11.01.08
Do-No-Evil Saturday – Part I: OpenSUSE Board Announced, More Beta Slippage
Board
THIS WEEK’S MAIN news would arguably be the formation of a new OpenSUSE Board following an election with a modest turnout. The results were sent to to OpenSUSE subscribers, including yours truly.
==Non-Novell== Bleser, Pascal 148 45.96 % Yunashko, Bryen 69 21.43 % Linnell, Petee 42 13.04 % Rodriguez, Alex 30 9.32 % Pasanen, Tuukka 18 5.59 % Rusinek, Jakub 15 4.66 % Total: 322 ==Novell== Vogelsang, Henne 126 38.18 % Mena-Quintero, Federico 86 26.06 % Shaw, Stephen 71 21.52 % Michna, Marco 47 14.24 % Total: 330
There is some more information about that in LWN.net.
Kristin Shoemaker, who writes about OpenSUSE quite regularly, managed to cover this pretty quickly.
In September, the openSUSE project urged its contributors and members to help choose a new board. The board was to consist of two Novell-affiliated and two non-Novell members chosen by the community, and chaired by a fifth Novell-appointed member.
Earlier this week, the results of the board election were announced. Community participation was impressive, with 178 of the 237 eligible voters casting at least one of the four votes (two for each category) they were allowed.
Ever since starting his ZDNet blog, Zonker appears not to have posted anything in OStatic, but Kristin does a lot of OpenSUSE coverage (even advocacy).
Heise published an item about this also. It covers a lot of SUSE news because it suits its audience.
The OpenSuse project has a new board. The election of the committee was the first time that OpenSuse community members have been able to vote on who sits on the board. The new board now includes two representatives of the OpenSuse community, Pascal Bleser and Bryen Yunashko, and two employees of parent company Novell, Henne Vogelsang and Federico Mena-Quintero.
OpenSUSE 11.0
This is the stable and very latest release. Kenneth Hess considered it worthy of inclusion in his list of 3 distributions to “watch and use,” probably meaning that he personally favours them.
My recommendation for OpenSuSE 11.x and above? Get it, discover it, and report back to me on what you think of it.
Among the technical articles, one can find this XM Radio HOWTO, one for VMware Tools, and another for performance improvement.
Novell’s engineers are still working on important graphics drivers.
When the X.Org developers raided the Edinburgh Zoo for their X Developers’ Summit in September, Keith had intended to close RandR 1.3 in roughly one month. It’s late, but we’re now approaching November and discussion surrounding the much talked about properties support for the RandR 1.3 protocol has been rejuvenated by Novell’s Matthias Hopf.
We have some inside information about this, but this can’t be shared publicly yet.
OpenSUSE 11.1
The KDE4 implementation in this release is coming along nicely. More bits and pieces fall into place.
When I blogged a couple of weeks ago about KDE3 and KDE4, I mentioned that hiding of the task bar is the number one missing feature. Yesterday I talked with Will Stephenson – he was hacking on the sofa in the hallway – and he showed me some new stuff including this one which is now in openSUSE 11.1 Beta3.
Béranger has got his own special proposal for OpenSUSE artwork. He seems to have found an image of a lizard, but it’s unlikely to ever make it in as the mascot of YaST. Have a quick look.
I’ve just read that openSUSE is looking for a YaST mascot. Wee, I thought they already had one!
Ben Kevan, who has been blogging about OpenSUSE for quite some time, seems to be new to the controversial EULA assigned to non-final OpenSUSE releases (builds rather).
I went to upgrade from openSUSE 11.1 Beta 3Plus to Beta4 via the factory oss repository (i also have non-oss enabled), and for the first time ever it required me to agree to an EULA before upgrading.
[...]
One of the very interesting points of the EULA, is that “THE SOFTWARE MAY NOT BE SOLD, TRANSFERRED, OR FURTHER DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PRIOR WRITTEN AUTHORIZATION FROM NOVELL.”
Am I not allowed to share openSUSE with others?
This was discussed here, as well as in other places. Ben appears to have gotten explanatory comments as well. He received them promptly.
OpenSUSE 11.1 is not making such a great progress. This current planned beta is slipping yet again, just like the previous one.
Just a quick note. The 11.1 release is slipping by at least one day due to a few major problems with the DVDs found during testing.
Regardless, and despite the delays, plans are being made for launch parties to usher the release of OpenSUSE 11.1.
Just got a question via email (which I will respond to shortly) and the topic came up during one of my five or so meetings today: openSUSE 11.1 release parties.
Short answer: Yes, my friends, there will be release parties so you can get your Geeko on with other openSUSE enthusiasts.
Miscellaneous
Zonker was at the Ohio Linuxfest, which finally releases a report to summarise his appearance there.
Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier of Novell, specifically of its OpenSuSE division, delivered the morning keynote. His topic was bootstrapping a community around an open source project. He was speaking from primarily a company project point of view, but his advice extends to freelance open source developers’ projects, as well.
One of his main points was that Open Source as a movement will succeed only if companies and communities collaborate successfully. A company which simply opens the source to its software allows others to see it, but that company hasn’t truely gone open source until there is a community of users of and contributors to that project. I believe Brockmeier called it “source open” versus “open source.”
The Weekly News came a little later than usual last week. Here it is, in case we missed something important.
In this week:
* openSUSE Build Service Webclient Survey Started
* Development Release: openSUSE 11.1 Beta 3 Now Available
* We want YOU – for openSUSE Weekly Newsletter
* People of openSUSE: Henne Vogelsang
Next up, we shall look at SUSE. █
