LAST week was too quiet to be worth a post, so this is an accumulation encompassing two weeks.
Another show in desperate need on Booster Talks is LinuxTag 2010. Their call for papers is running and every booster shoud put in a talk! There are instructions on the CFP about what they are interested in, what topics they want to focus on, what is expected of speakers and how to submit a talk. So all of us are currently thinking about what we could talk about to the FOSS community.
For those new to FOSDEM, all I can say is it is a blast! Seriously, there are people from all over the world there talking about all sorts of things – personally I’m not overly bothered about most of the talks. For me the biggest win from FOSDEM is the social aspect. The pre-event drinks on Friday night are great, and yes I have to admit there is one thing that those adorable little blue Belgians do right – Beer!!! I have met many a great person, some of whom I had never heard of before but many whom I had. The atmosphere just rules.
Linux migrations are fun for me to see. It brings happiness to my soul that more companies are seeing the benefits that Linux offers them over propietary operating systems. No more vendor lock-in, more security, freedom to do it how they want, and much lower cost. Well, openSUSE Linux is now finding its way into the company for which I work.
Online since August 2005, the openSUSE wiki has proved to be an invaluable resource for users, contributors and developers. However, we had no Quality Assurance step in the publishing procedure for wiki articles.
I just did a massive (and I mean HUGE) catch-up on Planet SUSE.
I use from time to time pictures to speak for me, thats for me in easier as write a long english entry. I hope you understand what I mean.
Around every 6 months I back up everything and look at updating my distro. My last update was in the summer when I tried updating Mint and ended up with Ubuntu.
[...]
I then thought to myself why not give the live version of openSUSE a try. The live version was KDE4.3. Now it identified my video card as the ATI HD3450 without any help from me. It did not recognize the 2 Acer monitors. I was amazed that when I tried to use configure display settings. It worked!
It's a safe bet that the majority of K through 12 students in this country have access to a computer either at home or school. With education budget trends resembling a ski slope (downhill) it only makes sense to look to open source for help. With the 11.2 release of openSUSE comes a separate project targeted at schools and school children.
There are hundreds of Linux distributions available worldwide, kitted with an infinite number of kernel/desktop/applications combos, each offering a unique perspective and usage model.
Still, true to the Pareto principle, most of the Linux desktop belongs to a very small number of distributions, including mainly Ubuntu and its derivatives, Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva, and a few more. Hop over to DistroWatch and see for yourself. So the big question is, what makes these distros so popular, or better yet, preferred over other candidates? Ultimately, which one offers the most complete all-round experience of all?
[...]
There you have, Dedoimedo has decreed that is the best overall choice for the average Linux user is openSUSE, effective end of 2009. Dedoimedo has spoke.
It turns out that openSUSE is probably the best distribution for you. It has its ups and downs, but the bottom line, it's probably the most refined product of all, which is not surprising, given its roots. It's a business model shipped for free, after all.
I know some people who use Linux, who have a massive collection of Live and Install media which goes back a long ways. If I keep up at this rate, I'll be one of those people before long.
See, this started a few days ago when Mum decided she didn't like OpenSUSE, and wanted something new. Her computer isn't exactly robust, however, so we always try out potential candidates before they touch her computer.
We went through, and settled on Mandriva. I've heard a lot of good things about it, and I'm sure in other circumstances, I might even have seen a few of them.
Seems like lot of openSUSE Gnome users don’t like the new Gnome panel, which is radically different interface from the traditional Menu bar with Applications/Places/System entries. Personally I prefer the new style, perhaps because I’m used to the openSUSE Kickoff panel, and I really dig the search feature
Locking down the desktop may be an important functionality for you or it may be a major annoyance. This depends on your point of view and on which side of the administration fence you are. There are certainly many use cases where the restriction of desktop functionality is very important. One such use case may be the configuration of machines in a teaching environment.
For GNOME, Sabayon is a GUI tool that allows you to set up the desktop to your liking and store the configuration as a profile. Profiles can be deployed to any system allowing the machine to display the desired desktop based on who logs into the machine. Further you may also use Pessulus to lock down the GNOME desktop. Additional information may also be found in the GNOME Admin Guide.
During our last openSUSE Project meeting, there was a discussion on Multimedia Codecs.
Stellarium is a free software available for Windows, Linux/Unix and MacOSX. It renders 3D photo-realistic skies in real time.. With stellarium, you really see what you can see with your eyes, binoculars or a small telescope. Packages for openSUSE are available from Education repository on openSUSE Build Service via 1-click install.
Since it has been over 6 months since I had installed a windows os on my HP 2133, problems started showing up clueing me into the fact that it was time to wipe the drive, reinstall the os and start all over. My previous set up on my HP 2133 was a tri boot of Windows Vista, Windows 7 (release candidate only), and Ubuntu 8.04.
When the project is finished, hackers are the guys in the spotlight and, sadly enough, QA work often stays unnoticed. Worse even, if the whole thing is a failure, testing squad is the first one to blame ("Damn, those guys must've had no QA. What? They had some? What they have been doing all that time then?"). Needless to say, that doesn't exactly boost one's confidence in the meaningfulness of his/her work.
To conclude, I'd like to dedicate this post to all our Four-Letter-Project testers (especially to the most active one of them) and to all former, present and future openSUSE testers. Ladies and gentlemen, a big round of applause for all those heroes, known and unknown!
Now with the aid of the Hermes notification system, you can find out as soon as a new version of software you’re interested in is uploaded to the openSUSE Build Service.
As mentioned in blogs here and here Prism 1.0b3 got somehow released. I have updated the version I had in mozilla:beta and moved it to the openSUSE mozilla repository (even if it’s officially beta but then there is no previous version so it makes sense).