Last Thursday we had GPG Key & CAcert Signing party at SUSE office inviting anybody who wants to get his key signed. I would say, that it went quite well, we had about 20 people showing up, we had some fun, and we now trust each other some more!
We started with GPG key signing. You know, the ussual stuff. Two rows moving against each other, people exchanging paper slips…
Last week I posted a survey about openSUSE Connect. Although some answers are still coming and you are still welcome to provide more feedback, let’s take a look at some results. Some numbers first. openSUSE Connect is not really busy website, it gets about 80 different visitors per day. Not much, but not a total wasteland. Related to this number is another one. More than half of the people responding in the survey have never ever heard about openSUSE Connect. So it sounds like we should speak about it more…
You might remember that in our team (openSUSE Boosters), we created openSUSE Connect some time ago. It was meant as replacement for users.opensuse.org that nobody knew about and nobody used. We hoped that it will attract more users and that it will be more user friendly way, how to manage personal data. Apart from that, we wanted to include more interesting widgets so it can become your landing page for all your efforts in openSUSE project. With that regards we created bugzilla widget, fate widget, build status widget and some more. We hoped that it would make difference and help people and that they will enjoy using the new site. During this summer my GSoC student created amazing Karma widget as well to make it more fun. And as Connect has been some time already in function, it’s now time to collect some feedback. Did it work? Do you like it? Or did it become just a wasteland? Do you think such a site make sense?
Almost two weeks ago, during the weekend, I was in Sankt Augustin to attend FrOSCon. Originally I didn’t planned to go as it is quite far from Prague and I was freshly back from vacation (and therefore quite without money). But I was asked by Sirko to give there a talk about Open Build Service and to participate in cross-distribution packaging workshop. Hard to refuse such an invitation. As the money was the only issue that was keeping me from participating, I decided to ask openSUSE Travel Support committee whether they would be willing to sponsor me. It was my first experience, but it turned out great and thanks to them, I was able to go to the event, speak about great things we have at openSUSE and have a lot of fun! My big thanks to them!
There will be a lot going on in fall this year in Prague. There will be awesome cluster of four conferences! And as I’m somehow involved in all of them, I want to promote them a little bit as well. So what’s going on? There is openSUSE Conference coming to Prague. We were planning where to have it, how to do it and stuff like that. During the planning of this one and one new Czech one called LinuxDays, I took Jos with me to the LinuxDays conference meeting so we can discuss how can both conferences help each other. Meeting was really great and we ended up with deciding to merge both conferences! Have them both at the same time, same place and make them both even more awesome! We also had Theo with us, who was by that time thinking about organizing new conference for Gentoo people. So we throw in another conference! What is the result? During weekend from 20th October to 21st October, we will have four conferences at the same place! Gentoo miniconf, LinuxDays, openSUSE Conference and SUSE Labs conference! And the openSUSE/SUSE Labs one will continue even for two extra days 😉 I’m really looking forward to it, to see all these communities merge. And to have a lot of fun, on this surely awesome multiconference! We even have a common poster and landing page as you can see bellow 😉
If you are following news regarding openSUSE and MySQL, you probably already know, that we have both MySQL and MariaDB in openSUSE to allow users to choose what they want to use. And if these two options are not enough, we’ve got server:database repository with newest and greatest development versions of both and MySQL Cluster on to of that. I think all this is great and awesome, that we have all of that.
If you follow MySQL community at least as much as I do (browsing trough the planet from time to time), you know that some exciting milestones were reached both in Oracles MySQL and in MariaDB. And as I love bleeding edge software, you can try all these exciting things prepackaged in openSUSE 😉
Let’s start with news from guys at Oracle. Recently they released new MySQL Cluster 7.2. Yes 7.2 is GA now. And you can find a lot of exiting info online about how fast it is! If you don’t believe benchmarks done by others, try it by yourself! We have it in server:database repository for all supported openSUSE versions, SLE and few other rpm based distributions. Just add the repository and install package mysql-cluster_72. Pretty easy, isn’t it? 😉 So if you have MySQL cluster and want to take advantage of the latest improvements, give it a try 😉
Last week on Friday we had a KDE 4.8 release party in Prague. It took us some time to organize everything, but in the end everything went well. For those of you who missed the party, little overview (and some photos, sorry, no cake left).
Even though it was a Prague release party, we spoke quite a lot in English as well. Why? Well most of our speakers don’t speak Czech (yet). Theo was one organizing the talks and inviting speakers and doing all important stuff around the party and he managed to get here Cornelius Schumacher and Jos Poortvliet to come. Both of them has a long history with KDE, so they were giving great talks. For example Jos spoke about 15 new KDE features in 5 minutes and Cornelius about how KDE evolved over the time from small project done by few people to the current state where many people from all over the world works on it. Talk by Jos was also important from other reaseon. People could bet how long will it take and three closest to the actual time have won plush geekos! In the end five minutes talk lasted eight minutes. Apart from famous foreign visitors, we had talks by Tomáš Chvátal about translations and LibreOffice KDE integration and Theo also had a talk which I unfortunatelly missed because I was fetching party attendees in the reception and getting them up through the lift.
You all probably heard about Ubuntu for Android, right? Ubuntu is very good in the marketing and they can do a lot of locomotion around everything. So what if you have Android, want to use Linux distribution and Ubuntu isn’t your cup of tee? You can use openSUSE of course! Let me show you how…
As you may already know, there are initiatives in openSUSE community to get our great openSUSE running even on non-mainstream architectures. I’m particularly interested into openSUSE on ARM but I’m rooting for our colleagues who are working on getting PPC support in openSUSE. Of course we are using OBS to do that and there is one minor think that you might not noticed yet. Anybody can build for these architectures!!! It is still slow, so don’t enable it just for every repo you have, but if you want to help us and contribute to our porting initiatives, this can help you, save you some time and can make it easier for you to contribute!