Summary: A collection of news surrounding OpenSUSE so far in February

THIS post accumulates news and developments from the past couple of weeks. There was no such post last week due to lack of sufficient activity that makes a post worthwhile. So let's look at what was missed.

Events

The KDE Plasma team is preparing to meet SUSE folks later this month. OpenSUSE is currently spreading many KDE4 desktops, whose implementation is considered very solid.

Earlier this month, OpenSUSE folks also attended FOSDEM. Some took an "OpenSUSE Bus" to get there:

We arrived, very relaxed, yesterday at 21:00 thanks to our awesome openSUSE Bus.

Here are some experiences from SUSE/Novell folks who attended [1, 2, 3]. Here is FOSDEM content that relates to OpenSUSE:

Last week we updated Hermes on our production servers, they’re running a version now which will become a first Hermes release. I hope to get it packaged and released this week to present it on FOSDEM where I’ll give a talk about Hermes. Don’t miss it if you’re interested in this useful technology.

OpenSUSE is going to deliver survey results some time soon, based on this call for participation.

Participate in the openSUSE survey 2010 to give feedback to the openSUSE project about the distribution, the openSUSE tools environment and the project in general.

Releases

Henne, not Zonker, announced the first milestone of OpenSUSE 11.3. He also put it in the mailing list:

People of Earth.

Its here! The first openSUSE 11.3 Milestone. This is the first step toward the next openSUSE release. The most important goal of this first milestone is to test the build interactions between newly added features in openSUSE Factory, also known as “get the snapshot to build”. It is in no way feature complete or ready for daily usage. There is no code freeze for any component yet, so many major changes are still to come.

This 11.3 Milestone build will give you a first glimpse of the direction we are pushing the distribution. Read more on news.opensuse.org to learn about the major changes that happened since the release of openSUSE 11.2.

http://bit.ly/113_milestone_1

Have a lot of fun...

The Register gave that milestone some coverage and so did a few other news sites [1, 2, 3].

The openSUSE Project has reached its first milestone for the upcoming 11.3 release, due in July.

Milestone 1 is the first of seven planned between now and late May. The development team said its primary goal is to test build interactions between newly-added features.

The first milestone features version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel, development version 2.29.5 of GNOME, and the first release candidate of KDE 4.4 desktop environment.

AstroGarrobo, a GNU/Linux distribution which is based on SUSE (constructed with SUSE Studio just like Bloatnux) is making its debut as public beta:

So, I’ve decided to build a Live CD using SUSE Studio, focused entirely in provide the same basic tools for learning the sky and their basic steps in Amateur Astronomy.

The name of the Project: AstroGarrobo

Reviews

We have managed to find some reviews over the past fortnight, one of which is more of a story about fitting OpenSUSE to specific hardware which is stubborn:

Some things of opensuse need some extra work like SUSPEND and HIBERNATE, I also didn't managed to get dual head working "out of the box" and I'm reluctant to change the Xorg.conf... something I did when I had my first thinkpad a second-hand 340...

As mentioned earlier, OpenSUSE is a solid KDE4 distribution and the next release of OpenSUSE seems to work well based on the tests of Linux Magazine:

OK, I’ll say it. KDE 4.4 is far superior to any release before it. Brace yourselves folks, it’s time to (finally) let go of version 3.

Here are installation instructions for KDE 4.4 in OpenSUSE 11.2.

OpenSUSE Education was put to the test as well. From the summary:

It’s a breath of fresh air to see a distribution singling out the educational institutions. This is exactly what schools need. Now the hardest part is making those schools aware of its existence. If OpenSuSE Edu can tackle that, they will have a huge success on their hands.

Here is a new video of someone talking about OpenSUSE (not in English) and here is the third part of a new OpenSUSE walkthrough.

Artwork

Some nice new Geeko artwork is being created [1, 2, 3] for whatever purpose, maybe marketing.

Technical

There were some OpenSUSE-specific problems and HOWTOs in various blogs [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], especially in HowToForge [1, 2, 3]. SJVN wrote about GNU/Linux upgrades and from his IDG blog, here is the OpenSUSE part:

With openSUSE, you'll need to download and burn a boot CD to start the Network upgrade, but after you get it going, you can go unpack the pots and pans while the upgrade automagically does its thing. In my case, with a 20Mbps cable Internet connection, I could only unpack the pots before the server would be ready for its first reboot with the latest version of openSUSE.

The most major news was OpenSUSE Build Service 1.7, which turned from a release candidate into a final release. It is finally available and The H gave this coverage (Heise has many readers who use SUSE):

The openSUSE developers have announced the availability of version 1.7 of the openSUSE Build Service. The latest update features the addition of a new attribute system that can store information related to packages or projects, and even faster build speeds. According to the developers, the SAT Solver improves the speed of dependency calculation "by [a] factor of 1,000, which means a package change submitted to the build service starts building in seconds instead of minutes".

Other than The H, there does not appear to be any news coverage of this, even though Novell's marketing people tried to create buzz. A lot of people just don't treat OpenSUSE as important anymore. In fact, one of the YaST developers finds that depressing and writes:

I no longer feel the sense of accomplishment from the things I'm working on and I'm unhappy with the way where something I was always doing with passion (ie. YaST hacking) is heading. The fact that I can do absolutely nothing to change that further deepens my blues.

Petr Mladek has been building OpenOffice.org 3.2 until its final release when he also made Novell's version of it available.

Masim Sugianto is still deploying mail applications on SLES even though he could use RHEL or CentOS (free of charge, unlike SLES).

Leftovers

Sascha 'Saigkill' Manns is still running many things around OpenSUSE.org, which includes OpenSUSE Weekly News (there is this new issue online). They need more contributions to it, as well as wiki translations. ⬆