Summary: A fortnight's worth of news about OpenSUSE, which has relatively little new stuff to tell

SINCE the last OpenSUSE update two weeks ago, not much has actually happened, but Milestone 2 of OpenSUSE 11.3 has been released, which is at least worth a mention.

Events

FOSDEM 2010 was declared over quite a while ago, but belated reports from OpenSUSE people include this one from Untz (Novell employee) and this guy who speaks about the "openSUSE gang".

I wanted to see the last 2 XMPP talks, but their devroom was desperately full, so I went back to our stand to meet the rest of the openSUSE gang and have dinner with them.

Here are some interesting thoughts about the "openSUSE Ecosystem" and here is something about the community:

I really like our openSUSE Community. Do you remember that before 11.2 release there was a possibility to try new openSUSE without installing it? Well, our community member Jaromír ÄŒervenka did it again! Original blogpost in Czech can be found here. For those who don't speak Czech, some basic overview in English.

Releases

Turning to new releases, here is the announcement of OpenSUSE 11.3 Milestone 2:

GNOME got updated to 2.30 beta 1 (2.29.90). This release is the beginning of the user interface (UI) freeze so all new functionality should be completed. GNOME 2.30 will bring you for instance a new user interface for nautilus including a split view mode, unlimited scrollback in gnome-terminal and a completely new accessibility stack based on DBus. For further details please read the GNOME 2.29.90 Development Release announcement.

The KDE Software Compilation got updated to the final 4.4.0 version (“Caikaku”). We already shipped the release candidate in milestone 1 so there are not too many changes in functionality but tons of bugfixes included. If you missed the release announcement for 4.4 we suggest you head over to kde.org and read it! There are so many new things to discover. Netbook interface, Authentication Framework, Social/Web features and more.

This got some coverage in other sites [1, 2, 3].

Reviews

Brian Proffitt, the former editor of Linux Today, writes about his experiences with OpenSUSE, which sometimes leaves him wanting more.

Like most long-time computer users, I remember the good old days when it took five minutes to boot my PS/2 machine into Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, and running Word and Excel at the same time was about as adventuresome as one could get on a machine. I remember being amazed at how I could play Tetris while installing my first Linux distribution (Caldera OpenLinux, made by--shhh!--SCO), which convinced me forever that Linux was better at handling system resources.

[...]

So, the real solution? Since I upgraded to openSUSE 11.2 instead of doing a clean install, I still have SaX2 available, and I can re-create the settings under xorg.conf. xorg.conf will override HAL, and make my changes session-proof.

In another new article about "Seeking the One True Linux", Proffitt writes about the "quirks of openSUSE":

As all Linux distributions become polished and robust, I've noticed that I personally have become less and less inclined to jump to a new distro. And, when I have migrated in recent years, I have found myself going back to my openSUSE starting point.

The big result for this continuity of distro has been that I have become much more familiar with the quirks of openSUSE and, if not an expert, then at the very least a power user for this distribution. I am sure that countless similar situations exist for power users of Fedora, Ubuntu, Gentoo, and so on.

Someone else who hopes to replace Arch won't try OpenSUSE just yet.

I didn’t try out OpenSuse KDE, because I was curious about the GNOME version, there’s no Ubuntu because I already had Linux Mint, and I didn’t include Fedora although I wanted to, because I’m a bit worried about my download limit.

One of the OpenSUSE people is pointing to an old video about OpenSUSE 11.2 and the latest milestone of 11.3 receives some preliminary coverage:

Finally another milestone. I’m trying openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 2 to tinker with it and see if I can report something. Let’s go.

I’m using KDE Live CD for testing this milestone. You can get it here. Remember to pick mirror closest to your place to increase download efficiency.

The boot screen still have 11.2 theme, nothing different. When finished loading kernel I’m pressing Escape key to see more detail on booting process. I got a lot of udevd message, don’t know what does it mean. Can someone point me to what file I should looking for report?

Technical

OpenSUSE people and Novell employees have covered some more technical aspects of the distribution and there is coverage outside the community too. Untz (from GNOME and Novell) writes:

One year and a half ago, for openSUSE 11.1, we wanted to make it easy to configure printers. So naturally, we integrated system-config-printer since it works well, is well-maintained, and is adopted by other distributions.

On the KDE side, a new version of KDE SC 4.3 was made available and there is a lot of KDE material in the OpenSUSE Web site.

KDE SC 4.3.5 is about to become available for openSUSE 11.2 as an online update (from 4.3.1).

 

For the last seven days we were hosting the KDE Plasma Team doing their developer meeting called Tokamak4 here in at the Nuremberg offices of Novell. It was great for SUSE to see the twentyfife KDE enthusiasts hacking on one of the most important parts of the KDE software compilation.

Here is a post about KDE development with OpenSUSE.

In this guide I’ll share my experiences and show you how to get started with KDE development. This article is based on the opensuse-wiki article on my personal solutions and on the helpful suggestions from the guys on #kde-devel channel.

Petr Mladek is maintaining OpenOffice.org 3.2 for the project so that people can upgrade to it and Luboš Luňák writes about his work at Novell.

All of them are default desktops on openSUSE 11.2 for a new user with a file browser and terminal open, the only exceptions being adding a mixer to the default Xfce setup for a reason that will be obvious later and not using the nvidia driver.

There are some other noteworthy packages [2] being maintained by OpenSUSE people and let's not forget derivatives like openGarrobito.

OpenGarrobito, is the fruit of the philosophy of free software, because source code is shared, you can create fancy layouts at ease, and are applicable to our needs as I am passionate about the multimedia computer, and worked in a distribution based on my beloved openSUSE and resulted openGarrobito.

Leftovers

The latest weekly 'newsletters' [1, 2, 3] (if they can be called that) may contain some more links and there is also the audiocast in German [2], not to mention the Wiki [2] that needs attention. There are updates from artwork people and from OpenSUSE Forum, but none of this is major. It's more about maintenance than about serious changes that qualify as news. ⬆