Summary: A grouping of the past week's news about OpenSUSE
OpenSUSE has had a quiet week, but it received
free publicity after the team had been
sucking up to some journalists from London area for SUSE publicity (press tour).
Brigitte and the PR team had set up a fantastic day of interviews and I had some quite good conversations with Glyn Moody, Richard Hillesley, Jason Stamper, Cliff Saran, and Peter Judge.
Talked about the openSUSE 11.2 release, where the project is at now, and also got rather a lot of questions about what it's like to transition from journalism to my current job. I suspect the last part probably won't feature in most of the final stories, but was more a chance to talk shop.
Zonker was feeding journalists some Microsoft/Novell spin. From
Peter Judge who was there:
Three years on from Microsoft's deal with Novell, the real importance is coming through, says Novell's OpenSUSE community manager, Joe Brockmeier
Yes, Brockmeier is paid by Novell to defend this patent deal. It's all about PR and that's where it came from.
Down in Germany, Novell
sponsored an "open source" research group.
Novell, provider of the community open source project openSUSE and the commercial open source product SUSE Linux Enterprise (Desktop/Server) is sponsoring the Open Source Research Group of the University of Erlangen Nuremberg. We are very happy to receive the gift which will support half a Ph.D. student (as a research assistant) for three years. The sponsorship was facilitated by the Open Source Business Foundation.
Also noteworthy:
"Open source professorship at University of Erlangen-Nuremberg"
Germany's first open source professorship was established at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.
Andreas Jaeger wrote about
the board elections -- a message that appeared also in the
opensuse-announce
mailing list.
Releases and Reviews
Looking at the latest release, Dan Lynch
experienced some difficulties with it and his final scores are therefore quite low.
Conclusions:
Ease Of Installation & Use: 4/5
Speed: 3/5
Stability: 2/5 (due to my false booting problem)
Community Support & Documentation: 4/5
Features: 3/5
Overall: 3/5
Other OpenSUSE folks
reported difficulties.
… This install is anything but painless.
Here is
a better experience from Jonathan.
Since I have been running SuSE/openSUSE since 9.1, I feel this is the best release to date. Now I'm not knocking other distributions. Ubuntu and Fedora are fine distributions. It was little things that I was used to that annoyed me. My philosophy is, use what works for you. But I am very impressed with this release of openSUSE.
SUSE Studio was
reviewed by Jim Lynch and
this person was handling different versions of OpenSUSE, having a bit of an ordeal throughout.
All in all it was pretty impressive, and I thought by myself “that’s like the stories the debian users always tell about upgrades”.
Other posts about such an adventure include
this one (there are about 4 in total).
Technical
The retirement of Sax2 was
mentioned earlier in the week and it is quite major. Heise
covered it and there have been
many other technical writings about OpenSUSE, some of which relate
to new packages that
are updated. OpenSUSE infrastructure repositories
are being moved.
The migrated subversion repositories are at BerliOS and reachable via http://developer.berlios.de/projects/opensuse/. The translation repository (suse-i18n) is also moving now (details on the mailing list).
Some KDE developers who are affiliated with OpenSUSE
look for bugs and
look for more tests. Luc Verhaegen, whom Novell laid off despite his important work on RadeonHD,
will attend FOSDEM.
More links can be found in
OpenSUSE Weekly News, as usual.
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