09.13.08
Do-No-Evil Saturday - Part I: OpenSUSE Board, Survey
Overall, the past week has not been packed with major technical developments. On the other hand, there was some organisational activities.
Board
It’s still safe to suppose that Novell some impact — no matter how indirect — inside the OpenSUSE board and the elections. It’s only the illusion of being an impartial outsider (begging for volunteers to put in some free labour).
The first openSUSE board has been appointed a year ago and now the elections are starting. We have formed an election committee that is organising it (see here for details - thanks to Marko, Andrew, Claas and Vincent for running the elections!).
Here is a call asking more people to participate.
Since this is the first member-elected Board, there have been a few special rules put in place to minimize bumps in the election process, and motivate and enable more members and contributors to take part in the voting.
The above coverage comes from a blog where Zonker writes as well, so there could be some prodding involved. Could be.
Survey
The OpenSUSE users survey is out and comments in this blog post augment the findings somewhat.
The openSUSE survey results are out now. The survey we made in July/August time frame attracted over 12,000 participants. Here is a short summary on changes compared to the last one we did approximately 1 1/2 year ago with the openSUSE 10.2 release. The summary is in the same order as the questions are.
Technical
Joe Brockmeier will deliver a keynote speech in Ohio LinuxFest 2008 and he also wrote about KDE in the next version of OpenSUSE.
KDE is hugely important to the openSUSE project, and openSUSE’s users. According to our most recent survey, a total of 68.3% of respondents are using KDE, so when it’s time to decide how to support KDE as it moves through its transition period, it’s not something that is taken lightly.
An OpenSUSE blog also marks the birth of the “openSUSE Tutorials” Web Site, which has this about Nautilus.
Nautilus is the graphical file manager (along with a few other nice features) in GNOME. Most users only use the bare minimum features of Nautilus (including me, as I’m mainly a console jockey) and don’t realize how powerful and flexible Nautilus truly is.
KDE has Konqueror, which can also be equated to cmacs in terms of function.
Elsewhere among the blogs there’s this important note about Build Service.
We now have put all checks in packages so that they can be easily enhanced: brp-check-suse, rpmlint (the polices are in the rpmlint-Factory package) and post-build-checks.
Going ‘outside’ to some other blogs, Scott shows off his triple-boot laptop, which has OpenSUSE on it. Here is some guidance to those who wish to install it.
The openSUSE project is a worldwide community program sponsored by Novell that promotes the use of Linux everywhere. The program provides free and easy access to openSUSE. I want to show you how to easy install openSUSE 11 on this post. The way is only take few time to install it because i will use default settings to install it.If you’ve never use Linux before, you shall follow my easy steps to install it. openSUSE 11 is one of many linux distros and it’s also a friendly Linux distro so i am really like it and want to introduce more about it.
As its turns out, it’s possible to perform the instillation over the serial line and here is a new rave.
OpenSuSe is another Linux distribution worth looking at. It’s listed as the second Major Distribution at Distro Watch so it must be raising more eyebrows than you think. With an easy to use installation that requires little to no previous experience and a better visually appealing boot loading screen by defaut, OpenSuSe is something you should try out. I currently use it on my laptop to do some OpenGL programming, and to be honest, it’s great.
More bits of news can probably be found in OpenSUSE Weekly News.
In this week:
* Hack Week III Judging
* Novell OpenPR Blog: Zonker Blogs
* Board election
* Hackweek review
* Jigish Gohil: Spin openSUSE Live CD or USB stick image “easily”
* Stephan Binner: New KDE Four Live-CDs
Next up: SUSE and Xandros. █
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.