Archive:Weekly news 45
Welcome to issue #45 of openSUSE Weekly News!
In this week:
- Lukas Ocilka: YaST-Mascot Contest-How to submit your ideas
- openSUSE News: OpenOffice.org Fix for openSUSE 11.1 Beta 4
- The openSUSE Board
- Jan Weber: Announcing Easy-KIWI-GUI
- Stephan Binner: openSUSE 11.1-Plasma-Desktop-Toolbox
Announcements
Lukas Ocilka: YaST-Mascot Contest-How to submit your ideas
- "We have finally reached 24 ideas submitted to the YaST Mascot Contest. Nevertheless, we've got a feedback that it might be quite uneasy to submit an idea, e.g. because it requires editing a wiki page. So, we've decided to extend the possibilities..."
Kerry Adorno: Schools flock to "Free the Penguin"
- "In just two months since it was announced, the “Free the Penguins” promotion has already taken flight. To date, universities and K-12 schools in 29 states and 10 nations have signed-on to the program to help them maximize their IT budgets by cutting desktop computing costs with multi-station SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktops."
Get Your openSUSE 11.1 Countdown Button Here
- "Yes, you too can have a beautiful openSUSE countdown button just like the one you see in this post."
openSUSE News: OpenOffice.org Fix for openSUSE 11.1 Beta 4
- "Good news, everybody! One of the most annoying bugs from openSUSE 11.1 beta 4 has a fix. A problem starting OpenOffice.org was found too late to fix for the beta, but we do have a fix now — so you can update your system and have a working install of OpenOffice.org!"
In the Community
Will Stephenson: Akonadi Developer Sprint
- "Here we are on the steps at the Linuxhotel in Essen, Germany. From left to right: Igor Trindade Oliveira, Bertjan Broeksema, Stephen Kelly, Ingo Klöcker, Kevin Krammer, Thomas McGuire, Volker Krause, Will Stephenson and Tom Albers. We had a very intense and productive couple of days filled with presentations, knowledge sharing and of course dawn till dusk hacking. As usual Volker, as the Akonadi visionary and lead, was mobbed by the rest of us with questions, which he answered with his trademark infinite patience and good explanations."
The openSUSE Board
The openSUSE board was setup to lead the overall project. The main tasks for members of the board are:
- Act as a central point of contact
- Help resolve conflicts
- Communicate community interests to Novell
- Facilitate communication with all areas of the community
- Facilitate decision making processes where needed.
The current members are as follows:
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Pascal Bleser lives in Belgium and works as a software architect and developer at a large European ISV in Germany. He contributes most of his time building packages for openSUSE in his now defunct Guru as well as Packman and openSUSE Build Service repositories. He wrote most of the current Packman website, contributes some bits to opensource projects here and there, and tries to support community interaction and communication. He is also a member of the core team that organizes FOSDEM, one of the largest and most appreciated opensource developer conferences in Europe. |
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Michael Loeffler (Chairman) is now more than 5 years with Novell/SUSE and is the Product Manager for openSUSE. In this role he is already kind of an interface between Novell Executives, the openSUSE community, engineering, marketing and other involved in the openSUSE Project. Michael was strongly involved with the creation of the the openSUSE Guiding Principles. |
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Federico Mena-Quintero is one of the founders of the GNOME Project. Before that, he worked as maintainer of the GIMP. In the early days of GNOME he was responsible for some of the original code and documentation for the GNOME libraries, games, and applications. He also worked on Evolution, the GTK+ toolkit, the GNOME platform libraries, and the Nautilus file manager. He currently works for Novell, mainly on hacking the GTK+ toolkit and the GNOME platform. He has also been a frequent member of the GNOME board. |
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Henne Vogelsang cares since a long time at Novell for the SUSE base system. Henne is one of the packman seniors, runs the #opensuse/#suse IRC channel and maintains all of the opensuse mailing lists and the corresponding server. Trough his work he is also involved in various free and open source projects. |
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Bryen Yunashko is a consultant based in the United States specializing in Novell products. Since joining the openSUSE Community, he has been an active contributor in the community by founding the openSUSE Helping Hands project and becoming co-editor of the openSUSE-Tutorials website. As the first known Deaf-Blind member of a Linux-based board, he is also a strong proponent of increasing accessibility through computing and is an active member of the GNOME A11y (Accessibility) Team and maintainer of the Planet A11y aggregator site. |
Status Updates
Distribution
- Status-Update for 11.1 beta 4: After work on the remaining show-stopper bugs we found this week, we have solved the blocker bugs, but were unable to generate all the necessary media and have it propagated to the mirrors in time for a Friday release per our release policy.
Build Service
- Build Team Meeting Minutes: "New OBS Roadmap has been discussed and will be published this week. Last missing feature for next release is local build support for kiwi images."
Wiki / Communication / Events
- Take openSUSE 11.1 Screenshots! Look at http://en.opensuse.org/Screenshots - for almost the whole development cycle of 11.0 (well, starting with Alpha 2 :-) we had screenshots.
Tips and Tricks
Masim Sugianto: Counter Strike - Half Life & Condition Zero on openSUSE 11.0
- "One major reason why I usually used Windows on my wife’s laptop was about Games, especially online games. Actually, I’m not a big fans of online games. Playing online games is an intermezzo on the midnight, as relaxation activity before going to bed. Counter Strike (CS) is my favorite games, although it was too old but it still interesting to play with another online gamers."
New/updated applications @openSUSE
- digiKam: digiKam is an advanced digital photo management application for KDE, which makes importing and organizing digital photos a "snap". The latest version is 0.9.4-51.1.
- VirtualBox-ose: VirtualBox was updated to use the appropriate driver version of vboxvideo/vboxmouse for openSUSE 11.1, 11.0, 10.3 and lower. Packages for version 2.0.4 are available here.
- gwibber: Gwibber is an open source microblogging client for GNOME developed with Python, GTK and WebKit. It supports Twitter, identi.ca, Jaiku, Facebook, Pownce, Flickr and Digg. The latest version is available here.
Planet SUSE
Covering just a few posts from Planet SUSE, an aggregation of all SUSE contributors' blogs:
Jan Weber: Announcing Easy-KIWI-GUI
- "Cyberorg introduced easy-kiwi-build, a command line tool to create KIWI images. He also announced that i will do a little GUI for it and here it is, finally ;)"
Bernhard Walle: How to use KDB in the Installations System
- "Kernel problems in the installation system are hard to debug because you cannot replace the kernel easily as you can do it in the running system. While thinking of methods how to obtain some information, I had the idea to just use KDB for that. Better than nothing. :-)"
Miguel de Icaza: Interactive Shell GUI
- "This week at the Microsoft PDC I showed gsharp, our GUI repl for the C# 3.0 language, a tool that I had previously talked about. Before the PDC we copied an idea from Owen's great reinteract shell where we provide our REPL with a mechanism to turn objects into Gtk.Widgets which we then insert."
Stephan Binner: openSUSE 11.1-Plasma-Desktop-Toolbox
- "Discussions about the usefulness of the Plasma desktop toolbox arise regularly. Usually it focus on the "Zoom Out"/Activities feature which as also Plasma developers admit is not as far implemented and nicely integrated as of KDE 4.1 as everyone wants it to be. If one removes (maybe even irreversible) the "Zoom Out" button, nothing is left in the desktop toolbox which is not also available in the panel/desktop context menus. So why not make it optional completely? For openSUSE 11.0 we offered that as a hidden option."
Past Events/Meetings
November 05, 2008: openSUSE Project Meeting
Upcoming Events/Meetings
November 12, 2008: KDE Team Meeting
November 13, 2008: openSUSE 11.1 RC 1
Security Updates
To view the security announcements in full, or to receive them as soon as they're released, refer to the openSUSE Security Announce mailing list.
SUSE Security Summary Report: SUSE-SR:2008:023
- Solved Security Vulnerabilities:
- graphviz
- libexiv2, exiv2
- tomcat5, apache-jakarta-tomcat-connectors
- libgadu
- opera
On the Web
Linux.com: The new openSUSE community-elected board speaks
- "The openSUSE project has a new board, and the new board has big plans."
Ars Technica: OpenSUSE community announces first elected board
- "Back in 2005, one year after Novell acquired SUSE, the company announced plans to transform the popular Linux distribution into a community-driven project with an inclusive development model. This effort has been relatively successful and has helped attract new contributors. The OpenSUSE community took another big step last week when it revealed the results of its first-ever board election."
Earthweb: OpenSUSE Starts Steering its Own Course
- "It's not easy for a Linux company to let go the reins of control over its community Linux distribution. Just ask Red Hat, which started to let go of Fedora and then decided to keep managing it (Red Hat keeps its grip on Fedora). But, now Novell is loosening its apron strings on its community Linux openSUSE."
openSUSE Introduces First Community Elected Board
- "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."
Linux Pro Magazine: openSUSE Project Welcomes First Community Elected Board
- "When polls closed at exactly 12 UTC last Saturday, the openSUSE Project had chosen its first community elected board."
Heise: New board for OpenSuse
- "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."
Statistics
Numbers in brackets show the changes compared to last week.
Communication
lists.opensuse.org has 36050 (+70) non-unique subscribers to all mailing lists. The openSUSE Forums have 14781 (+436) registered users - most users including guests ever online was 1642, 07-Oct-2008 at 21:24.
Contributors
1749 (+26) of 3061 (+43) registered contributors in the User Directory have signed the Guiding Principles. The board has acknowledged 212 members.
Build Service
The Build Service now hosts 4335 (+45) projects, 51287 (-586) packages, 8530 (+87) repositories by 10078 (+121) confirmed users.
Bugzilla
The numbers for all openSUSE project products are this week:
- All Open Reports: 4426 (+98)
- Blocker: 20 (+6)
- Critical: 255 (+17)
- Major: 717 (+14)
- Normal: 2378 (+29)
- Minor: 439 (+9)
- Enhancements: 617 (+23)
Detailed Bugzilla Report – Submitting Bug Reports – Bug Reporting FAQ
Translations
Daily updated translation statistics are available on the openSUSE Localization Portal.
Trunk Top-List – Localization Guide
Feedback / Communicate / Get Involved
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