Summary: "OpenSUSE boosters" get their plan together, preparations are made for the release of OpenSUSE 11.2, new OpenSUSE Board is required



THE COMING week will be a big one for OpenSUSE because of a new release. The "boosters" team is already making plans for hype; their goal is to elevate the project's status and means of communication are being set up and used.

You find us on IRC in channel #opensuse-boosters or on the opensuse-boosters mailinglist.

More from the news:

Behind the scenes, the Wiki and Booster Teams are currently working hard to improve the Usability of the openSUSE Wiki to the openSUSE Community.

OpenSUSE 11.2 is just 4 days away and we wrote about it many times before. As mentioned last week, the release candidate is being tested while Zonker refines and decides on design. He reaches a wider audience using the OpenSUSE news site and Novell's PR team.

Zonker also wrote about the Board elections which we mentioned before. He was not alone. Linux Magazine notes the addition of a position/room for non-Novell employees. One such person abandoned such a 'tenure' earlier this year. Another one (with the help of others) complained about the state of OpenSUSE; maybe the need for "boosters" becomes more apparent with these issues taken into consideration.

OpenSUSE updates will, in future, be decided by a joint panel of Novell staff and community members. Only security updates will be decided by Novell alone.

Phoronix took OpenSUSE for a comparative ride that showed how it performs.

With the release of CentOS 5.4 last month to bring this community enterprise operating system on par with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, we decided it was a good time to see how the server / workstation performance between this new CentOS release compares to that of Ubuntu 9.10, which was released last week, and also how it performs up against the release candidate of OpenSuSE 11.2. In this article are these benchmarks.

Zypper had quite a few articles and blogs that covered it and OpenSUSE Build Service too received some tender care.

People who follow the openSUSE Build Service (OBS) developments might know it already, we work on an attribute system for OBS. But what it is good for at all ?

Our current driver is to enable every OBS user to do maintenance for packages in the maintained products (which are currently openSUSE 11.0, 11.1 and a few days 11.2). The maintenance concept itself is described in a very first draft here

Whilst openEMR got packaged for OpenSUSE, OpenSUSE-Medical was re-introduced, then promoted by the medical community.

The openSUSE-Medical project is seeking developers and additional packagers. The distribution is an openSUSE sub-project aimed at doctors and medical staff and will include various open source software applications for medical use.

Brent McConnell, who is affiliated with OpenSUSE, has found out that hosts are not necessarily viewing OpenSUSE as a mainstream distribution.

SliceHost doesn't offer my preferred Linux distro of openSUSE so I had my choice between Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian Lenny. I've always been a fan of the stability of the Debian platform so I opted to use Lenny as my platform.

Ben Kevan (of OpenSUSE) has published a bunch of good posts about KDE 4.3.x. That last one is good for demonstrating the maturity and wonders of this very modern desktop environment.

Lubos Lunak (also of OpenSUSE) wrote about Firefox integration in OpenSUSE (KDE) and others from the team work at a lower level on issues that need resolving and benefit all GNU/Linux users.

In SUSE, we carry some ancient AMD-provided patches that replace strlen(), memcmp(), strcmp() and strncmp() on x86_64 with different implementation, in the last glibc update to 2.11 I have hoped to get rid of the AMD patch finally, but the benchmark have shown that in fact glibc-2.11 has quite massive performance regression here…

There are also a couple of posts from Michal, who is getting prepared for events.

I'll be wearing some openSUSE t-shirt and I'll probably have some other openSUSE/Novell stuff with on me. I'm attaching one of my latest photos to this blog post.

Moving on to the events, there will be one in Nürnberg when version 11.2 is out the door and a separate one in OpenRheinRuhr (also in Germany).

Once again it’s time for a new conference! Next weekend the first OpenRheinRuhr will take place in Bottrop and of course openSUSE will be present with a booth.

The OpenSUSE Web site has some photos from iFest [1, 2] and for those who are looking for more news, there is OpenSUSE Weekly News. ⬆