Summary: People leave and come to OpenSUSE, which has no news of great significance to tell this week

THIS WEEK will be the last week that we post news summaries regarding Novell simply because there's too little significant news about Novell. In recent months we occasionally posted such summaries just once in a fortnight because the amount of news was not sufficient to merit a post. Novell may be sold within weeks or months, so we do expect less -- not more -- news about Novell products.

This first summary is all about OpenSUSE, which is a shadow of its former self. The "People of OpenSUSE" series used to come on a weekly basis, but its key maintainer has moved on. This series is back, perhaps momentarily. This time it's about Andrew Wafaa and there are signs that new people still join the project sometimes.

Events

FLISOL is to take place in Venezuela and OpenSUSE may have some presence there.

Venezuelan Linux community is finishing all the preparations for the April 24, the day that all Latin America celebrate the FLISOL, Latin American Festival of Free Software Installation.

OpenSUSE-LXDE is still disliked based on the ratings in the OpenSUSE Web site. Why all this resentment? OpenSUSE-LXDE merely announced its first meeting and a developer meeting is expected to take place in order to discuss other, more formal parts of OpenSUSE (more connected to Novell).

Someone is still uploading videos from last year's OpenSUSE Conference (2009) [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] and it's unclear whether such a conference is also scheduled to take place this year. Zonker is not around to help organise it.

The following new blog post suggests that OpenSUSE manages to gain new users, despite losing many (to other distributions).

If you’ve followed my dents on identi.ca, you may have noticed that I asked people for their recommendations for a good KDE4 Linux distribution. Well after a bit of thought I decided that I would move away from Kubuntu to openSUSE.

Marcus announced the imminent end of life of OpenSUSE 11.0. That only happened yesterday (no public post about it yet). He wrote the following:

Dear opensuse-announce subscribers,

SUSE Security announces that openSUSE 11.0 will be discontinued soon. Having provided security-relevant fixes for two years, we will stop releasing updates after June 30th 2010.

As a consequence, the openSUSE 11.0 distribution directory on our server download.opensuse.org will be removed from /distribution/11.0/ to free space on our mirror sites. The 11.0 directory in the update tree /update/11.0 will follow, as soon as all updates have been published. Also the openSUSE buildservice repositories building openSUSE 11.0 will be removed.

The discontinuation of openSUSE 11.0 enables us to focus on the openSUSE distributions of a newer release dates to ensure that our users can continuously take advantage of the quality that they are used to with openSUSE products.

This announcement holds true for openSUSE 11.0 only. As usual, Novell/SUSE will continue to provide update packages for the following products:

openSUSE 11.1 (supported until December 31st 2010) openSUSE 11.2 (supported until approximately May 12th 2011) openSUSE 11.3 (currently in development, to be released around July 8th 2010) for the next two openSUSE releases plus two months overlap period.

Please note that the maintenance cycles of SUSE Linux Enterprise products and products based on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system are not affected by this announcement and have longer life cycles.

To learn more about SUSE Linux Enterprise products, please visit http://www.novell.com/linux/suse/ . For a detailed list of the life cycles of our Enterprise Products please visit http://support.novell.com/lifecycle/ and http://support.novell.com/lifecycle/lcSearchResults.jsp?sl=suse

If you have any questions regarding this announcement, please do not hesitate to contact SUSE Security at <security@suse.de>.

Technical

Somebody has written to provide guidance on how to install/use the Novell Client on OpenSUSE 11.2. It is about time. It's explained in great detail, but it's not simple.

This has been covered on a couple of forums out there, but I’ve yet to find a decent comprehensive post. This is for 32bit systems, it’s easily modified for 64bit setups.

There are other OpenSUSE posts that are technical [1, 2, 3], some of which discuss new packages [1, 2, 3] such as osc:

I just submitted the new osc 0.126 release to the openSUSE:Tools project.

Uwe wrote about YaST and here is something about OBS.

To get some testing on these new features I have prepared packages for the upcoming release in the mozilla:beta OBS repository.

It's about plug-ins.

Leftovers

Sascha Manns has released the usual newsletter ("Weekly News") [1, 2] and gave room for this guest blog post about Linux, which is one among other new ones.

The openSUSE Testing Core Team (TCT) has been asked to contribute to the Weekly News on a regular basis. We are grateful for the opportunity.

Weekly News too is yearning for contributions. OpenSUSE-Guide.org is still growing up and it seems to replicate some of tips from the OpenSUSE Wiki, which was intended to centralise everything just like OpenSUSE Forums (it lost key members [1, 2]).

Today it was five months ago that I announced the availability of opensuse-guide.org, and soon I’ll begin updating it for openSUSE 11.3, so it’s a good time for a quick status report.

It looks like a nice and useful Web site. It would also have less surveillance than OpenSUSE.org, or maybe not. Novell staff is looking at what people search for in OpenSUSE.org.

http://software.opensuse.org/stage includes now a little box to show what other people search for. It was a little idea The Boosters had, but I found the results so far pretty suprising. I didn’t really expect subversion in the top 3, but perhaps it’s only the moment.

The impact on privacy should be taken into consideration. ⬆