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Novell News Summary - Part I: OpenSUSE 11.3 Milestone 5, Zypper Changes

Lizard on the ground



Summary: OpenSUSE events, a new project "milestone", and assorted bits from the past two weeks

AS we migrated the Web site last week, no posts were made that summarise Novell's progress (or lack thereof). The Easter vacation contributed to that. So today's summary embodies news from the past fortnight, not a single week.



The main news would probably be OpenSUSE 11.3 Milestone 5, but we'll start with a focus on events.

Events



Novell’s Brainshare is recalled in the following post about "Zypper Revolution"; it's about system/package management.

I have been going over customer feedback from Novell’s Brainshare conference for my internal “Systems Management Zeitgeist” report, and there are a couple of points I just had to share with you all as they are plain simply inspirational.


OpenSUSE conference 2010 is being planned with anticipation in India and over in Nicaragua something similar is being prepared.

The folks of the openSUSE Community in Nicaragua, are preparing a great event in the city of Granada, Nicaragua, in Central America.


In Indonesia there is this OpenSUSE Community Web site.

Indonesian openSUSE Community website has been activated since July 2007 and provide news update, information, tutorial, tips & trick regarding openSUSE using Bahasa Indonesia as main language. I think it would be better to provide a major changes & improvement for main site, especially for content integration and daily update.


From another conference come many videos, such as the talks from Lenz Grimmer, Zonker, Klaas Freitag, Benjiman Weber & Pascal Bleser, and Katarína Machálková (whom we mentioned earlier today). Here is how the OpenSUSE Web site explains it:

Well it’s been almost seven months since our inaugural conference, and there were a load of videos taken.

[...]

Currently only Day 1 of the conference is available, you can view online (flash) or download (ogg) the talks from the openSUSE TV channel on BlipTV. I am working on getting a channel on YouTube to enable a wider reach, as some people have bandwidth issues with Blip. You can also subscribe to the feeds in multiple formats – rss, miro, itunes.


Wafaa still blogs about the OpenSUSE community and communities in general [1, 2]. The OpenSUSE community is considered to be very cohesive.

Reviews



We have not found a single review of OpenSUSE, but someone who moved from OpenSUSE 11.2 to Kubuntu 9.10 wrote about this decision in comparative terms, such as:

Ubuntu also has local mirrors in Australia, and I have always found these to be very fast. Updates and package installs are handled with no fuss whatsoever. No lockups, no problems. It just downloads the files (several at a time) and then installs them. I am never left with a broken system, or if for some reason I am, I can select "fix broken packages" from within Synaptic and the problem is then rectified. I do not recall if zypper has such a feature.


A new review of CrossOver 9.0 for GNU/Linux was based on OpenSUSE:

All tests were run in an openSUSE 11.2 Virtual Machine with 1GB RAM.


Technical



In a new guest post, Rares Aioanei explains Linux inside OpenSUSE while another person from OpenSUSE writes about "openSUSE 11.3 and SELinux" as follows:

The first step was to bring the next milestone of 11.3 to the level of 11.2 by adding load_policy to the mkinitrd scripts. The patch was submitted to Base:System a few hours ago. This work-around was needed because we switched to upstart which does not contain native C API calls to libselinux to load the policy from within init.

The next step fixed the file permissions of /etc/selinux/config to be 644 and to add some functionality to the selinux-ready script. Both are in security:SELinux now and on their way to opensuse:Factory.


OpenSUSE was one of the earliest distributions to incorporate SELinux.

More OpenSUSE-hosted or OpenSUSE-specific HOWTOs from April would be:

  1. openSUSE 11.1 / SLES11 and add-ons
  2. How to Configure clear and smooth fonts (subpixel rendering) in OpenSuSe Linux
  3. Install ATi Drivers on OpenSUSE
  4. Installing VirtualBox on openSUSE 11.2
  5. Installing Ruby 1.9 on openSUSE 11.2
  6. Samba 3.5.2 SMBTA v2 enabled packages releasedRuby 1.9 on openSUSE and SLEx
  7. Call for testing: unzip feature
  8. Small script to monitor service/process


Leftovers



Issue 117 of OpenSUSE Weekly News has been released along with an audiocast [1, 2, 3]. The same goes for the 118th issue [1, 2, 3], whose author, Sascha Manns, keeps packaging software for OpenSUSE [1, 2, 3]. Progress has generally been slow recently, but OpenSUSE 11.3 Milestone 5 is out, so the project carries on, regardless of Novell's fate (Novell is up for sale).

Recent Techrights' Posts

The 'Culture Wars' in Free Software Have Gone Out of Control
Social control media amplifies such utterly infantile discourse
10 Out of 10: RMS Attracts Massive Audience in Göteborg, Sweden (All Seats Occupied, Some People Standing)
a 55-second clip of his talk
The Lawsuit by Clients of Brett Wilson LLP Against Brett Wilson LLP is Officially On, It is Progressing, The 'Experts' Pick Outside Law Firms (RPC and Mills & Reeve) to Spare Them From Litigants in Person
So it is probably quite potent
Slopwatch: Plagiarism and "Linux" Articles by Bots
Sites that do this won't survive; many of them rely on slop services (suppliers) that will cease to exist after the bubble bursts
 
Geminispace is Very Large
The word continues to spread and the number of participants grows
Teaser: To Compensate for the Fact Our Clients Are Terrible Human Beings Who Strangle Women (While on Microsoft's Payroll) and We Get Paid by Mystery Parties We Bombard You and Your Wife With Almost 10 Kilograms of Legal Papers
If you can't win an argument, then drown the other side with papers?
Another Wave of Microsoft Layoffs, This Time During National Day Holiday
This time it's China again
Staying Happy in Times of Crackdowns on Civil Society
Optimism in this sort of "new reality" or "new normal" seems like something for the irrational person
"Nobel" Exploited Posthumously for "AI" Hype, Now They Do the Same With "Quantum"
ere have been many jokes about "Nobel" for peace (often granted to pro-war people) and a fake one for "Economics" (establishment propaganda)
Distinguished Lecture by Richard Stallman This Coming Monday in Rome
After "Free software, Crucial for Freedom in a Digital World"
Links 10/10/2025: Putin Admits Russia Downed Azerbaijan Airlines Jet, More New Heat Records
Links for the day
Noteworthy Claim That IBM is Firing a Lot of Lawyers This Week (RAs in the Legal Department)
A lot of what they do is patent 'trolling' or lawyering up against their own staff (e.g. HR disputes)
Links 10/10/2025: US Judge Bars Attacks by ICE On Journalists and Protesters; “We Took The Freedom of Speech Away” Says the President
Links for the day
Slopwatch: Serial Sloppers, Google News Gifting Slopfarms, and Fake News/Plagiarism About "Linux"
Google itself is a slop pusher these days
Qualcomm, the New Owner of Arduino, Blasted for Its Software Patents Tax on 'Smartphones'
A lot of Qualcomm's patents are on software. We wrote about this in prior years.
XBox Layoffs Rumours, Downtime, and Criticism From XBox Co-Founder
"everyone is ditching the xbox."
Links 10/10/2025: Honoring The Legacy Of Robert Murray-Smith, Many Articles on the Hey Hi (AI) Bubble
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/10/2025: October Gothic and Reading Middle Earth Role Playing; C and Ada
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 09, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, October 09, 2025
Links 09/10/2025: Farewell to Jane Goodall, California Bans Algorithmic Price-Fixing
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/10/2025: Lost Wages and a Saga Of Continuing To Use Palm PDAs
Links for the day
Richard Stallman's Talk in Helsinki is Done. Tomorrow Göteborg.
There are scarce details in Finnish about Dr. Stallman's talk
New XBox Leaks Probably Serve to Confirm XBox's Collapse (Many More Layoffs)
It's very much consistent with what many other sites have reported lately
The Slop Song
The train wreck marches on
LLM Slop/Advanced Plagiarism Flooding the Zone With Capital That Does Not Exist
Many publishers out there still participate in this bubble instead of calling it what it is
Links 09/10/2025: Sacked Microsoft Workers Make "Sackbird", IBM Taps CockroachDB for PostgreSQL
Links for the day
"Happy Hacking Day" Richard Stallman Talk This Afternoon (From 14:00 to 16:00) at Haaga-Helia University in Pasila
Richard Stallman in Helsinki, Finland
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 08, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, October 08, 2025
Links 09/10/2025: Impact of Microsoft Layoffs, More Data Breaches
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/10/2025: Autumn Blues and C IRC Bot
Links for the day
Slopwatch Appreciated by Real Authors of GNU/Linux Articles
We do try to keep on top of those things
Upgraded R.R.R.R.R.R. Today
The Web of 2025 is full of garbage, not limited to slopfarms
Freedom From Proprietary Prisons
Forking always an option
IBM's Watson Died in 1956, Now Watson Dies Again
IBM is becoming just a reseller of GAFAM and other stuff
Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, UbuntuPIT, and Google News
We've also just noticed more slop from UbuntuPIT
Microsoft Says That Constant Mass Layoffs Are Success, the Media Isn't Buying This Microsoft Narrative Anymore
If people in the media feel an obligation to repeat whatever lies Microsoft tells, what point will there be to the media?
Links 08/10/2025: "Mali Puts Free Speech on Trial" And Apple Enforces Dictatorship
Links for the day
Links 08/10/2025: ‘Death to Spotify’ and Law to Ban Loud Commercials on Streaming (Dis)Services
Links for the day
Links 08/10/2025: Real Innovation and Nina.chat is Dead
Links for the day
Links 08/10/2025: Y2K38 Bug is a Vulnerability, Chat Control in Europe a Threat
Links for the day
Microsoft Windows is No Longer an Operating System, It's Surveillance Project
Why is this even legal to preload on PCs outside the US?
How and Why Once-Legitimate Sites Turn Into Slopfarms
Many sites will go offline and many social control networks will shut down once they realise or even openly admit they spend money and time gardening a bunch of bots and slop
UbuntuPIT Became a Slopfarm and Gnoppix Tarnishes Its Own Brand With Slop
It fits all the characteristics of mildly-edited (if at all) slop
Slopwatch: Linux Journal and Other Slopfarms
GAFAM needs to go the way of the dodo
Gemini Links 08/10/2025: "Seek Seek Revolution" and Gradient Backgrounds
Links for the day
Qualcomm Arduino Takes Aim at Raspberry Pi
Qualcomm is a Microsoft partner
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, October 07, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, October 07, 2025
Stagnation of the Economy and What Free Software Can (or Could) Do For It
If your economic model is based on a pyramid of lies, it won't last very long
Social Control Media is Sinking
it would rightly seem like the era of centralised "social" sites (they're not social, they're about controlling the users) is ending, not overnight but gradually