As you may or may not know, I’m part of the openSUSE Boosters team and I’m working on umbrella project. Part of this project is to make all openSUSE pages look similar. What I was working on during last week was to addapt Roberts Bentoo theme for Media Wiki. And as I posted to my workreport that it is available internaly (as it is curently running on my machine only) I’m posting here sample screenshot 😉

It’s been some time already since I informed you about server: database: UNSTABLE repository in openSUSE Build Service. Today I want to mention what is going on there. As the name of the repository suggests, it’s probably not the best idea to use anything from here on your production servers 😉

MySQL 5.4

I’m keeping there MySQL 5.4. Currently in version 5.4.3 beta. 5.4 branch of MySQL contains some patches to improve performance. That is the reason why it might be interesting. Downside is that it isn’t released as often as 5.1 and it is not considered production ready. I already wrote something about this, so let’s move to something new.

This weekend we were on LinuxAlt conference with my colleague Pavol Rusnak. It was really nice event, we met quite some people. I also learned some new things during the talks but I’m not going to write here about talks as others will surely write about them more deeply. I’m going to write something about the feedback we received and what we talked about with people.

openSUSE 11.2 DVDs

As I already mentioned before, we were giving out openSUSE 11.2 promo DVDs to the people attending conference. GoldMaster was created at Friday and we were burning DVDs during night and during conference and printing out covers to have something really fresh to give to the people. And we weren’t burning new DVDs fast enough as people were really interested. We came with 30 pre-burnt DVDs and they were out in no time and the rest had to wait till we burn some more. In the end 50 people was lucky enough and received shiny new openSUSE 11.2 directly from the oven.

This is going to be just a little note. Tomorrow starts two day conference LinuxAlt in Brno in Czech Republic. I’m planning to attend as a mere mortal (no presentation or such). So if you want to speak to me in person, you can probably catch me there somewhere. I’ll be wearing some openSUSE t-shirt and I’ll probably have some other openSUSE/Novell stuff with on me. I’m attaching one of my latest photos to this blog post.

We are going to release openSUSE 11.2 soon, so I want to let you know about one problem you may expect. One of the openSUSE 11.2 features is support for ext4. Well, if you will just click on next all the time during the installation, default filesystem for your root partition will be ext4. What is the problem with that? Well, ext4 in current kernel has barriers enabled by default. It’s not a problem, it’s a feature, but it has some unpleasant side effects which you may encounter. Let’s take a closer look.

We have announced Junior Jobs in the Monday and we already have the contributions! People are interested! It’s not in factory yet but it’s on its way there. Let’s be more specific. Currently I’m speaking about bug 546020. David Binderman reported missing free in barcode package. As this is easy to fix, it was marked as a Junior Job. And here comes our community member, Marek Belisko, fixes the bug and sends us submit request. It was accepted by package maintainer and resend to the Factory. He also fixed bug 432596 in libunwind. And again, his fix was approved and it is on its way to the Factory. Once these two fixes (and some more) will be accepted in Factory, his name will be in changelog of these packages forever!

Have you always wanted to be openSUSE Contributor? What was stopping you? You just didn’t know where to start? Well every package has some maintainer and you can try to find some problems, fix them and then submit fix to the maintainer… But in the beginning you may encounter too hard problem or you’ll fix it few days after maintainer does it or even you’ll do the fix for old version which wouldn’t be needed after planned update. And of course it’s not so easy to find something that is broken 😉

Some additional notes about openSUSE Conference 2009. This time I want to mention my talks and point you to my slides if you are interested in them.

Building your own distro

We originally created this presentation with Mare Stopka for LineExpo 2009. Then it was rewritten for openSUSE Conference 2009. It’s brief presentation how you can create your own distribution based on openSUSE. It starts with introduction to the openSUSE Build Service and then it continues with brief introduction to the SUSE Studio

Last Thursday I have returned from Germany, where I was attending openSUSE Conference 2009 and then we had a kick-off meeting with our new team. I’ll write something about our meeting later. Now I want to write something about conference.

Conference was great. Meeting so many people interested in openSUSE. And so many interesting talks. Sometimes it was really hard to decide where to go as there were four simultaneous talks most of the time. My todo list was growing most of the time. I’ll mention few talks I found most interesting in random order.

One member of openSUSE Community started very interesting project I want to inform you about. What is it about? It is publicly available virtual machine with openSUSE Milestone. So if you want to test how openSUSE 11.2 would look like without installing it on your computer or just want to show your friends why should they use openSUSE then this project let’s you do so easily.

Author of this project is Jaromír Červenka and you can read something about this project in one of his blog posts. But as his blog is in Czech, I’ll mention few things as well.