Bonum Certa Men Certa

Novell News Summary - Part I: OpenFate, Build Service, and Many Events

Lizard on the road



Summary: OpenSUSE brings OpenFate, Hack Week is coming, and many new events take place

WE DELIVERED NO weekly news last week (summer break), so this week's aggregation will be larger than usual.

OpenFate



OpenSUSE introduces OpenFate, about which there is more information right here:

It was just announced that openFATE, openSUSE’s feature tracking system, will now be open to non openSUSE members.


Coding Rallies



Google's Summer of Code still supports OpenSUSE and here is just one report on the subject. Novell's next Hack Week (the fourth one) is coming pretty soon as well.

Novell is once again sponsoring a Hack Week, from July 20 through July 24th. This is an opportunity for Novell’s Open Platform Solutions developers to use their Innovation Time Off and hunker down and work on the projects that catch their fancy.


Zonker wrote about Hack Week very recently:

Novell is once again sponsoring a Hack Week, from July 20 through July 24th. This is an opportunity for Novell's Open Platform Solutions developers to use their Innovation Time Off and hunker down and work on the projects that catch their fancy.

Hack Week projects can be new features, new applications, or improvements to existing services and applications. Previous Hack Weeks have generated projects like Tasque, Giver, Debian package support in the openSUSE Build Service, and many others. Hack Week is also a chance for Novell employees to work with the openSUSE Community contributors if they wish on projects that help improve openSUSE.

You don't have to be a Novell employee to participate! If you'd like to hack on something cool and useful, you're welcome to join in!

We'll be collecting ideas in openFATE for Hack Week, so if you'd like to contribute an idea, just go to openFATE[1] and log in with your openSUSE account. Then select "Create" and add your feature, as well as any test or use cases.

If you'd like to help implement one of the ideas, check out the features that are already in openFATE for Hack Week IV. Go to "Browse" and select Hack Week IV as the Product, and you'll see all of the proposed features for Hack Week.

Have questions about Hack Week? Email Olaf Kirch[2] or ask in #opensuse-project on Freenode.

[1]: http://features.opensuse.org/

[2]: mailto:okir@suse.de


There are surely some interesting projects in store (hopefully not Mono related). Here for example is a welcomed improvement.

Installation: Resizing Windows before proposing Linux partitions



While “selling” openSUSE to a friend of mine, I tried to explain him all the steps of the installation and all the configuration options which I had changed. He was not any geek and it was his first time seeing Linux.

[...]

You can see it with 11.2 Milestone 2, where it is not enabled by default; to enable it, boot with start_shell=1 on kernel command line and uncomment the


OpenSUSE Factory



OpenSUSE Factory is said to be opening... opening up in the sense that other folks are invited to participate.

openSUSE Factory is open! That means that people outside Novell will have a chance to real participate on the openSUSE distribution. That is GREAT news!


The Build Service is being used to bring the latest KDE and LXDE is coming too.

What else is being built? Well, among the things that are announced more openly, there is work on Firefox 3.5 which is built for older versions of OpenSUSE as well. See this post about Mozilla news in OpenSUSE and the writings about another browser, Chrome, being built and tested on OpenSUSE. MySQL 5.4 is coming too and LenZ Grimmer writes about FlightGear 1.9.1. Novell's own iFolder was brought in very recently.

Good news, everybody! iFolder client packages are now available for openSUSE 11.1 from the openSUSE update repositories. This means you can install iFolder client on openSUSE 11.1 using YaST or zypper, without any modifications to your installed system.


Needless to say, many packages are added to OBS without special announcements or any fuss.

OpenSUSE Central



Brian Proffitt has just interviewed Zonker, with whom he did not work directly as a media person.

Linux.com: How are openSUSE, and Novell, approaching the big IT challenges in the current economic climate?

Zonker: Those are two very different questions, really. Novell is approaching the "big IT challenges" in the same way as many companies: Hunkering down and concentrating on the best way to meet customer needs and make sales in a very challenging environment.

The openSUSE Project doesn't really have the same pressures. We have no quarterly revenue targets and the downturn hasn't been a negative for use of FOSS. In fact, we may be seeing more interest by individuals and companies as a result of the downturn. It's hard to say.


OpenSUSE Forums claims 30,000 users now, despite growing pains.

Short but sweet post here: Getting a few numbers on community growth for the openSUSE Day introduction at LinuxTag, I noticed that the openSUSE Forums have now passed 30,000 users!


Events



There are many events this summer. There are heaps of photos from LinuxTag 2009, which took place in Berlin [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8].

Federico Mena-Quintero, who recently left the OpenSUSE Board shares some GNOME Hispano photos and Jack Wallen writes about another event that Novell attended.

I have a licence plate hanging in my office that I received from one of the last major Linux conventions I attended. The convention was in New York at the Jacob Javitz centre. It was huge. The convention was filled to rim with big business. IBM, Oracle, Compaq, Novell — many of the big guns were in attendance.


Looking at South America, many photos from Brazil's Free software conference can be found here.

Well.. I have some photos from International Free Software Conference in Brazil.

We have an openSUSE Users Group booth, with DVDs, T-Shirts and a lot of curious people about openSUSE.


Gabriel Stein from OpenSUSE took many more photos in later days and put a large number of them in Google's Picasa.

Chile too celebrated an OpenSUSE Day.

And the day came. After a six hours trip on bus, and a few minutes of sleep I got to Santiago de Chile. Francisco Toha picked me up so we headed to Universidad Andres Bello for the openSUSE Day. Huge building and plenty of room for everyone. The event started almost on time. I followed the first talk, a bit hoping to have a decent internet connection so I could show a live SUSE Studio test drive. OK, that didn’t happen. The internet traffic ratio was too slow like waiting 59 minutes to build an JeOS appliance was nuts so that was definitely the low aspect of the talk.


Releases



OpenSUSE 11.2 is now at milestone 3 and people take note. Stein posts a little reminder and the official announcement is here.

The openSUSE Project is pleased to announce the release of openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 3. Images are ready for download and testing. This release includes the 2.6.30 Linux kernel, KDE 4.3 beta 2, GNOME 2.27.2, OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 Alpha, and more!


Is SELinux going to be part of it?

Recent Techrights' Posts

Microsoft XBox is Dying as More Retailers Stop Stocking It and Massive Layoffs Planned Again
Microsoft is circling down the drain
Linux and the Freedom Paradox
Linux is losing freedom if some external actors who only use Microsoft tools for development wrest control
Watch the FSF Party Live (via Livestream)
It's in WebM format, which is widely supported by now
Advocacy of Software Freedom Changed, LUGs Became Less Relevant
The way we see it, support groups like LUGs sort of outlived their usefulness when it became easier to install GNU/Linux
 
Links 05/10/2025: Slow News Day and Wondering About the Canada Post Walkout
Links for the day
Gemini Links 05/10/2025: Telnet Debugging and The Programmer’s Brain
Links for the day
More Than "Just a Rumour": XBox Seems to Have Just Died
At this point, why would any studio out there target or partner with XBox?
How to Tell Your Community, Project or Company is Being Infiltrated by Saboteurs
How to identify nefarious social engineering
The Fortieth Birthday of the FSF Made Us Extremely Happy
It feels like the 'hacker community' is regrouping to discuss things and prepare for the next Big Challenge
Chat Control 2 Them, Not 2 U
Follow the advice of Dr. Patrick Breyer
Mozilla: Throw Away Your "Old" PC and Enable "Digital Rights Management (DRM)"
This is heading in a bad direction
Controlling Our Computing for Another Forty Years
40 years of freedom
Motivational Small Place to Run Large Sites
We deem this scenery motivational and inspiring
Techrights' Text Version (Daily Bulletin) Turns Five This Month
our plain-text bulletins are turning 5 this month
We'll Continue Covering the Moribund OSI and Other Dysfunctional if Not Hostile Institutions
Stefano Maffulli's departure is due to his defection and due to him failing the mission in pursuit of money (his salary)
Links 05/10/2025: Lufthansa Layoffs (4,000) and More Spotify Woes (Aside From Massive Debt)
Links for the day
The Free Software Foundation's Livestream Has Ended, Video/s Might be Online Next
I've asked whether they'll upload video of some of the event; I still wait for an answer
The Register MS Does Not Know the Difference Between Microsoft GitHub and GitLab
At the time of writing (October 5) the article from "Thu 2 Oct 2025" remains uncorrected
"Bullshit Generators" (What RMS Calls LLMs) and Fake Images Already Target the FSF
Why does Google News promote fake articles about the FSF while omitting all the real ones?
Software Patents as a Bubble
Don't invest resources in hype; if you detect a bubble, run away from it
Links 05/10/2025: Political Leftovers, Climate Change, and Security Incidents
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, October 04, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, October 04, 2025
For the Second Time in a Few Weeks Microsoft Lunduke Makes False Accusations Against Senior Red Hat Staff to Incite a Despicable 'Troll Army'
Nothing that Microsoft Lunduke claims or says can be trusted
When Microsoft "Integrates" Something With "AI" It Means It's Losing Money and Is Generally Hopeless
how did Bing fare after 36 months of LLM slop being hyped up as "replacement" for search?
Most Certificates Don't Improve Security, They Mostly Increase Downtime (for No Good Reason)
The 'Gemini sites' (capsules) are a growing force
The statCounter Site Has Data Integrity Problems
Maybe we'll get back to statCounter when its data becomes more "stable" again
10 Ways to Combat Software Patents
software patents are loathed also by proprietary software developers
"Just a Little Bit of Meat..."
Free software "absolutism" is not a radical stance, more so if the only "radical" belief the user possesses is that he or she must be in control of his or her software, and by extension his or her computer
Compromised by NVIDIA Proprietary Library
Meanwhile in Boston there are "[r]oundtable talk with FSF volunteers (both in-person and online)"
Red Hat is Ignoring the Free Software Community, It's a "Fortune 1000" Vendor
Red Hat's blog also participates a lot in promoting of Wall Street's latest pump-and-dump "AI" scheme
Free Software Foundation Party Has Begun
We shall be focusing a lot on software patents today
Former Head of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Lina Khan Knows Whatever Microsoft Touches Will Die
Just like Skype (as recently as months ago) [...] When Microsoft grabs things, or when it buys things, it almost never ends well
Slopwatch: Fake Articles About LibreOffice in Austria and Wine 10.16
very short
Links 04/10/2025: "attempted Coup" Noted in Facebook, Russia Kills Journalists via Drones
Links for the day
Gemini Links 04/10/2025: Anesthesia and Baudpunk
Links for the day
How Software Patents Were Viewed or Their General Status Changed Over Time
A rough summary
Links 04/10/2025: "Privacy Harm Is Harm", Criticism Outlawed in US
Links for the day
Garmin Uses Linux for Some of the Garmin Products, Now It's Sued by Strava Using Software Patents
Software patents should never have been granted in the first place
Richard Stallman Will Give a Talk in Sweden in 6 Days
Dr. Stallman, despite his battle with cancer is still alive and mentally sharp
FSF Turns 40
We'll be focusing on patent-related topics this weekend
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 03, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, October 03, 2025
Gemini Links 04/10/2025: Distro Hopping and "Part Time"
Links for the day
We Are Turning 19 in One Month, FSF Turns 40 in 3 Hours (CET)
For our anniversary next month we still have no concrete plans
Patent Docs (or PatentDocs) Learned the Wrong Lessons From the Death of TypePad
Had they gone ahead with an SSG, they'd become a lot more future-proof
USPTO Patent Bubble Already Imploding, After Decades of Artificial Inflation, Entire Offices Close for Good
we can deduce that financial pressures (lack of "demand" for monopolies) play a role
TikTok is Not Harmless (Being CheeTok in the US Will Advance Orange Agenda)
Social control media isn't "fun and games"; it's a digital weapon that lets hostile groups or nations infiltrate others, then turn them against themselves
Andy Farnell and Helen Plews Explain What "Modern" Tech Does to Old People
Imposing terrible tech "religion" on people is not helping them
Tomorrow the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Turns 40 and Its Web Site is Still Slow Due to DDoS by LLM Slop Bots
For an advocacy group, uptime is important (for its message to remain accessible)
Slopwatch: Google News as a Firehose of LLM Slop About "Linux"
Google News is really bad
Datamation, Where I Used to Publish Articles, Appears to Have Been Sold to TechnologyAdvice Only to Become a Slopfarm
I'd prefer to not associate with that site anymore
Links 03/10/2025: "NPR’s Economics Lessons Come With Neoliberal Spin" and Canada Post at Risk
Links for the day
Gemini Links 03/10/2025: Panic Attacks and Food Adulteration
Links for the day
Links 03/10/2025: Lawyers Caught Using LLM Slop Explain Why They Did It, LibreSSL 4.1.1 and 4.0.1 Released
Links for the day
FSF Board Grew 50% Since Last Year, Has New President, Turns 40 in Two Days
It's a good move for the FSF and - by extension - for software freedom
Links 03/10/2025: Conflicts, Death of TypePad, and TikTok/CheeTok Gives a Boost to Far Right Groups in Europe
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 02, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, October 02, 2025
Slopwatch: Linux Journal, Google News, and LinuxSecurity
They carry on polluting the Web with fake articles
Gemini Links 02/10/2025: Kubernetes With FreeBSD and robots.txt
Links for the day