Photo from Jenny Roll

Summary: News about OpenSUSE, of which there's a moderate amount this week

THE LINUX Foundation's Developer Network has published this new technical article about the OpenSUSE Build Service (OBS), which should not be too surprising given previous stories about the Linux Foundation and OBS. LWN has meanwhile made available to non-subscribers the following article about long-term support for OpenSUSE. It's old news by now, but LWN has good articles in general.



Here are some more bits of material on OBS, courtesy of Pascal.

Marcus "}-Tux-{" Hüwe and I have been busy the last weeks to set up an openSUSE Build Service instance for Packman. While doing so, I wrote a few little scripts to monitor what is going on as far as building, the scheduler queue and such are concerned.

Yet more information about OBS is mostly technical this week.

This article explains how to setup all parts of the openSUSE buildservice. It will describe the needed steps to get it running with the latest sourcecode from svn, ready to use it and develop it.

The news about Shuttle's latest OpenSUSE boxes might carry on for a while longer. APC Magazine wrote about it:

Other features for the machine include a 160GB HDD, 1.3-megapixel webcam, memory card reader, mic, and stereo speakers. Shuttle made the all-in-one a scant little rig with a thickness of 3.6 cm, that's hardly fatter than most notebooks. The machine is available to purchase right now (though only in Europe so far, it seems) from Shuttle for EUR 444 ($AUD749).

ThomasNet did its usual thing posting the press releases under different headlines 1-2 weeks after their original arrival. Here's the one from Shuttle.

Shuttle Inc., market leader in the Mini-PC sector and manufacturer of Multi-Form-Factor solutions, is now supplying its X50 All-in-One PC platform with pre-installed Linux operating system.

"ELMSHORN, Germany" is said to be the source of this press release and meanwhile, in Nuernberg, there's this news about last week's long downtime. Many prior warnings were published about this.

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.

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier announced milestone 7 of OpenSUSE 11.2 just over a week ago and some OpenSUSE folks wrote down tips for it. Michal Hrušecký wrote about testing it "safely".

One member of openSUSE Community started very interesting project I want to inform you about. What is it about? It is publicly available virtual machine with openSUSE Milestone. So if you want to test how openSUSE 11.2 would look like without installing it on your computer or just want to show your friends why should they use openSUSE then this project let's you do so easily.

Gabriel Stein wrote a very extensive batch of posts about OpenSUSE 11.2. It includes:

• VirtualBox Guest Additions and openSUSE 11.2 M7



• Testing – openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 7



• openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 7 – Testing YaST2 and sharing



• openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 7 – Testing Desktop Applications

The stable release of OpenSUSE, namely 11.1, has gotten KDE 4.3.1 (just over a week ago in fact).

Although openSUSE 11.2 is still two months away updated openSUSE 11.1 KDE4 Reloaded images previewing some changes are available now. They are respins of openSUSE 11.1 including KDE 4.3.1, Firefox 3.5 and all the online updates which have been released for openSUSE 11.1.

OpenSUSE will also entertain a "KDE Showcase" at the OpenSUSE Conference which Novell is finally promoting.

This week there is the openSUSE Conference in Nuremberg. There is a lot of activity planned, and as there will be quite some people there from both the KDE and openSUSE communities, I thought it would be a good idea to use that opportunity to work on a project I always wanted to spend some time on: Creating a KDE Showcase.

I am running an alpha of Kubuntu on my main machine, along with KDE 4.3.1. I warmly recommend it. It's wonderful. In fact, OpenSUSE's decision to go with KDE4 by default was probably a smart one, particularly given the maturity of KDE 4.3 (and subsequent versions).

There was a good deal of promotion of LXDE this week. It mostly comes from the OpenSUSE Web site, e.g.:

openSUSE-LXDE Live CD 1.0.

[...]

That features asks to provide LXDE into OSS repo, and to made that installable from DVD media like XFCE.

Holger Sickenberg wrote about the establishment of a Core Test Team for the OpenSUSE project:

Our call to apply for the openSUSE Core Test Team end of July attract a great deal of attention. So we got applications from nearly 50 members out of the openSUSE community, much more than expected.

Some users of OpenSUSE offer advice and recommendations, whereas leaders like Andreas Jaeger do a batch of interviews. Here is Jaeger's new interview with the guys at Linux Format.

With the OpenSUSE Conference in full swing, we caught up with Andreas Jaeger, Program Manager for the distro. Read on for his opinions on the new eight month release process, the controversial KDE-as-default decision, and how distros can work better together.

There is another interview with Jaeger over at Tux Journal.

One interesting initiative is the Webfrontend to YaST which will allow both local and remote administration of a system. openSUSE 11.2 is supposed to see the first few modules for this.

For closing we have this latest Open Audio episode with Erin Quill and Zonker. Weekly News got published too, despite the outage.

In this Week:

* openSUSE Conference: Social Events * Make Tech Easier/Joshua Price: 8 Useful and Interesting Bash Prompts * Update to VirtualBox-3.0.6-OSE * Holger Sickenberg: openSUSE Core Test Team Established

Reports from the OpenSUSE Conference will probably arrive very soon. ⬆