openSUSE News

Our Provo data center will take down a few server starting today at 6pm local time (MDT) which is 10th of May, 0:00 UTC. The downtime is expected to last for three hours.

The following openSUSE services might be effected:

• all openSUSE wiki instances, e.g. en.opensuse.org
• the wordpress instances like news.opensuse.org and lizards.opensuse.org
• the forums at forums.opensuse.org

Open Build Service is a generic system to build and distribute packages from sources in an automatic, consistent and reproducible way. OBS 2.3 brings the functionality to maintain a released software product in an efficient and transparent way. This includes

• Update coordination: One or more maintenance groups can decide if and when to start or release an update. This includes also the tracking of new, running and processed updates.
• QA and Review integration: The current state of an update is always visible and trackable. Review processes can be integrated.
• Release Management: Isolated build and tested updates can be released or revoked via OBS mechanism.
• Multiple code stream support: An issue can be handled for multiple code streams.
• Documentation support: The documentation of an update for the end-user is integrated

This functionality is already used for doing the maintenance updates for the openSUSE distributions. The features can be used all together or in parts for own products.

In addition OBS 2.3 provides

• A greatly improved web interface, including user management, syntax highlighted source editor and improved source diff review views
• Improved Cross Build Support via Qemu
• Functionality to hide entire projects
• Issue tracking support, tracking documented fixes in external bugzilla, fate and CVE instances in packages.

It is recommended to read the Release Notes before updating an instance. OBS packages can be found in the openSUSE Tools project or as an appliance which can be used on hardware or in VM.

Your Open Build Service team

About Open Build Service

The Open Build Service (OBS) is an open and complete distribution development platform. It provides the infrastructure to easily create, release and maintain software for openSUSE and other Linux distributions on different hardware architectures. It is developed under the umbrella of the openSUSE project, but is licensed under GPL and used by other open source projects like MeeGo or Tizen. It is also used by universities, ISVs and companies like Intel, Dell, and SGI.

Support Offerings for Open Build Service

Update: download.opensuse.org is back up, OBS and mirrors are resyncing

After receiving a new disk array, and restoring backups onto it, download.opensuse.org is back up.  The openSUSE Build Service is currently syncing all its repos to it, and then a full mirror rescan will be carried out so that the latest software is on all the mirrors that download redirects to. The temporary redirection has been removed.  The outage is to be discussed at today’s openSUSE Project Meeting.

–

It’s going to be a quiet May 1 for openSUSE users and contributors, due to a rare two-disk failure on download.opensuse.org, the central site for accessing openSUSE distribution releases and packages.  To work-around the failure, temporarily change your repository URLs using YaST Software Repositories or zypper (or edit the files in /etc/zypp/repos.d) to a nearby mirror.  Normally, requests to download.opensuse.org are redirected automatically to a mirror by the Mirrorbrain software running there.  On Monday, the disk hardware on download failed beyond the level its redundancy is designed to handle.  We are working to restore the system as soon as possible, and will post updates as soon as we have more information.

Google published the list of 12 students proposals that have been accepted for Google Summer of Code 2012 for openSUSE. It means that 12 students will be able to work full-time on changing the world this summer!

Big thanks to every student who dedicated their time thinking up and writing awesome proposals: we received a total of 51 proposals! This year Google allocated 12 students slots to openSUSE. This means we had a very hard time deciding! What projects will benefit openSUSE most, what will teach the student most? Do we mentor new students or give people already familiar with openSUSE a chance to dedicate some real time? There are practical considerations too. We don’t have mentors for all projects, or multiple students per mentor. Some mentors can only mentor in the evening, others only during the day – we have to watch time zones too.

But we’ve managed to extract 12 proposals out of the brilliance thrown at us and these students now will have to geeko up for their awesome summer job!

• Adding an Ambassador/Event plugin to openSUSE Connect -  Athanasios-Ilias Rousinopoulos will be adding event calendering to openSUSE connect, to make it easier to plan openSUSE events.
• Writing a better looking 1-Click Install client -  Saurabh Sood will be working on replacing the existing YAST-based 1-click installer with something much nicer looking.
•  Completing AppStream/Software-Center support for openSUSE -  Matthias Klumpp will be working on Appstream
• Improving the MongoDB destination driver for syslog-ng -  Eun Kyung will be enhancing syslog-ng’s Mongo support.
• Fixing/implementing automated kernel/glibc tests -  Marios Makris will be improving Linux Test Project coverage.
• openSUSE Karma plugin for openSUSE Connect -Priyanka Menghani will add a “karma” plugin to openSUSE Connect, similar to the “reputation” score on StackExchange.
• Further work on the osc2 client -  Marcus Hüwe is going to continue his existing work on the next-generation osc client for the Open Build Service.
• Popularity contest for RPM (popcorn) - Akshit Khurana will be working on popcorn, which will be optionally installed on openSUSE systems and provide us with statistics about which packages are popular.
• Redesigning fdisk to be more extensible and implement GPT support -Davidlohr Bueso will be cleaning up and refactoring everyone’s favorite disk utility, fdisk.
• Scanny, a security scanner for Ruby code - Piotr Niełacny will be be working on scanny, a tool designed to alert developers to security errors in their Ruby code.
• An upstream/downstream tracker -  N.B.Prashanth will write an “upstream/downstream” tracker tool that will track the differences between upstream versions and distro packages.
• Writable snapshot support for ext4 snapshots -  Yongqiang Yang will extend ext4 to support writeable snapshots.

Now it is time to get in touch with your community, start speaking to people around you, discuss your ideas, read documentation, code and have loads of fun!

The openSUSE Summit team has been working hard over the last weeks to add Spanish translations to the website. As the openSUSE Summit is meant to be an ‘Americas’ event, we aim to create a dual-language conference, accommodating both the Spanish and English speaking visitors. The exact language distribution of talks will strongly depends on the talks submitted, so we’d urge our Spanish speaking community to submit talk proposals in Spanish!

SUSE, our founder, partner and sponsor, has put out a couple of job openings for the openSUSE Boosters Team! Are you a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) enthusiast? Are you quick on your feet, a talented technologist? Are you hungry to learn new things and equally passionate about sharing your knowledge with your peers? Are you looking to turn what you love into your job? Then head over to suse.com, send in your resume and score the opportunity of a lifetime!

The openSUSE Boosters, widely known as the Ecstatic Eleven, is a team of people helping contributors to take off in our project. No matter if an ambassador needs help with organizing an event, an admin needs assistance with implementing a new service, or a developer needs guidance to bring his code into our distribution: the Boosters are here to work with all contributors to reach their goals and to enable them to bring this project forward. But the Boosters are not a bunch of lone fighters; the team always works together, in an agile fashion, on its milestones and every member is equally important and responsible for the success – and of course for celebrating it. It is a team of young, clever, spirited people from different backgrounds, countries and talents that want to collaborate. A team that wants to make a difference in this world by helping each other and our project to become even more awesome.

As you can imagine the Boosters goal requires people who are willing to explore the vast possibilities a FOSS project like ours offers. Boosters are as comfortable in front of an huge audience on a conference as behind an editor in a GIT repository. As the possibilities to contribute to openSUSE are endless a Booster must be agile, open minded and willing to take on tasks that require to learn completely new things. Be it a programming language, an application framework, how to give an interview to the press or what questions to ask in a questionnaire survey. Boosters are not afraid of anything and there is nothing they are not willing to do to attract and nurture contributors.

Does that sound like it’s your thing? If yes, you will find a tight-knit team here that lives and breathes collaboration. A gang of FOSS aficionados that share your passion, hard workers and a wild bunch to have a lot of fun with. And equally important you’ll start with an employer that will bring your FOSS career forward: SUSE, which has been around for 20 years and is the original provider of the enterprise Linux distribution that powers thousands of organizations around the world across physical, virtual and cloud environments. A company that has been a leader and an active participant for years in tons of open source projects and open standards. Sounds great? It’s awesome, guaranteed!

The openSUSE community is proud to welcome Heinlein Support as new sponsor to the project! Heinlein is a Linux specialist offering training, consulting and hosting focused on the German market and will help us with our mail infrastructure.

Heinlein Support has specialized in Linux servers and e-mail services for over 20 years. They share their knowledge and their experience at the Heinlein Academy, during personal consultations, through their hosting services, and through their appliance and software products.

Peer Heinlein said:
After working with SUSE technologies since 1994, we’re very happy to have a chance to contribute something back to the openSUSE Community. For our customers, the (open)SUSE-platform has always been a very reliable distribution for business and enterprise use cases.

We are happy to announce that Heinlein Support is sponsoring the openSUSE project by providing infrastructure to run the project.

Henne Vogelsang told us:
I believe Peer and his crew will help us to take our mail infrastructure to the next level and I’m happy that we have the opportunity to work together with them. I mean that guy wrote a book about postfix and has tons of hands-on experience with mail infrastructure, how awesome is that?

openSUSE 12.1 was one of the first major Linux distributions to include the new programming language Go. Recently, go 1.0 was released and shortly before milestone 3 openSUSE Factory received packages for this new Go. Graham Anderson notified the factory mailing list of this and included some tips for Go hackers on getting started with Go. Read on for some of his tips and links to more.

According to the description from the go-lang website:

Go is a programming language and environment that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software.

Go is an expressive, concurrent, garbage collected general/systems programming language that is type safe and memory safe. It has pointers but no pointer arithmetic. Go has fast builds, clean syntax, garbage collection, methods for any type, and run-time reflection. It feels like a dynamic language but has the speed and safety of a static language.

In a discussion on python vs go you’ll find that

Clearly Go is a superior weapon if the goal is to shoot everyone in the foot at the same time. The GIL in python forces you to shoot each person in the foot in sequence :).

(by Kyle Lemons)

In other words, go is optimized for concurrent programming – getting the most out of our modern multi-core systems.

To install go, one can use the new graphical interface at software.opensuse.org by going to software.opensuse.org/package/go. Get the documentation here (go-doc) and if you’re a VIM user, also get go-vim. From a commandline, Factory users can do a simple zypper in go go-doc go-vim. If you’re on openSUSE 12.1 or other versions you’ll need the devel:languages:go project. Lots of additional stuff there of course. Note that adding go via the software.opensuse.org route will add the devel:languages:go repository to your list, allowing you to pull in any of the extras easily.

You’ll have to know and set a few thingies now:

• Either source /etc/profile.d/go.sh or open a new terminal to import the Go env vars into your environment. Your $GOPATH will be set to $HOME/go so either override this in your profile or create the directory.
• Go libraries and packages installed from the openSUSE repo are installed to $GOROOT and the system bindir. Any extra packages or binaries you install using the “go” tool will be installed to $GOPATH and $GOBIN (if it’s set).
• Currently $GOBIN for non root users defaults to $GOPATH/bin, we currently don’t add that location to your $PATH so you will either have to add it in your profile or set another location for $GOBIN (such as $HOME/bin). See the golang documentation for more information.

It’s time to get Going now. An excellent way to check if everything is setup OK is to install and run the Go Tour! If you have a viable Go environment the following two commands will execute without error.
go get code.google.com/p/go-tour/gotour
gotour
When you have a working environment, the following documentation is a great resource for first time Go hackers:

• Golang Documentation
• For experienced C, C++ and Java hackers I also recommend the Go FAQ.
• Go language community support: Mailing List and #go-nuts on freenode

More information on the current Go setup in openSUSE can be found on this wiki page. Thanks to Graham Anderson for the information there and this article.

If you would like to just play with Go before installing it, there’s a pretty cool tour set up on the golang website: click here to start. You can edit the code and run it live on the site!

Funny images of the go mascotte courtesy of the golang.org website.

We had some network problems in our Nürnberg data center this afternoon and now the site software.opensuse.org is not reachable.

To download the openSUSE 12.2 Milestone 3, go directly to the download directory.

To download openSUSE 12.1, go directly to the 12.1 download directory.

For everything else, please wait until the server is fully up again.

Update 2012-04-12 19:37 UTC: Everything should be up again.

Despite delays due to the move to a i686 desktop kernel for 32-bit systems, milestone 3 is finally available. This milestone brings progress on a number of features including GNOME 3.4, LibreOffice 3.5.2, Plymouth and more.

Like the M2, there has been a bit of a delay getting this testing milestone out. Some kernel changes made it initially impossible to build the 32bit version of openSUSE but these have been fixed. Download it from software.opensuse.org/developer. As usual, a list of the most annoying bugs is being maintained and you can see the list of bugs and/or file a new one in Bugzilla. Read on for some details on the release and how to help!

The roadmap aims Milestone 4 for April 26th.

openSUSE, as you might know, is being developed in Factory. Factory is a project on the openSUSE Build Service against which you can build a package. If it works fine, you can submit it to Factory and keep it working there.

List of failures in Factory - help get rid of them!

Factory has now received the latest versions of GNOME 3.4, KDE SC 4.8.2 (with numerous KDE PIM bugfixes!) and finally LibreOffice 3.5.2 has landed as well.

In a recent blog openSUSE contributor ‘tittiatcoke’ gave an update on Plymouth support in openSUSE. Plymouth itself is merged and integration into other packages is nearly finished, the issues are being worked out through some team efforts, for this milestone plymouth is not yet the default. The latest status can be tracked on this wiki page. Currently the team works on openSUSE branding to complete the new boot experience.

The integration of grub2 as bootloader has seen further steps and we ask for testing of grub2. Unfortunately the LiveCDs cannot install grub2 in this milestone (see most annoying bugs for a workaround).

We’re very close to getting GCC 4.7 in – the latest status update concluded that a bug in GCC 4.7 blocks zypper from being build. This will be fixed in the 4.7.1 release expected in June but to facilitate testing a patch will probably be applied on 4.7.0 to have it in the next milestone.

USRMove and tmp-on-tmpfs is still being debated, a final decision has not been made yet but it looks like we’ll wait with this for at least another release.

Improved software search

The software search improvements being tested over the last weeks have moved to software.opensuse.org and users looking for software to install on their openSUSE system can now enjoy the new UI, featuring screen shots and more extensive information about the applications available.

Of course you’re wondering how you can help. This can start with testing. Go to software.opensuse.org/developer, download Milestone 3 and try it out on your system! You can then check the
most annoying bugs to see if your problems are there, if not, you can see the list of bugs and/or file a new one in Bugzilla. If the bug you find is very serious, add it tho the list of annoying bugs!

If you are a packager (or want to be one!) there is of course also plenty to do. Fixing bugs in packages is a nice way of learning the ways of packaging (see the Packaging portal for documentation). You can read about how to do this here, via a simple set of stepps which in openSUSE are commonly known as ‘BURP-ing’.

Factory Workflow

If you’re already a packager for openSUSE, don’t forget to get your packages in Factory or start to maintain one!

We’d like to thank everyone working on openSUSE for being so cool. Special hugs to the top-ten factory contributors over the last 6 weeks (according to some scripting by AJ):

• Vincent Untz
• Stephan Kulow
• Dirk Mueller
• Dominique Leuenberger
• Jan Engelhard
• Sascha Peilicke
• Marcus Schäfer
• Ciaran Farrell
• Ralph Lang
• Cristian Rodriguez

Note that the list above doesn’t credit the hard work being done by the Packman team or people building packages outside of factory!

The Open Build Service, a system to collaboratively build and easily distribute packages for a wide variety of operating systems and platforms, has introduced the ability to integrate the intelligent OBS ‘download package’ page into websites. This is useful for projects who want to offer their users easy access to downloads for a wide variety of Linux (and non-linux) systems. Moreover, the Open Build Service 2.3 Release Candidate is out and the final release is near.

The Open Build Service provided by openSUSE keeps growing. The number of packages is now well over 170.000, with more than 32.000 developers using the Open Build Service either for personal use, to provide packages for one or more Linux distributions publicly or to contribute to openSUSE. Many projects depend on the Open Build Service to get software to their users. Right now, developers need to move the packages from OBS to a place where they are easy to download, or point users to the repository. The project page on OBS usually provides a ‘download’ button but this page is clearly not designed for end users.

OBS download page integrated in Qupzilla

We decided to do better and now provide a download page which can be properly integrated in any website. It offers several layers of integration, starting with a convenient multi-distribution download page one can link to (example here); or an iframe which can be included in a web page; to PHP and html objects one can use to really offer deep integration. New is also the option to also provide Appliances this way so those building OS images on OBS can provide access to them directly via the same interface.

If you are interested in integrating the download functionality of the Open Build Service in your website, there is easy documentation on the openbuildservice.org website as well as an in-depth how-to in the OBS handbook.

The first project to take advantage of this is the light weight web browser QupZilla and the integration work took only a few minutes using the iframe option. It saves interested users an extra click to install the application and looks better at the same time.

The full functionality, including the downloading of Appliances, can be seen in action on the openbuildservice.org website which got a nice face-lift for the occasion.

OBS download page on OBS.org

A while ago the the 2.3 release candidate was released. The release notes are already online and the final release is imminent. While a final date has not been decided upon it is expected to be in the next two or three weeks.

The main features for the 2.3 release of the Open Build Service are the introduction of full product maintenance handling in OBS. No external build or tracking tools are required anymore for the typical maintenance workflow of a distribution. The current documentation of these features can be found in a draft version of the OBS reference guide.

A second important feature is the ability to set projects to be hidden. This means no source or binary read access is possible for anyone not part of the project, allowing for the use of public OBS instances for private building purposes. Note that this flag can only be set at project creation time and does not support merge requests! Read the release notes for more information.

The OBS 2.3 release will also introduce protection against XSS attacks. Especially public instances are strongly encouraged to update to OBS 2.3 once it is released.

Other important new features for the Open Build Service 2.3 include:

• Tracking of bugzilla or CVE issues in source changes and tracking servers
• web interface improvements including package filtering, improved request and review UI and the introduction of social features like showing users’ projects and requests
• API improvements especially to the handling of review and merge requests
• A new dispatcher with a more clever sort order based on defined priorities and the trigger reason, improving build times for important projects

Read the release notes for more complete overview of what is coming to your OBS instance soon!

COSCUP is the largest FLOSS conference organized by local communities in Taiwan. The conference has sessions for new users, enthusiastic promoters, coders or anyone who is interested in cutting-edge FLOSS technologies. The goal is to create a friendly and informative environment for people from different communities to make friends, learn new technologies and inspire each other.

At COSCUP 2011, several KDE and openSUSE contributors gave talks and presented ‘cool stuff’ at their booths. This year, we will have a fully dedicated track for KDE and openSUSE and starting today, you can send in session proposals.

Geeko’s at their booth at COSCUP 2011

We are glad to announce that in 2012 the COSCUP conference will feature a full two-day track dedicated entirely to KDE and openSUSE. People from both organisations have teamed up to bring you the best talks possible.

But for that, we need your help!

The program committee is looking for talks about KDE and openSUSE. Possible topics are (but not limited to):

• desktop technologies (d-bus, gstreamer, etcetera)
  embedded and mobile
• distribution technologies (packaging tools, build systems, etcetera)
• challenges in adapting software to local needs (L10N, I18N)
• cross-desktop and cross-distribution collaboration
• cloud computing and integration into the desktop
• or anything else you think the world should hear about!

KDE BOF at COSCUP 2011

Although KDE and openSUSE have always been close the talks do not necessarily have to be related to both KDE and openSUSE (like ownCloud or Apper). In the spirit of our openness and collaboration we welcome talk proposals about KDE on other distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, etcetera), or other desktops and non-desktop technologies on openSUSE (GNOME, OpenStack, etcetera).

The call for papers ends on June 15. Please send in a proposal of about 200 words, accompanied by a ~50 words biography, in either English or Chinese, to this address before that date.

The Program Committee for the KDE/openSUSE track at COSCUP consists of the following people:

• Franklin Weng (KDE)
• Aaron J. Seigo (KDE)
• Sakana (openSUSE)
• Al Cho (openSUSE)
• Bryen Yunashko (openSUSE)
• Greg Kroah-Hartman (the Linux Foundation)

We’re happy to announce that starting March 29 the openSUSE Summit team will accept session proposals for the openSUSE Summit. The openSUSE Summit will take place from September 21-23, 2012 in Orlando Florida at the Caribe Royale Hotel. The proposal submission period ends on June 15, 2012 at midnight EDT. Final announcement of the program will occur on or before July 23, 2012.

The Summit aims to continue the tradition of a fun and exciting gathering. We will deliver a bi-lingual event with some sessions offered in English and some in Spanish. In good openSUSE spirit we also want to make this event as welcoming as possible by inviting other projects to participate in the Summit.

On summit.opensuse.org you can see the results of the hard work of our marketing and artwork teams. We’re very proud that this website is live now, that we have a great logo as well as lots of other artwork like postcards, posters and even t-shirts. Aside from the prettyness we also have a sponsorship brochure on our Sponsors page and we’ve got our Call for Papers up.

The openSUSE Summit will have 3 tracks as outlined below. Presentations, BoF (Birds of a Feather) sessions, and work shops are expected to align with the track topic.

openSUSE Community
The openSUSE Community track provides information and discussion around the openSUSE community. Topics include but are not limited to:

• Project governance and organization
• How can we improve and evolve as a growing community
• What is the task of an Ambassador
• How to get involved

openSUSE Tech
The openSUSE Tech track provides information, discussion, and hands on experience with the technology that makes openSUSE tick. Topics in this track include, but are not limited to:

• The openSUSE Factory development model
• Packaging hands on
• Wiki editing help
• What is OBS and how do I use it
• Tools of the trade of the Artwork team

open World
The open World track provides a platform to present your project, or listen to the interesting things our sponsors want to share. Topics in this track may cover demos and HowTos, FOSS project introductions, or other interesting topics from areas such as the “Maker movement”. This is also the platform for cross-community collaboration with upstream or other Linux distributions.

The openSUSE Summit, by virtue of being an openSUSE event, has fun high on the agenda. Therefore, proposals that are “outside the box” of a “regular” software focused conference are encouraged. Collaboratively Building a Giant Paper Mache Geeko has already been proposed and rejected due to environmental concerns.

Submit proposals for the openSUSE Summit using the registration and submission website. If you have not spoken at a previous openSUSE event, please create a new account to submit an abstract. The abstract submission should contain at least a 200 word description of the topic you plan to discuss, as well as a short (~ 50 word) description of yourself.

Please note: All openSUSE events are governed by the openSUSE Code of Conduct. The speaker guidelines outline requirements for the submission of proposals and provide other valuable information for speakers.

About 2 weeks ago Thomas “digitaltom” Schmidt of the openSUSE Boosters started working on a refresh of the software.opensuse.org search interface. In that time, he has transformed the quite technical search UI into one which is a lot more modern and far easier to use. But there’s quite a bit of work in designing and building a new way of searching the whole buildservice repository with its 170.000+ packages in an userfriendly and logical way. If you’re up for it, we could use your help!

Above is a gallery of the current state, you can play with it here. Surely, you’ll agree that a lot has improved already. But there is still plenty to do! If you’re a Ruby hacker and want to take a crack at making the software search and installation experience for millions of openSUSE users better, this is your chance! Tom has been discussing where the UI should go on the openSUSE Build Service mailing lists (see the discussions Part I, Part II and Part III).

From the outcome of these discussions, there’s a list of things which need to be added over the next few weeks. If you want to try, go and Fork the github repo and start crackin’!

software.opensuse.org is written in Ruby and based on the rails framework. Behind the scenes it collects all data from the obs api which is documented here. The results from the discussions have been collected by Tom in this TODO list on Github. Some easy beginner hacks would be:

• Test and fix the pages with different browsers
• create images for featured apps like on this webstore
• link to install instructions for non-suse distros (like on software.o.o/download)
• add tooltips for download links including size, build date etc
• Defined sort order for unsupported packages
• Fix a bug: Libreoffice not found when searching for “libreoffice” but when searching for “office”
• Check to replace the searchbar on http://software.opensuse.org/ with the new one, or if we don’t need a package search on the dvd download page
• Improve display of ‘sub-packages’ in the result list
• And more…

If you want to get to know your ruby/rails by working with an experienced hacker and give back to your favorite distro, this is your chance!

You’ll get all the help you need and questions answered from Thomas, who you can find on IRC in our #opensuse-project channel on Freenode as “digitaltom”, by mail on tom at the opensuse.org server and also on Google+.

So, go to our github repo, fork it and get going!

Those following openSUSE development closely probably know that the 2nd milestone on the way to openSUSE 12.2 was planned for the beginning of this week. And indeed you can now download it from software.opensuse.org/developer. As usual, a list of the most annoying bugs is being maintained and you can see the list of bugs and/or file a new one in Bugzilla. Read on for some details on the release and how to help!

openSUSE, as you might know, is being developed in Factory. Factory is a project on the openSUSE Build Service against which you can build a package. If it works fine, you can submit it to Factory and keep it working there.

Plymouth Merge request: Accepted!

Many new features are currently being developed in Factory. About two weeks ago, for example, Michael Chang announced the plans for Grub2 support in openSUSE and asked for help in testing and improving the integration in openSUSE (being tracked here). Related to this is the work on Plymouth and flicker-free boot in openSUSE (wiki here). Plymouth’s merge request got accepted so it is on its way to you for openSUSE 12.2!

Another call for help came when Coolo asked if anyone was interested in leading the efforts to bring GCC 4.7 to Factory. Dimstar took the challenge and you can see the progress in his home project as well as in his latest status update mail to the ML.

Grub2, Plymouth and GCC 4.7 are of course only three random upcoming features for openSUSE 12.2, part of a much bigger list. For example, the openSUSE ARM team is targeting 12.2, work is being done on USRMerge and the openSUSE Boosters are working on software installation (appstores) in openSUSE. And you can expect the usual latest LibreOffice (of course!), GNOME, KDE and with some luck the brand new Razor-Qt desktop environment to be part of our next release.

List of failures in Factory - help get rid of them!

Of course you’re wondering how you can help. This can start with testing. Go to software.opensuse.org/developer, download Milestone 2 and try it out on your system! You can then check the
most annoying bugs to see if your problems are there, if not, you can see the list of bugs and/or file a new one in Bugzilla. If the bug you find is very serious, add it tho the list of annoying bugs!

If you are a packager (or want to be one!) there is of course also plenty to do. Fixing bugs in packages is a nice way of learning the ways of packaging (see the Packaging portal for documentation).

Stephan “Coolo” Kulow did a call for help, mentioning the bad shape openSUSE-Factory was in, asking whoever can to help fix issues in the list of build failures. You can read about how to do this here, via a simple set of stepps which in openSUSE are commonly known as ‘BURP-ing’.

Factory Workflow

Dimstar asked anyone able and willing to help out with GCC 4.7 , I’ll just quote him:

So: don’t be shy! Grab one of the still failing packages in home:dimstar:gcc47, try to fix it up and submit it (either to home:dimstar:gcc47 or directly to its devel project). If you identify that the failure is not due to GCC 4.7 (there is a bunch of > 150 packages failing in openSUSE:Factory too after all), then you don’t have to stop there of course and can still go ahead and fix the package :P (admittedly, I did not do that and concentrated on pure gcc caused failures these days).

You can find out how to help with the USRMerge here and if you’re already a packager for openSUSE, don’t forget to get your packages in Factory or start to maintain one!

Good news! As followers of our openSUSE Google+ account already know, openSUSE will be part of GSOC 2012. That means it is now time for the students to take the openSUSE GSOC ideas, find a mentor and start creating proposals to be submitted to Google. We’ve got until April 6th for this, at which point openSUSE and Google will start to look at the proposals.

So what does a good proposal look like? There is plenty of advice to be found:

• How to write a kick-ass proposal for GSOC
• Do’s and Dont’s of GSOC
• The GSOC Student Guide
• Examples of proposals

As is being said above, the proposal has to be technically sound and realistic. For this, make sure you write it in cooperation with the potential mentor(s). They know what can and can’t be done and what makes sense! In the end, you have to convince both GOOGLE and the openSUSE GSOC team and they heavily rely on the mentors’ opinions. Work with them!

For openSUSE GSOC proposals We’d like you to include at least the following items:

• Background
• Use Cases
• Benefits
• Caveats
• Technical Details
• Why Me
• Contact Information

Now go to our GSOC 2012 page and write a kick-ass proposal!

Once the proposals are selected and Google has given us a share, May 21st coding will start and it will continue (with a mid term evaluation on July 13th) until August 13.

But now, first order of the day is for students to talk to their mentors and flesh (not flush) out those ideas!

You can find all information about our GSOC program on our wiki and you can always ask the openSUSE GSOC team if you have any questions:

• Vincent “vuntz” Untz
• Matt Barringer

They hang out on IRC in our #opensuse-project channel on Freenode!

It’s that time of the year again – FLISOL, the “Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre” (Latin American free software install fest) will start in about 6 weeks! If you live in Latin America, you can join one of the hundreds of install fests happening all over the continent on April 28th. And if there is nothing close by, there is no reason you can’t organize it yourself…

Luiz Augusto Machado, openSUSE ambassador from Brazil, invited all Ambassadors and anyone else interested in openSUSE in Latin America to participate and support openSUSE at FLISOL 2012. This is the event to teach anyone interested in Software Libre about the cool things the world wide community around Linux and other open projects has done.

Helping others play with Free Software is not hard. You don’t have to know a lot – just more than those you teach! And neither does it have to be complicated and perfect. A room at your office or university combined with a blog and asking colleagues and friends to come makes for a fine FLISOL!

You can help people install a Linux on their laptops! Any Windows or Mac install you replace with a Linux, be it Mint, Fedora, PC BSD or of course openSUSE, is a win for the owner of the system. Another little step towards a world where people own their hardware, control their data and are Free to do what they want with both! So be sure to bring DVD’s or USB sticks with which to install openSUSE! You can request openSUSE DVD’s for an event here . Be sure to order early.

You can talk about your favorite project, be it GNOME, the Kernel, openSUSE, Blender, LibreOffice – and show people what it is, how to use it and why. openSUSE has a number of standard presentations you can use in our marketing github repository (click here for a quick how-to on getting stuff from github). Note that the presentations have ‘notes’ and we also of course have a template you can use for your own slides!

A number of ambassadors has already replied that there will be events in their vicinity. Brazil already has four confirmed lectures on openSUSE, Guatamala two, and we have confirmed events in El Salvador, Panama and Chile and more is of course coming. If you want to attend or help out, you can find out if your city is already involved here. If not, we encourage you to consider organizing openSUSE attendance to your local FLISOL or even organizing the FLISOL event to also have fun spreading the FOSS culture in your city! Remember to add your participation in the openSUSE Ambassadors events page.

A while ago, we wrote about the work on moving maintenance support into the Open Build Service. Since then announcement, some of the internal maintenance scripts have been running in parallel to the Open Build Service but the Security, Maintenance and OBS teams are now convinced things are ready for a switch. Soon, to be exact Thursday, March 15 2012, your updates will be delivered exclusively by OBS via an open workflow!

For users, nothing changes. The patch naming will change a a bit but zypper & YaST takes care of that automatically. The real changes are for the openSUSE packagers. In short:

• OBS and Bugzilla are now THE tools to coordinate openSUSE updates
• That means you can do submit requests for updates to openSUSE via :Update directly!
• You will have to update to osc 0.134 for all this to work properly. It has the ability to do maintenance submit requests.
• Find documentation here.

It is HIGHLY recommended to read the original announcement mail from Adrian for more details, especially if you want to help maintain openSUSE 12.1!

The openSUSE Conference (oSC) is the yearly get-together of  our community to give its people a chance to meet face to face, talk to and inspire each other. Being together in one room, even in this day and age, beats every other collaboration method and is what forges cohesion and friendships. That is why the openSUSE Project tries to get together this conference every year for its contributors. But not only for them, the conference is also for anyone using, working with or taking advantage of the project. No matter if you use our technology, if you are one of our many friends from free and open source upstream projects or if you contribute to another GNU/Linux distribution this conference is for you.

After three years of oSC in Nuremberg we are excited to host this years conference in Prague, “the city of a hundred spires”. Prague, which is regularly voted among the ten most beautiful cities in Europe, is the capital and with more than 1.2 million inhabitants the largest city in the Czech Republic. The exact location and date isn’t set yet but the fourth installment of oSC will not take place in September as usual, but rather at the turn of October and November, because of the preceding SUSECon and the openSUSE Summit.

Just because the conference isn’t until November, it does not mean we can’t start planning right way! We have already established a team of folks local to Prague which will help with the on-site organization during the conference, but we still need to form additional teams which will deal with various topics prior the conference. We need for instance a program team which will drive the call for papers and the schedule or the promotion team to come up with a theme for oSC12 together with artwork, banners, badges, T-shirts, etc.

If you would like to participate, please subscribe to the opensuse-conference@opensuse.org mailing list and read through the conference wiki portal where we coordinate the organization We are looking forward to hearing from you!

Our fellow and long time openSUSE contributor Marco “daemon” Michna has passed away last week.

He was a friend to many of us, and will be sorely missed.

Our condolences and sympathy go out to his family and friends.

Daemon, dear friend, rest in peace.