Bonum Certa Men Certa

Novell News Summary - Part I: FLISOL 2010, Linux Tage 2010, and OpenSUSE 11.3 Milestone 3

Lizrard's life is so stressing



Summary: Another restful week for "Geeko" and some news from events that featured OpenSUSE

THE coming week promises to be packed with events, but this week was a quiet one for OpenSUSE.





Events



FLISOL 2010 took place in Venezuela and OpenSUSE was there.

The Latin American Festival of Installation of Free Software (Festival Latinoamericano de instalación de Software libre) will be held this year in over 90 cities throughout the region, including at least 19 Venezuelan 19 cities, bringing together much of the community of users and developers of open technologies in the country.


Sirko writes about this event as well.

A few weeks ago as I did this comic here I wrote at the same time to all openSUSE Amabassadors from Latin America a mail to participate in Flisol.


More from Sirko (about another event):

For the openSUSE the event was good and not so good. First Jan asked me for the registration process and I answered him he can use me as the second person that is needed for the process.


Jan Weber was at Chemnitzer Linux Days representing OpenSUSE along with a few others.

This weekend, as mentioned in my previous post, I visited the Chemnitzer Linux Days to run the openSUSE booth!


Jan and Sirko are both mentioned in this other entry from Petr Uzel -- an entry about Chemnitzer Linux Days (Linux Tage) 2010.

Last weekend, I was boosting at Chemnitzer Linux Tage where we ran openSUSE booth with Jan Weber, Kai-Uwe Behrmann and Sirko Kemter. Jan and Sirko already wrote reports at their blogs, so I’ll add just some personal thoughts and remarks.


There's also this new Novell video from Open Source Days 2010 (in Danish). It's mostly about virtualisation.



The "boosters" got busy with some other projects, but presence at public events is sometimes tied to them.

In January, the Build Service squad of openSUSE Boosters worked to improve the openSUSE Build Service web client experience.

[...]

The Boosters’ sprint resulted in a fully-featured web frontend, where the reviewer can check if a submitted package actually builds, the differences in the request, accept or reject with comment, and also immediately submit the changes onward to openSUSE Factory.


Releases



The next release of OpenSUSE is now in its third milestone and there is also OpenSUSE-LXDE. For some reason, it gets treated badly in the OpenSUSE Web site. All the posts about OpenSUSE-LXDE are rated very poorly and contain angry comments. Then there's OpenSUSE Xfce, which is another lightweight option.

Reviews



Not many people have shared their experiences with OpenSUSE, but here is one person who alludes to it. He looks for something lighter.

As you know I am currently running OpenSUSE 11.2 on my laptop. While I have enjoyed my time using it, I have noticed that this particular distribution tends to be on the heavy side of memory usage. This got me thinking. If OpenSUSE uses this much memory on my machine, how could it possibly run on a machine with 512MB of RAM (the lowest recommended amount)? If Ubuntu is the most popular distribution, but it is also, what I would call, a fully-fledged desktop distribution, then how does it manage given tighter memory constraints? And so the mini-experiment begins.

[...]

Conclusion

Make you own! …well it is pretty obvious that some of these distributions would perform better than others given these low system specs. There are however other things to consider. For example which packing type you prefer, or for that matter which package manager.


Another blogger explains "why you should switch to OpenSuse":

I can’t understand why some people are ‘afraid’ of using Linux. Few of them still think that it is command line based operating system used by programmers. But this is not true. Any popular Linux distribution (I recommend OpenSuse or Ubuntu for beginners) is a GUI based desktop operating system. In fact, the advantage is that you still have the command line if you want to perform advance level tasks.

[...]

In this edition, I am also going to cover a simple installation guide for the latest release of OpenSuse so that beginners can easily switch to the Operating System (especially if you want to migrate from Windows platform to Linux). First of all, download the DVD image from this website and write it to a DVD.

[...]

I have been using Linux for the past 7 years and I have tried many distributions (including the Damn Small Linux which comes in a CD image of size 50 MB). But, for the past 4 years I have been mostly using Ubuntu and Fedora. I liked Ubuntu very much since the community support for the project is very high. And it is based on another popular distribution Debian , which is very reliable.


Technical



Not much to see here this time. The beta of OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 has been made available to OpenSUSE users and someone explains how to install VLC. Another person has been having Okular problem in OpenSUSE.

Recently, poppler was having a bogus memory allocation bug. It had creeped into okular. Some pdf files were rendered okay; while some others flashed instantaneously and closed. The problem was on both of my systems openSUSE and Gentoo.


Speaking of KDE, Kraft 0.40 Beta 2 is available and OpenSUSE continues to receive decent treatment within the KDE community (it always did because of its roots, regardless of the default selection of a desktop environment in the installer).

Two days ago the KDE Plasma community announced that they are providing a live image of the Plasma Netbook Reference Platform. They provide this image to make it easy for all interested developers, users, journalists and geeks to check it out, work with, talk about and and improve it. The reference image is the result of an KDE effort utilizing the openSUSE Buildservice and it’s based on the openSUSE distribution.

What does that mean for us the openSUSE community? First of all it makes us very happy and proud.


Leftovers



The latest OpenSUSE Weekly News has been released and the OpenSUSE Web site is supposed to have universal search sooner or later.

During last two week I was among the other things investigating how to implement search through all openSUSE web pages.


It's long overdue. The Wiki was getting overhauled as well.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Reboots Should Never be Necessary
"BUT WHAT ABOUT SECURITY!!"
There's Still Hope for the World Wide Web
Let's hope that the trajectory of the Web won't be leading us to over-reliance on Google, nor will it reward worthless slopfarms
Gemini Links 15/07/2025: Smolweb and Alhena 5.1.7
Links for the day
XBox is Rapidly Turned Into a Slopfarm by Microsoft
Slop isn't about efficiency and saving money
Microsoft's Halloween Documents and systemd, Wayland, Etc.
Maybe one day Wayland will be widespread. Or maybe not.
 
Links 15/07/2025: LLM Pollution and Pushback in Ukraine
Links for the day
Gemini Links 15/07/2025: xkcd, New Cert, and Alhena Gemlog
Links for the day
Links 15/07/2025: Press Freedom at Risk and New Facebook Blunders
Links for the day
The Danes Want GNU/Linux
David Heinemeier Hansson recently moved to GNU/Linux
Cory Doctorow Explains Why Software Freedom Matters, Whereas "Open Source" Misses the Point and Helps Monopolies
It's a very long article
BillPR (EpsteinGate-Bribed NPR) is Turning Into a Partial Slopfarm that Promotes Slop
"I went on a date with a chatbot!"
Two Weeks Passed Since Latest Large Wave of Microsoft Layoffs, More Expected Next Month
Blaming the debt on "AI" is just self-serving storytelling
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, July 14, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, July 14, 2025
Gemini Links 15/07/2025: Gemini "Style Sheets" and Switching From Microsoft GitHub to Codeberg
Links for the day
Coming Soon: Another OSI Scandal, This One Implicating Molly de Blanc
OSI has been fairly quiet lately
Outreachy & Debian pregnancy cluster, Meike Reichle evidence
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Again, "Lunduke is Actually Sending His Audience to Attack People"
Microsoft Lunduke is not trying to "protect" Linux
One of the Most Hilarious Things About the Microsoft SLAPPs
It's so ridiculous
Financial Support for the Free Software Foundation or the GNU Project
The FSF has extended until Friday its fund-raising campaign
Illegally Hiding (or Demanding Secrecy Around) Illegal Requests or Attempts at Extortion
unlawful communications like threats
Gemini Links 14/07/2025: BOFH Archive, Updating Old Palm PDAS, and Nginx vs Slop Bots
Links for the day
Ubuntu is Becoming GAFAM-Like
What does that say about Canonical and Ubuntu?
Slopfarms Which Take Real Articles About GNU/Linux and Turn Them Into Copycats Which Are False
Even before the LLM hype those were quite common
The Firm That Picks on Techrights is Accustomed to Working With Criminals
Techrights never did anything illegal. So why is it being picked on by people who work with criminals?
Microsoft Said the Mass Layoffs Were for "Investment" in "AI", But It's Also Laying Off the "AI" and "Copilot" Staff
Months ago we showed many so-called "AI" people were getting the boot and this time it's the same
DryDeadFish is Dead, Long Live DryDeadFish
We kept checking, hoping it can recover from some temporary technical issue
For Quite Some Time Already Microsoft Attracts Crackpots, Scams, and More
Occasionally we talk about the situation at IBM as there are many parallels
Links 14/07/2025: Chatbots Broken Again, McHire LLM Shows Limits of the Hype
Links for the day
Changing One's Name Won't Change One's Past
People who have earned a bad reputation are not magically "entitled" to reset
People Who Assault Women Are Not Victims of "Distress"
It seems like an American tradition. In a country with almost 50 presidents, not even one was a female.
Slashdot Media Turned Linux Journal Into a Slopfarm and Now Slashdot Actively Promotes Anti-Linux Slopfarms
Yes, "no-nonsense" apparently means actual nonsense
Adoption of Gemini Protocol Still Growing
Gemini Protocol is being obscured by the media - it doesn't help that Google 'hijacked' the word "Gemini" - but people still manage to find out about it, download a client, and use it
Links 14/07/2025: Arresting Photographers, Threats to Revoke US Citizenship Over Criticism
Links for the day
More EPO Leaks on the Way
We hope that Mr. Rowan will actually try to refute what we say and show, not merely point the finger at the messengers
Decommodification is a Corporate Strategy Against Communities
systemd is led by Microsoft and hosted by Microsoft
copyleft.org 'Hijacked' by the People Who Attack the Person Who Created Copyleft
So far there's nothing "tasteless" in copyleft.org, but that can change at any time in the future
Asking People to Take Down Articles and Videos Only Makes These More Popular and "Viral"
If you do something bad, one of the worst things you can possibly do it try to silence those who speak about it
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, July 13, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, July 13, 2025
Two-Thirds Towards FSF Goal, Richard Stallman to Give Talks in Europe
There are 67 left before reaching the target
Brett Wilson LLP "Takes it Personal" (Character Assassination, Not Professionalism). Everybody Can See That.
On behalf of violent men
Gemini Links 14/07/2025: Politicised Tech and "Leaving GitHub"
Links for the day
Pissing Contests and Pissing Off Everyone
people who came from Microsoft are trying to vex and divide the community
Microsoft Repeats the Mistakes Made by the EPO After We Exposed a Major Microsoft/EPO Scandal 10 Years Ago
That scandal was all over the media, not just in English
The Demise of LLMs
We've just checked BetaNews again. They've dropped all the slop and went back to human authors.
Gemini Links 13/07/2025: Sonpo Museum of Art and FCEUX
Links for the day
Links 13/07/2025: UnitedHealth's Censorship Campaign, Australia Wary of China
Links for the day
Firing Away With Nonsense
Or fighting fire with fire
Links 13/07/2025: Climate Crisis, GAFAM Poisoning the Water
Links for the day
Turns Out LLMs for Code Don't Save Time and Don't Improve Quality
Neither legal nor useful
The Microsofters Will Have an Obligation to Compensate Us
This story isn't just about Microsoft. It's also about corruption, there are many women victims, there is abject "abuse of process", and many more scandals to be illuminated in years to come.
Reproducing at the EPO Instead of Producing Monopolies for Foreign Monopolies With Their Price-Fixing Cartels
Does the EPO recognise the need of well-educated Europeans to bear kids?
Valnet Inc. Dominates Real (Not LLM Slop) GNU/Linux Coverage in 2025
And likely in prior years, too
Free Software Foundation (FSF) Fund Raiser Goes on
Later this month we'll expose another OSI scandal
EPO Staff Representatives Issue a Warning About Staff's Health and Inadequate Care
Even the EPO's own stakeholders (money sources) are openly protesting against what the EPO became
Links 13/07/2025: Partly Assorted News From Deutsche Welle and CBC
Links for the day
Gemini Links 13/07/2025: Board Games and Battle Styles
Gemini Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, July 12, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, July 12, 2025