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Novell News Summary - Part I: OpenSUSE Conference 2009 Reports

Gecko



Summary: OpenSUSE news this week is mostly to do with the conference which ended last week

A LOT has been written about the conference in Nürnberg, but the one person who wrote the most about it was also in part an organiser.

We have several tracks at the conference — two tracks of pre-planned discussions, two rooms for the “unconference” which have been consistently lively and full, and the “hallway” track.


Keysigning and elections were on the agenda. Coverage came mostly from the OpenSUSE community, e.g. the ambassador Sascha Manns [1, 2]. Roger Whittaker flew over from the UK to Germany [1, 2, 3, 4] and so did Benjamin Weber. Bryen Yunashko from the Board also attended alongside core members like Adrian Schröter and Andreas Jaeger, who collected some links to photos.

Today at the openSUSE Conference I took the notes of the governance session. We will continue the discussion tomorrow but let me just publish the raw notes as I took them at the meeting without much editing.


 

Sunday morning of the openSUSE conference I took part in the Lightning Talks which were short talks on a variety of topics.


More photos can be found here.

Zonker wrote about the event in the company's PR blog and his final coverage was crossposted (semi-professional and the personal blog). Michael Löffler did a wrap-up, Martin Vidner took notes later in the week, and a female member of the team was disappointed that they had no shirts for females at the conference.

Unfortunately, this year's openSUSE conference organizing team either assumed that all the conference participants will be male, or (more likely) deliberately chose not to take female minority into account. Ladies tees were sadly not among the conference swag. So I said no, thanks, I already have a shelf full of Linux/opensource/tech conference T-shirts I can hardly wear, because they simply do not fit (those of you who happened to meet me at the conference know that I look drowned even in men's S size ;-) ). I see no point in handing them to friends/relatives either, after all, it was me, not them, who participated at the event, right?


Some technical work that transpired at the conference is this:

On the outskirts of the OpenSUSE Conference, core developers revealed details on the new openSUSE version 11.2. Although it will have Kernel 2.6.31, browser users will have to wait a bit longer for YaST.


In other news, OpenSUSE Edu Li-f-e is said to have gone "hybrid" (not meaning semi-proprietary).

I am happy to announce that the very first working hybrid iso of openSUSE Education Li-f-e DVD created on openSUSE Build Service is now available for testing.


A few days ago, Zonker canceled the project's IRC meeting. He explained this decision as follows: "The openSUSE Project meeting for today is canceled as many of the openSUSE team are traveling or in off-site meetings today. The next meeting will be held in two weeks. If you have any questions or concerns in the meantime, please feel free to bring them up on the -project mailing list." So the IRC meeting was canceled, but SLLUG decided to hold a meeting with an introduction to SUSE Studio.

This month's Salt Lake Linux Users Group (SLLUG) meeting will be an introduction to SUSE Studio.


On the technical side, Duncan writes about zypper, as usual, Sascha Manns puts another package in OBS and here is a new set of instructions for Avidemux on OpenSUSE. An OpenSUSE/SLE book is being put together as yet another new product gets OpenSUSE preinstalled.

TabletKiosk announced three portable computers running OpenSUSE Linux 11 on Intel Atom processors, two of them seven-inch UMPCs (ultra mobile PCs) with built-in Wacom digitizers. The UMPCs are the Eo a7330D and the ruggedized TufTab a7230XD, joined by the 12.1-inch Sahara NetSlate a230T tablet, according to the company.


On the Moblin/Goblin side of things, mechanisms from OpenSUSE are being converged and the significance of this we last mentioned here. Moblin and OpenSUSE getting together [1, 2] would raise some important questions. More news can probably be found in the OpenSUSE Web site.

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