Summary: OpenSUSE news from this past week



IT has been a rather quiet week, but OpenSUSE Weekly News may suggest otherwise. Zonker was mentioned in relation to some events where OpenSUSE has a role. Here is some PR about LinuxCon for instance:

At LinuxCon in Portland, Oregon on September 22, openSUSE community manager Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier will talk about how the build service is used for the openSUSE Project as well as other projects and organizations like KDevelop, Open-Xchange, and Dell.

Zonker also wrote about the OpenSUSE Conference which he appears to be organising along with others. There are some confirmed keynote speakers and in his personal blog Zonker remarks on funding of such events.

Andreas Jaeger and Zonker have had a little public chat and there is also a "keysigning party" scheduled for the OpenSUSE Conference.

Jaeger writes about packaging of software in order to instruct others.

Magnus started recently a discussion on the openSUSE packaging mailing list (thread start is archived here) where he stated that it takes very long for him to build packages for openSUSE’s Factory distribution since the packages are only build once the complete distribution has been built.

Ben Kevan is still compiling the latest Chrome code for OpenSUSE and Manns handles other such things. Here is a note about Gwibber for OpenSUSE and also a complaint from Jean-Christophe Baptiste, who is bemoaning the loss of Nessus.

Even the server has a rather limited and obsolete support of openSUSE 10, whereas Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora have support for various versions and architectures. Check there.

This is rather a shame, as openSUSE is one of the major distribution.

On the brighter side of things, Firebird has been made more easily accessible to OpenSUSE users. There is also such progress in Ubuntu.

I want to inform our users that thanks to the efforts of Philippe Makowski, we've got Firebird in openSUSE now.

Masim Sugianto did some advocacy work in Indonesia where OpenSUSE is apparently a distribution of choice. There is an OpenSUSE event over there -- perhaps one that he helped organise.

The training itself dedicated for openSUSE promotional event for server side. Beside my activity as Indonesian openSUSE member, I also become a founder for Indonesian Zimbra Community. I think it would be a good idea to make openSUSE as primary choice, both for desktop and server application. Zimbra has it’s own benefit. The combination between it’s feature and price (priceless for open source edition) making Zimbra as an attractive option for mail server.

Early in the week Heise published a distributions overview that included OpenSUSE. A person who had attempted to install OpenSUSE on the long road to Ubuntu wrote the following:

Day 4: openSUSE 11: A quick test on www.zegeniestudios.com reveled i should try this popular Linux distro. I had a live CD iso file lying on my external harddrive so i went ahead and put it on a USB stick(instead of wasting a CD) using UNetbootin. However openSUSE handles live ISO differently. Spent 10 minutes figuring out how and why. Googling revealed this : http://en.opensuse.org/Live_USB_stick Sadly it required a pre-existing openSUSE installed. Sad. I thought i should be able to tweak the pre existing ISO dump on the USB stick to make it boot.

The following post -- along with the update -- seems almost ironic.

OpenSUSE Wins One (Updated)

[...]

So let the Novell haters come and link and talk bad about me; I really don’t care. I have work to do and, for now, openSUSE is making it happen with significant improvements over just about everything else I tried. Of course, Windows is simply not an option in my world.

Update: This, too, shall pass. While studying ways to fix the way the kernel interacts with the broken ACPI, I got SUSE where I couldn’t do anything at all. It just was not worth the hassle. However, I did learn an awful lot about broken ACPIs and such, like HPs insistence on having the thermal zone report in Centigrade, when it’s supposed to be Kelvin. What a mess…

Anyway, I’m back to CentOS because in the process of mucking about with the ACPI, I learned how to fix the stuff I didn’t get working there.

So the OpenSUSE rave ("Wins One") ended up as a loss. Our reader Goblin wrote about the drawbacks of using OpenSUSE.

Seems to further show an almost hero worship (IMO) of the Microsoft brand. Leaving Windows for Linux? Is going with OpenSUSE really leaving Microsoft at all? I will let you decide and is whats described by the above reviewer as “bloated” and “slow” a worthy choice when moving from Windows? Maybe if you have come to enjoy “bloated” and “slow” (IMO).

Nevertheless, Shuttle continues to support OpenSUSE as its distribution of choice (it is not a new pairing). From The Register:

Shuttle has introduced a version of its X500 "ultra-thin" all-in-one desktop PC that now comes pre-loaded with Linux - openSUSE 11.1, to be precise.

Lars from the OpenSUSE team informs in advance that the OpenSUSE site will be down in about a week from now.

From Sep 12 to Sep 13 we will have a power outage in the Nuernberg office.

Downtime is planned from 2009-09-11 20:00 CEST (18:00 UTC) until 2009-09-14 10:00 CEST (08:00 UTC). So it might become a long weekend especially for developers - but we plan to avoid restrictions for endusers during this downtime.

So far, the following services are definitively affected by this downtime:

* Build Service * Mailing lists * ...and more

Please have a look at the "downtime" wiki page to see the full list of affected hosts.

Not affected:

* <lang>.opensuse.org (all opensuse wikis) * forums.opensuse.org * irc.freenode.net/opensuse* channels * bugzilla.novell.com

The discussion to host at least download.opensuse.org and static.opensuse.org somewhere else is work in progress. We plan no replacement for the other services as the downtime is not too large.

We will try to reduce/disable building on build.opensuse.org on Thursday, so all mirrors should have "up-to date" packages over the weekend.

Generally speaking, Novell has seemingly neglected OpenSUSE (even if just a little). It seems to make sense for OpenSUSE staff and community to gain real independence from Novell. They can make it work. If that was ever to happen, I'd be among the first to return to OpenSUSE, at least as a user. ⬆