Summary: Business as usual for the OpenSUSE community and the developers, who also announce new milestones

MANY eyes are on Novell's future (or lack thereof [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]), but in many ways, OpenSUSE carries on as usual.

Community

Brent, an OpenSUSE person, writes about the OpenSUSE community (or communities in general) and he is not alone.

I thought it would be a good idea to try and engage you – the fine openSUSE community – in discussion about "Us" the Community. We seemed to have been spoiled by having a Community Manager, people kind of seemed to let him do the work or worse expected him to do so. Now that we don't have that position any more we need to go back to basics and start rolling our sleeves up. We've started but we have much to do. As such this is the first in I'm not sure how many posts on the subject.

With or without Novell, the OpenSUSE community is likely to live on, maybe even without that patent deal which Novell and Microsoft signed.

Events

Jan Weber represents the OpenSUSE community right about now.

On next weekend I will be present at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage running the openSUSE booth there, so if you don’t know what todo next weekend and you are in the Chemnitz area stop by and visit Chemnitzer Linux-Tage, of course stop by at the openSUSE booth :)

In Nicaragua too, an OpenSUSE Group turns out to exist.

For us, the openSUSE Group in Nicaragua, this is a great opportunity to participate in leading one of the main groups and to send personnel to the remaining places, so we can provide a permanent and effective presence in the Country.

Reviews

In OpenSUSE Forums, someone has posted a sort of comparison between PCLinuxOS 2010 (still in beta) and the latest stable version of OpenSUSE. We could not find another review.

Setting up my HP wireless printer/scanner was also painless, that took me days of bashing my head against the keyboard fighting with the hplip drivers in 11.2, where it wouldn't work if you selected the printer the software discovered, you had to enter the IP manually. Plus PCLOS set the scanner part up automatically, that has to be done seperately in 11.2.

Novell' Untz saw OpenSUSE breaking.

It was funny to see Garrett breaking his openSUSE installation. Except that it shouldn't break this way when using GNOME:Factory on 11.2. Oops.

Technical

On the technical side of things, the release of OpenSUSE Build Service 1.7.2 was probably the most major development. "KDE OBS Generator Builds KDE Packages for Various Distros," heralds Linux Magazine.

The idea for kde-obs-generator emerged from CampKDE and FOSDEM. Since then, Novell employee Lubo Lunák has uploaded its first developer version on kde-apps.org. The program creates RPM and Debian packages for openSUSE Build Services (OBS) supported distros without having to know very much about package building. A few command line commands in kde-obs-generator will easily create packages, according to Lunák. He has tested it on Plasma, KDM and KSplash themes, simple wallpapers and, of course, KDE apps themselves. The tool should greatly simplify uploading content to the kde-apps.org site, for example.

More on OBS here:

Build your own Google Earth rpm

[...]

The procedure to build the rpm can be found in the openSUSE wiki. One word of caution about the procedure, you need to be an experienced linux user and you need to have access to the openSUSE Build Service (OBS) to be able to build the rpm. This is due to library dependency problem, which prevents it to build without modification to the base system.

Cornelius wrote about http://live.opensuse.org/ in this announcement which is also significant.

Enjoy this gift from our community member and don’t forget to report any problems you find with this new milestone in our bugzilla. :-)

PS: I had a talk with our SUSE Studio guys and they are up to something similar using their infrastructure. They have to solve some issues first, though. Feature for this is already filed in openFATE.

Cornelius has this older post about Studio.

Last time I blogged about open positions in the SUSE Studio team we were just preparing the first public alpha of SUSE Studio. We were excited about our application, but we didn't know what users would say. Now we are running SUSE Studio Online with more than 50.000 registered users. We have released an onsite version as part of the SUSE Appliance Toolkit, have won awards, and we get a lot of fantastic feedback. We have achieved a lot. To sustain this growth and success we are looking for some smart people to join our team. This could be you.

Then there's just a bunch of OpenSUSE-specific/oriented HOWTOs, notably:

● Installing ATi Drivers in OpenSUSE

● new “osc config” command

● MySQL Version Updates

● Develop Javascript Plasmoids on openSUSE

● Panel Drawers in KDE

● Using osc build to make a jail on openSUSE

You can get the most recent osc and build tools from the openSUSE:Tools repository. You will also need an account on the build service.

Leftovers

The Wiki Team needs some help and another newsletter has been posted.

The next openSUSE german Wiki Team meeting will take place tomorrow Wednesday March 09 at 18:00 GMT. As always, the meeting will be held in IRC on the #opensuse-wiki-de channel on Freenode.

 

In this Week:

* Pavol Rusnak: Announcing Connect! * Andrew Wafaa: openSUSE & Google Summer of Code 2010 * Bento-Theme implementation approach * Linux.com/Joe Brockmeier: Beginner's Guide to Nmap * Poll: Which linux Distro do you use frequently

The man behind these posts says that "Geeko wants you" and a Geeko tram gets spotted (but it's not really Geeko). On the more positive side of things, there's something for OpenSUSE to be genuinely proud of; It has achieved this minor goal of advocacy with an accidental television appearance:

Just received the message (via awafaa) that our preferred distro openSUSE is being featured in the trailer of the Film Genitori e Figli (Parent and children). Here an screenshot of the moment were openSUSE is visible at 01m:40s

GNU/Linux is used on sub-notebooks quite extensively, especially outside the United States. ⬆