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. ⬆