Summary: News from the past week about the OpenSUSE project

THE main event of this month is probably the "Community Week" of OpenSUSE. It was characteristically covered by Kristin Shoemaker, who seems a tad too close to the project.

Community Week kicks off on Monday, May 11th and concludes on May 17th. Most of the events take place on Freenode, with individual components (such as openSUSE-specific discussions on KDE, GNOME, or marketing) having their own unique #openSUSE-project channels and schedules.

This was also mentioned in some other places including Novell and there were reports about it throughout (not many though).

Spent a big part of the day in Freenode in the #opensuse-wiki and #opensuse-marketing channels. The marketing session generated some good feedback, though we didn’t get terribly far in actually putting together the 11.2 launch plan. The wiki session, likewise, was good in generating ideas. Attendance was not too bad - about 20 people between the sessions, and some folks in both.

On the OpenSUSE-specific HOWTOs side, the following stood out:

• vnstat on openSUSE
• Conky - Lightweight system monitor in openSUSE
• cutmp3 - Command Line MP3 Editor in openSUSE

Here is a tour of GNOME Shell (from "Community Week").

Because I feel a tad bit guilty about missing all of the Community Week sessions this week (school and work training, and before you ask, I’ve got more training all this weekend, so I can’t make those sessions either), I did decide to do a quick tour of the GNOME Shell, one of the integral parts of the GNOME 3 series, scheduled to be coming out in 2010 or so.

The controversial Swiftfox was there in Susegeek's Web site as well. Here is an interesting sighting where, following some talk about work from a Novell engineer on a Creative driver, there is also some more chatter about RadeonHD. These are some of the good things Novell is doing.

While the xf86-video-ati driver continues to churn along receiving new code and frequent releases, there has not been too much to report on with the xf86-video-radeonhd driver lately. There was the RadeonHD 1.2.5 release over a month ago, but not a lot of interesting commits can be found in the RadeonHD driver over the past few weeks and these Novell developers suffered in recent layoffs. One of the few remaining feature differences between the -ati and -radeonhd drivers is with regard to HDMI audio support.

One of the Lizards blogged about the new look of OpenSUSE Education, a distribution tailored primarily for schools.

This community week we got a couple of new contributors to openSUSE-Education project, we got artists to come up with new looks for live images.

More news appeared in the OpenSUSE Web site. Here is issue #70:

In this Week:

* KDE4 Reloaded * Google Summer of Code Introduction * OpenOffice.org 3.1beta6 * Lukas Ocilka: YaST Has New Icons / Mascot ... Finally :) * ARM support in openSUSE Buildservice - fixed

Issue #71 is available as well.

In this Week:

* Get Ready for the openSUSE Community Week * Jan-Simon Möller: GSoC Introduction openSUSE @ ARM * Katarina Machalkova: Secret AutoYaST feature :) * Jigish Gohil: openSUSE in Education * Linux Magazine: KDE 4.3: First Widget for Social Desktop

There is also a special delivery of Weekly News for the Community Week and some instructions on how to make these. ⬆