Summary: News from the OpenSUSE project

THE MAIN story this week is the arrival at Milestone 6 of the next release of OpenSUSE. Newer SELinux is coming into it and there is other more experimental work and features like 1-click bug reporting.

If you are running the openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 6 (Gnome 2.27.5, Kernel 2.6.31-rc6-3-default) and find out that clicks of touchpad do not work, then this might help you a bit.

OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 also came pretty fast into the (Open)SUSE Build Service.

I’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 beta3 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project and include many upstream and Go-oo fixes. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE OOo build on the wiki page.

OpenSUSE's choice of KDE4 as the default desktop environment still receives some coverage and Linux Journal writes:

Particularly of note is the suggestion that, by highlighting the KDE radio button the installer by default, the distribution will become "the only big KDE distribution" — presumably ignoring the existence of Kubuntu, and that the default download of Mandriva is it's KDE version (including the advice "If you are not sure, just stay with the default choice"). Knoppix — much loved by Linux Journal's own Kyle Rankin — also includes KDE as it's standard desktop.

From a KDE/SUSE blogger:

The main openSUSE users' mailing list are a demanding bunch who know what they want. Over the last few months the KDE group have been asking them what they still miss from KDE 3 in KDE 4, and one of those things has been the ability to add a submenu of the main app launcher, whether Kickoff or traditional, to the panel as a button in its own right.

Novell's PR people went to great lengths to use Greg Kroah-Hartman for street cred:

Novell has a strong showing — SUSE developer Greg Kroah-Hartman is a co-author of the paper and Novell continues to be one of the top named contributors to the Linux kernel.

Sascha Manns, who inquired and informed last week and earlier in the month about the Weekly News survey (he also interviewed Greg Kroah-Hartman at the time), has the results which he advertises with this direct link [PDF].

Watch the latest OpenSUSE weekly newsletter. It's done very, very nicely now.

In this Week:

* Change in Maintenance for openSUSE 11.2 and Future Versions * Joe Brockmeier: OpenSource World * Ian MacGregor: Finding files on the comand line * Lydia Pintscher: Social Media Guide for free Software Projects * ITManagement/Bruce Byfield: OpenOffice.org and the 'Ribbons' Interface Brouhaha

Francis Giannaros is meanwhile figuring out better ways to document meetings.

We just completed our first openSUSE project meeting with a newly added plugin to bugbot called MeetBot.

OpenSUSE still gains some users sometimes ("Switching from Ubuntu to OpenSuse") and there are older stories too from a time when it was a lot more common an occurrence.

Somebody from OpenSUSE did a nice hacking job whereby he put LXDE on a phone which was intended for Android.

Ben Kevan from the OpenSUSE community is still packaging the latest Chrome whilst others do the same with Firefox 3.6 (test build). New updates are also being applied to SUSE's firewall.

Packages for openSUSE 11.1 are available from the openSUSE build service. You also need to update SuSEfirewall2 from that repo. Source code repo is available at gitorious.

Looking at some events, Brockmeier writes about the upcoming OpenSUSE conference.

Unconference

The openSUSE Conference will also have a major “unconference” component. We’ll have plenty of time for contributors to discuss and work on topics they’re interested in face to face.

Brockmeier also wrote about the subject in his personal blog.

The openSUSE Conference is coming together nicely! We announced the second keynote for the conference yesterday, and I’m pretty excited about the choice: Gianugo Rabellino of the Apache Foundation will be doing the closing keynote on Sunday, September 20th.

One OpenSUSE member wrote about the presence of OpenSUSE at FrOSCon 2009, a German event.

Last weekend the FrOSCon took place in Sankt Augustin and again this year openSUSE was present with a booth! For the first time in germany the booth was driven only by Ambassadors and users, AFAIK. So for this reason the event already was a huge success for openSUSE!

On the educational side, OpenSUSE-Edu will be part of a workshop.

We will be having hands-on sessions on openSUSE-Edu: Li-f-e (Linux for Education) distribution, participants will get to take home a copy too.

According to this, Linux for Education is also sponsored by Novell.

Sponsored by the open-SUSE Education Project, the site contains

…collections of useful courses to help you better use the applications found on the Linux distributions. There are also forums, chatrooms, courses, and help materials at your disposal.

Courses range in topics from the Sugar OS to ice formations on Europa to Moodle basics and all materials are licensed under Creative Commons. The site is truly not to be missed, whether you’re a *nix fan or not. It also serves as a showcase for the power of Moodle and OSS in presenting coursework.

Other than OpenSUSE-Edu and the workshop, there is ENOS, which will be hosted in Portugal.

For the third consecutive year, all the Portuguese openSUSE community users will be meeting will the main goal of boosting the openSUSE project in Portugal.

OpenSUSE is not necessarily gaining in Portugal.

Novell is hard to trust when its employees are spreading .NET/Mono. Also see this new discussion about Mono and Moonlight. The OpenSUSE crowd does not seem terribly keen on these. ⬆