Summary: Artwork and screenshots for OpenSUSE, Ark picks ZYpp, OpenSUSE might revive Ted Haeger-type podcasts, and distribution development gets opened up a bit



THIS PAST WEEK we were able to pick up a fair bit of OpenSUSE stuff, but none was particularly impactful. Some nice screenshots of OpenSUSE-Edu and OpenSUSE 11.2 milestone 2 (GNOME) were published and also some new wallpapers.

A bit late this year but I finally started creating my new wallpapers, I have 4 ideas for wallpapers and I don't know if I will manage to actually do them all. In this post I will publish the 2nd idea (2009b) and this time I plan to have a couple of variations on each theme.

Here are some nice-looking posters of SUSE Studio.

Linuxtag is happening in Berlin later this month and SUSE Studio is going to be there.

There was one prominent OpenSUSE HOWTO in Linux news sites and also a migration from Ubuntu (GNU/Linux) to OpenSUSE.

My struggle with Ubuntu has finally ended in me installing OpenSuse and getting rid of Ubuntu. :D

OpenSUSE did have a thing to crow about; Ark has just picked its package management system, but:

One potential source of problems with zypper is the order in which it does some things – e.g. when installing a package with many dependencies, zypper downloads a package, installs it with –nodeps, downloads the next package, installs it with –nodeps and so on [while apt-rpm downloads all packages first, then installs them in one go, avoiding the need for --nodeps].

The Community manager of OpenSUSE wrote about this small victory in the OpenSUSE Web site.

Some pretty good news for the ZYpp team! Ark Linux after some evaluation has choosen to use zypper with their next release.

Zonker also considers starting a weekly audio show.

Been toying with the idea of doing a quick weekly podcast - no frills, just a quick recap of the week, usually with what’s going on in and around openSUSE, as well as other comments on wider Linux community.

Quite importantly, OpenSUSE claims that it will put more control in the hands of its community.

The openSUSE developers have announced that they are changing their development policies to make it easier for developers outside of Novell to contribute. The previous policies, which dated back to before openSUSE existed, required that code contributions and technical decisions were only possible by going through a Novell developer and having them include the change or back the decision.

More information can be found here, along with an option for discussion.

For the future of openSUSE development we want to change some things. Currently, we have some policies around the distribution that date back to the time when there was no openSUSE. Code contributions are only possible if you go through a Novell developer. The same thing is true if you want to make some technical decision.

On the development side, OpenSUSE gets Go-oo 3.1 and Greg Kroah-Hartman writes a report about drivers again. SJVN bases an article on it.

To make sure that Linux supports hardware, Greg Kroah-Hartman, a Linux kernel developer and an engineer at Novell, started a project, the LDP (Linux Driver Project), for open-source developers to create hardware drivers for free for companies. You don't even have to reveal your precious proprietary secrets to the world. The programmers will keep those secret.

[...]

Before closing though let me say that this is not just a Linux problem. I, and many others, have endless troubles with multi-function devices on Macs and Windows PCs. In particular, I've found that a machine which will work great with one version of Windows will have fits with another version and I've found the same thing with Macs operating systems. Regardless of your operating system, we could really use better device support all-around from the vendors.

Whilst Zonker is unsure about the purpose of IRC, OpenSUSE Weekly News carries on as usual, despite apparent deflation in the size of the community. The latest summary includes.

* Announcing the openSUSE Ambassadors Program * openSUSE Education * Gnome 2.26.2 for openSUSE 11.1 * Ben Kevan : How to find out how long a process has been running * Duncan Mac-Vicar: Facebook on Kopete, take II

The next post will look more closely at SLE*. ⬆