Bonum Certa Men Certa

Novell News Summary - Part I: OpenSUSE 11.2 Milestone 6

Gecko



Summary: News from the OpenSUSE project

THE MAIN story this week is the arrival at Milestone 6 of the next release of OpenSUSE. Newer SELinux is coming into it and there is other more experimental work and features like 1-click bug reporting.



If you are running the openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 6 (Gnome 2.27.5, Kernel 2.6.31-rc6-3-default) and find out that clicks of touchpad do not work, then this might help you a bit.


OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 also came pretty fast into the (Open)SUSE Build Service.

I’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 beta3 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project and include many upstream and Go-oo fixes. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE OOo build on the wiki page.


OpenSUSE's choice of KDE4 as the default desktop environment still receives some coverage and Linux Journal writes:

Particularly of note is the suggestion that, by highlighting the KDE radio button the installer by default, the distribution will become "the only big KDE distribution" — presumably ignoring the existence of Kubuntu, and that the default download of Mandriva is it's KDE version (including the advice "If you are not sure, just stay with the default choice"). Knoppix — much loved by Linux Journal's own Kyle Rankin — also includes KDE as it's standard desktop.


From a KDE/SUSE blogger:

The main openSUSE users' mailing list are a demanding bunch who know what they want. Over the last few months the KDE group have been asking them what they still miss from KDE 3 in KDE 4, and one of those things has been the ability to add a submenu of the main app launcher, whether Kickoff or traditional, to the panel as a button in its own right.


Novell's PR people went to great lengths to use Greg Kroah-Hartman for street cred:

Novell has a strong showing — SUSE developer Greg Kroah-Hartman is a co-author of the paper and Novell continues to be one of the top named contributors to the Linux kernel.


Sascha Manns, who inquired and informed last week and earlier in the month about the Weekly News survey (he also interviewed Greg Kroah-Hartman at the time), has the results which he advertises with this direct link [PDF].

Watch the latest OpenSUSE weekly newsletter. It's done very, very nicely now.

In this Week:

* Change in Maintenance for openSUSE 11.2 and Future Versions * Joe Brockmeier: OpenSource World * Ian MacGregor: Finding files on the comand line * Lydia Pintscher: Social Media Guide for free Software Projects * ITManagement/Bruce Byfield: OpenOffice.org and the 'Ribbons' Interface Brouhaha


Francis Giannaros is meanwhile figuring out better ways to document meetings.

We just completed our first openSUSE project meeting with a newly added plugin to bugbot called MeetBot.


OpenSUSE still gains some users sometimes ("Switching from Ubuntu to OpenSuse") and there are older stories too from a time when it was a lot more common an occurrence.

Somebody from OpenSUSE did a nice hacking job whereby he put LXDE on a phone which was intended for Android.

Ben Kevan from the OpenSUSE community is still packaging the latest Chrome whilst others do the same with Firefox 3.6 (test build). New updates are also being applied to SUSE's firewall.

Packages for openSUSE 11.1 are available from the openSUSE build service. You also need to update SuSEfirewall2 from that repo. Source code repo is available at gitorious.


Looking at some events, Brockmeier writes about the upcoming OpenSUSE conference.

Unconference



The openSUSE Conference will also have a major “unconference” component. We’ll have plenty of time for contributors to discuss and work on topics they’re interested in face to face.


Brockmeier also wrote about the subject in his personal blog.

The openSUSE Conference is coming together nicely! We announced the second keynote for the conference yesterday, and I’m pretty excited about the choice: Gianugo Rabellino of the Apache Foundation will be doing the closing keynote on Sunday, September 20th.


One OpenSUSE member wrote about the presence of OpenSUSE at FrOSCon 2009, a German event.

Last weekend the FrOSCon took place in Sankt Augustin and again this year openSUSE was present with a booth! For the first time in germany the booth was driven only by Ambassadors and users, AFAIK. So for this reason the event already was a huge success for openSUSE!


On the educational side, OpenSUSE-Edu will be part of a workshop.

We will be having hands-on sessions on openSUSE-Edu: Li-f-e (Linux for Education) distribution, participants will get to take home a copy too.


According to this, Linux for Education is also sponsored by Novell.

Sponsored by the open-SUSE Education Project, the site contains

…collections of useful courses to help you better use the applications found on the Linux distributions. There are also forums, chatrooms, courses, and help materials at your disposal.

Courses range in topics from the Sugar OS to ice formations on Europa to Moodle basics and all materials are licensed under Creative Commons. The site is truly not to be missed, whether you’re a *nix fan or not. It also serves as a showcase for the power of Moodle and OSS in presenting coursework.


Other than OpenSUSE-Edu and the workshop, there is ENOS, which will be hosted in Portugal.

For the third consecutive year, all the Portuguese openSUSE community users will be meeting will the main goal of boosting the openSUSE project in Portugal.


OpenSUSE is not necessarily gaining in Portugal.

Novell is hard to trust when its employees are spreading .NET/Mono. Also see this new discussion about Mono and Moonlight. The OpenSUSE crowd does not seem terribly keen on these.

Recent Techrights' Posts

SoylentNews Grows Up, Registers as a Business, Site Traffic Reportedly Grows
More people realise that social control media may in fact be a passing fad
 
Garden Season Starts Today
Outdoor time, officially...
More Information About Public Talks That Richard Stallman Gave This Week in Europe
Two talks in Switzerland
Engadget is Still a Spamfarm, It's Just an Amazon Catalogue (SPAM/SEO), a Sea of Junk Disguised as "Articles" With Few 'Fillers' (Real Articles) in Between
Engadget writes for bots now, not for humans
Richard Stallman's Talks in Switzerland This Week
We need to put an end to 'cancer culture'; it's trying to kill people and it is even swatting people
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, March 28, 2024
IRC logs for Thursday, March 28, 2024
[Meme] EPO's New Ways of Working (NWoW), a.k.a. You Don't Even Get a Desk at Work and Cannot be Near Known Colleagues
Seems more like union-busting (divide and rule)
Hiding Microsoft's Culpability in Security Breaches and Other Major Blunders (in the United Kingdom, This May Mean You Can't Get Food)
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is vast
Giving back to the community
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 28/03/2024: Sega, Nintendo, and Bell Layoffs
Links for the day
Open letter to the ACM regarding Codes of Conduct impersonating the Code of Ethics
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
With 9 Mentions of Azure In Its Latest Blog Post, Canonical is Again Promoting Microsoft and Intel Vendor Lock-in, Surveillance, Back Doors, Considerable Power Waste, and Defects That Cannot be Fixed
Microsoft did not even have to buy Canonical (for Canonical to act like it happened)
Links 28/03/2024: GAFAM Replacing Full-Time Workers With Interns Now
Links for the day
Consent & Debian's illegitimate constitution
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
The Time Our Server Host Died in a Car Accident
If Debian has internal problems, then they need to be illuminated and then tackled, at the very least in order to ensure we do not end up with "Deadian"
China's New 'IT' Rules Are a Massive Headache for Microsoft
On the issue of China we're neutral except when it comes to human rights issues
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, March 27, 2024
IRC logs for Wednesday, March 27, 2024
WeMakeFedora.org: harassment decision, victory for volunteers and Fedora Foundations
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 27/03/2024: Terrorism Grows in Africa, Unemployment in Finland Rose Sharply in a Year, Chinese Aggression Escalates
Links for the day
Links 27/03/2024: Ericsson and Tencent Layoffs
Links for the day
Amid Online Reports of XBox Sales Collapsing, Mass Layoffs in More Teams, and Windows Making Things Worse (Admission of Losses, Rumours About XBox Canceled as a Hardware Unit)...
Windows has loads of issues, also as a gaming platform
Links 27/03/2024: BBC Resorts to CG Cruft, Akamai Blocking Blunders in Piracy Shield
Links for the day
Android Approaches 90% of the Operating Systems Market in Chad (Windows Down From 99.5% 15 Years Ago to Just 2.5% Right Now)
Windows is down to about 2% on the Web-connected client side as measured by statCounter
Sainsbury's: Let Them Eat Yoghurts (and Microsoft Downtimes When They Need Proper Food)
a social control media 'scandal' this week
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, March 26, 2024
IRC logs for Tuesday, March 26, 2024
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
Windows/Client at Microsoft Falling Sharply (Well Over 10% Decline Every Quarter), So For His Next Trick the Ponzi in Chief Merges Units, Spices Everything Up With "AI"
Hiding the steep decline of Windows/Client at Microsoft?
Free technology in housing and construction
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
We Need Open Standards With Free Software Implementations, Not "Interoperability" Alone
Sadly we're confronting misguided managers and a bunch of clowns trying to herd us all - sometimes without consent - into "clown computing"
Microsoft's Collapse in the Web Server Space Continued This Month
Microsoft is the "2%", just like Windows in some countries