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Novell News Summary - Part I: OpenSUSE at Heise, LinuxCon 2009, and Google SoC

Green with envy



Summary: A few picks from the past week for those who wish to keep up with OpenSUSE

THE PAST week has been pretty decent for the OpenSUSE project. The word about 11.2 milestone 1 is still spreading and Heise, as usual, covered it as well:



The release is intended for testing and is available as DVD images for x86 and x86-64 systems or as KDE and GNOME Live CDs. An overview of the planned features for the final openSUSE 11.2 release can be found on the distributions own feature-tracking system, called OpenFate.


Heise also published this review OpenSUSE (in German) whilst SJVN wrote about some older news regarding the Linux Foundation and OBS.

Now, thanks to the joint efforts of the Linux Foundation and openSUSE, any programmer has a straightforward way to get their program up and working in any Linux distribution without pulling out their hair. It's called the openSUSE Build Service. Despite the name, the Build Service actually enables you to create packages not just for openSUSE, but for the Red Hat family-CentOS, Fedora, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux-the Debian/Ubuntu group, and Mandriva.


The OpenSUSE community has found a new fan and HOWTOs were published too, some by community members and some by Novell employees who are on the Microsoft/Novell payroll (Novell extracts money from Microsoft).

So thanks to both Daniel and Jan (and my mentor, Marek Stopka, of course!) for a good initial experience in the openSUSE community! I look forward to making many future contributions.


Another Novell employee, Joe Brockmeier, will be speaking at LinuxCon 2009.

The Linux Foundation has announced the keynotes for LinuxCon 2009. These are:

* Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, openSUSE Community Manager, Novell;


Brockmeier still criticises all sorts of companies in his blog/s, but never will he criticise Microsoft, which is partly accountable for his wage. Interestingly, he will also be less likely to criticise Google in public because Google puts money in the project he represents.

Novell today announced that three of its sponsored open source initiatives are participating in the Google Summer of Code, hosting a total of 24 student projects. The students with accepted projects will be mentored by Novell employees and community contributors with the openSUSE and Mono projects, which have participated in previous Google Summer of Code events, and Go OpenOffice (go-oo.org).


In other news that is already old, there is yet another article about the Shuttle X270V, which comes with OpenSUSE preinstalled.

Based on the Shuttle Barebone X27D, the main highlight is the 1.6 GHz Intel dual-core Atom 330 processor that harmonizes with openSUSE Linux operating system (version 11) in a small form factor.


More picks can probably be found in the OpenSUSE Web site.

In this Week:

* openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 1 Released * People of openSUSE: Jan Engelhardt * Michal Vyskocil : How to track changes in packages: osc vc * Joe Brockmeier: The argument for free fonts * openSUSE Forums: Newbie KDE Questions


Next up: SLE* and Xandros.

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