Summary: Accumulation of OpenSUSE news and debates

BUSY week for OpenSUSE this time around, so let's get started.

Hackweek and Other Events

Although Hackweek ended quite a while ago, some OpenSUSE people still write about it. Cornelius Schumacher, for instance, writes about the KDE SDK and there is some more such stuff in Weekly News.

Welcome to issue # 82 of openSUSE Weekly News

In this Week:

* Milestone 4 released * Hackweek IV Results

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is also involved with OpenSUSE people, the number of which is seemingly increasing, just like GNU/Linux in general.

The openSUSE Board wants to thank all people contributing to openSUSE and helping to make the openSUSE project more community driven from day to day.

The OpenSUSE Conference is coming soon.

The openSUSE Project is proud to announce the first confirmed keynote for the first-ever openSUSE Conference. The openSUSE Conference is an opportunity for openSUSE contributors to attend talks, workshops, Birds of a Feather sessions, and collaborate together face to face. The conference will be held from September 17 through September 20 in Nürnberg, Germany. Register today to reserve your spot!

Desktop Environments

A lot of discussion over the past week has been dedicated to the question of default desktop environments. OpenSUSE takes a rather agnostic position and according to Ben Kevan, OpenSUSE has just gotten the latest GNOME, whereas KDE 4.3 requires some work.

Last week SUSE Studio was launched, and this week KDE 4.3 was released. They make a great combination. With SUSE Studio you can build a KDE 4.3 distro in just a few minutes. Here are the instructions how to do it.

According to Zonker, Stephan Binner still contributes to KDE in OpenSUSE, even after the Novell layoffs.

If you’ve been sticking with KDE 3.5.x, or if you’ve never tried KDE before, the KDE 4.3 release might be a good time to take another look when it’s released. You can find KDE live CDs here, courtesy of Stephan Binner. KDE 4.3 RC 3 images are available now.

That was a short while before the formal release of KDE 4.3.

Michael Löffler wrote about OpenFATE and KDE whilst a discussion emerged about including KDE as the default desktop in OpenSUSE.

Recently, the discussion whether to make KDE the default desktop on openSUSE has been raised. The situation bears some historical meaning, and has also brought up some misconceptions. Let me try to give a bit of an overview of it, and put things into context.

This ongoing debate was started a short while back and it was covered in OS News, then in Linux Magazine

Up to Novell's takeover of the Suse Linux AG, KDE was without doubt the preferred default for the German distribution. Now openSUSE users are increasingly demanding the return of KDE as default desktop.

An essay titled "When 'choice' becomes a burden" talked about this too.

Those of you who may have read Barry Schwartz’ “The Paradox of Choice” may already be familiar with the idea of choice paralysis though information overload. One of the reasons I’ve stayed out of the conversation is that I feel that openSUSE should not offer a choice at all. Not supporting “freedom of choice” is a very controversial position to take in a free software community, but many fail to realise how much “choice” can hurt a user.

Speaking of choice, OpenSUSE 11.2 will facilitate more than enough partitions and incorporate this into the GUI.

28 Partitions on a Single Disk? No Problem!

[...]

For openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 5 YaST was extended to support this new kernel feature.

OpenSUSE Linux for Education was also updated so as to offer better choice for educational settings.

openSUSE Li-f-e: Linux for Education DVD and the KIWI-LTSP has been updated.

Technical

There's this series of posts about RAID in OpenSUSE 11.1, a post on the proxying of OpenSUSE repositories, and something about OpenSUSE Build Service.

All this stuff is available in svn and openSUSE:Tools:Devel project. If you like to write another source service, you may want to look into the obs-service packages there. They are for sure no master piece of computer sience yet, but they prove the concept. It should be relative easy to write

One of the "OpenSUSE Lizards" (Andreas Jaeger, who is in charge) typed down some tips for OpenSUSE Build Service:

I talked yesterday with Coolo about the openSUSE Build Service and mentioned that I have now a lot of branched projects in my home project since I looked at many different packages that have different devel packages. He showed me his script and also gave another hint that I wanted to share (thanks Coolo for sharing this with me!).

Other

Kenneth Hess and Jason Perlow have hosted this new show with Zonker.

Author, editor, journalist and Community Manager for Novell's openSUSE project joins us to discuss openSUSE and the openSUSE community.

Hess later wrote about Perlow intending to make an OpenSUSE appliance, just like Bloatnux.

So, Jason is baking a new Linux distribution that he calls the Jason Server and he's using OpenSUSE because it's free and he can build a distribution easily on Novell's SUSE Studio. The Linux ICs allow you to install Linux seamlessly onto a Hyper-V server and have everything just work out of the box, so to speak.

Someone from Microsoft's Live Spaces has just dumped OpenSUSE.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm currently running openSolaris on both my desktop and my laptop, the latter of which had previously been running openSUSE. My persistent problems with sound in openSUSE are eventually what drove me away. It seemed that every time I thought I had a solution, something would break again. Eventually, I reached the point where booting my laptop would yield absolutely no sound from any of my applications.

John Fabry describes his interests as "computers, networking, Linux, Unix, literature, film, cars". Why does he blog on Windows Live? ⬆