Bonum Certa Men Certa

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

Under the Guise of "MIT Technology Review Insights" the Site MIT Technology Review Posts Corporate Spam as 'Articles'
Some of the articles aren't even articles but 'hit pieces' against Free software and some are paid advertisements
Brett Wilson LLP Has Track Record in Scam Coin Cases (e.g. Craig Wright and More), Now It Works for 'Crypto' Scam Purveyors
But wait, it gets worse
Will Brett Wilson LLP Handle Its Own Winding Up Petition or be Struck Off for Overt Abuse of Process?
Today we sue not only the first Microsofter
Ubuntu Becomes Microsoft GitHub, Based on Decision Made by British Army Officer
You're hopeless, Canonical
Sharing Code and Recipes
It helps explain the triviality of software freedom
How Many Women Has Microsoft's Alex Balabhadra Graveley Already Strangled and Where Does That End?
If you too are a victim of this man and wish to share information, contact us
"We Might Save Somebody's Life"
I follow the example of my father
 
Links 17/07/2025: Science, Hardware, and Censorship
Links for the day
Gemini Links 17/07/2025: Staying in the "Small Web" and Back on ICQ
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, July 16, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, July 16, 2025
Exclusive: corruption in Tribunals, Greffiers, from protection rackets to cat whisperers
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 16/07/2025: Chip Bans and Microsoft’s “Digital Escort” Program
Links for the day
Revolving Doors: One Day You're a Judge, the Next Day You're an Attorney Paying Public Officials and Working for Violent and Dangerous Microsoft Employees
how the US justice system works
Slopwatch: Noise, Plagiarism and Even Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation
What are we meant to do to prevent a false association or misleading connotations? Game the LLMs? No. Boycott slopfarms.
Gemini Links 16/07/2025: BaseLibre Numerical System and Simple Web Browsing with TLS
Links for the day
Links 16/07/2025: Fascist Slop Takes "Intelligence" Clothing, New Criminal Case Against MElon
Links for the day
Why I am Suing the Serial Strangler From Microsoft, Alex Balabhadra Graveley, in the UK High Court This Week
Out of respect to the process and to the Court, I shall not share any pertinent details about the case
Links 16/07/2025: China’s Economy Grows Steadily, France Takes Action Regarding Harm to Children by GAFAM and Fentanylware (TikTok)
Links for the day
It is Not About Politics
Beware the people who try to make this about politics
Good Journalism Saves Lives
a shocking number of women die or get seriously hurt every day due to violence from a partner
Recognition of Women's Contributions to Free Software
Being passive is not an option when bad things are happening
Slopfarms Are Going to Perish Because Public Opinion is Changing
Many slopfarms will simply go offline
19 Years of Standing Up for Justice, Equality, and Truth
This week we shall take it up a notch
Gemini Links 16/07/2025: Tmux and OCC25 Working TLS
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, July 15, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, July 15, 2025
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
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
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