opensuse.org/search?q=obs&baseproject=ALL * Current svn version can get checked out from https://forgesvn1.novell.com/svn/opensuse/trunk/buildservice

We wish you already a Happy New Year !

Your OBS development team.

It's unlikely that there will be much to post about next week, but plenty of people install a new distribution of GNU/Linux during the holidays. It's like the electronic laundry time. ⬆