Christoph’s Blog

As you all might have noticed already, we released SUSE Linux 10.0 Beta2 today. I’d recommend using Bittorrent to get the latests ISOs:

• SUSE-Linux-10.0-OSS-i386-beta2.torrent
• SUSE-Linux-10.0-OSS-x86_64-beta2.torrent

However, if you prefer direct downloads, refer to ftp4.gwdg.de and/or the Download section on the openSUSE website. Before you report bugs, be sure to check Bugs:most annoying bugs

Note: The delta ISOs that are out there right now are corrupt! The generation of the delta ISOs was defective due to a bug in deltarpm 3.0. We are preparing new delta ISOs as I blog this. As soon as they are available, we will issue an announcement to the openSUSE mailinglist.

This is the first SUSE Linux that includes apt4rpm, however that feature will be “unsupported”. It should be very clear that YaST is and will be the preferred / default / supported package manager in SUSE Linux, but as people kept on requesting apt4rpm over the last few years, we finally made the decision to include it. Actually the next Beta will also include yum (I just submitted yum packages to Autobuild yesterday). If you would like to test yum just now, get the packages from http://ct.kki.org/packages/. We are working on the ftp trees to include the apt and yum metadata, thus it will be easy to use apt and yum in the future!

That’s it for today, but before I get back to work, let me call your attention to the Chinese version of openSUSE that Novell announced yesterday!

…, actually I wanted to blog about LWE last week, but somehow I didn’t had the time to do it. So, now that I’m back in Nuremberg since Monday night and already pretty much got over the jetlag (surprisingly it wasn’t that bad again), it’s time to write down some thoughts.

First of all day 2 and 3 on LinuxWorld Expo wasn’t very different from the first day ;) Again, we had lots of positive feedback and great discussions. The people that showed up at the booth were quite happy with what we told them about openSUSE and the goals and visions we have. To me it was very interesting to hear that some people switch from SUSE to Debian (and other
distros as well) when Novell acquired SUSE 18 months ago. However, the reasons for switch didn’t have anything to do with technical features or something like that. Now, with openSUSE, they are switching back to SUSE, because it’s no longer awkward to admit using SUSE Linux.

After LinuxWorld Expo I spent some nice days in San Francisco. Together with a colleague I rode the bike to the Golden Gate Bridge and later to Golden Gate Park, which was really amazing. The weather was perfect - sunny and quite warm - we just somehow forgot to take the appropriate actions (like using sun lotion). Therefore I got a very bad sunburn on my arms and in the face ;) I’m still suffering from that. On Saturday and Sunday I did some sight seeing in San Francisco, walking from Union Square (where I stayed in the hotel) to Fishermans Wharf and taking the Cable Care back was fun.

On my flight back to Germany I had the pleasure to use Lufthansa FlyNet, i.e. access the internet on-board the plane. Actually a “flatrate” for the whole flight would have costed me $ 29.99, but I managed to get a promotion code to use FlyNet for free.

So, it’s been a greate day at LinuxWorld Expo. We hat lots of visitors at our booth and many interesting talks there. One thing I noted was that almost all visitors really liked SUSE [Linux] and the openSUSE stuff. Getting that kind of feedback is really amazing! By the way, people were going just crazy about those green hats - if you want to get one, be sure to attend one of the Novell theater presentations at LWE ;)

After tow pleasant flights (from Munich to Washington D.C., continuing to San Francisco), five movies and zero sleep I safely arrived in San Francisco last night. I really had to force myself to stay awake which wasn’t very easy, but in the end it worked out somehow. Well, still I got up very early (5:30 am) this morning, but I don’t suffer from my jetlag (yet) ;) I started to work through my mails, tried to keep up with the latests news and now I’ll have to get ready for LWE.

As you all noticed already, openSUSE got officially launched today and the beta1 is out. I’d like to encourage everyone to give it a try now and hunt down as many bugs as possible!

That’s it for the moment, I’ll try to report back on the LWE soon. Have a lot of fun!

It’s been quite some time since my last blog entry, but anyway here we go:

The last few days have been very busy, besides preparing for the openSUSE launch, I updated/fixed some 30-40 packages for the upcoming 10.0 and I of course installed the latest internal development build (aka. preview4). If you ask me, it feels quite good for a preview. I’v seen beta versions of SUSE Linux that weren’t that usable/stable ;)

Reading the news and articles on openSUSE was very interesting lately. I really saw some excellent comments and suggestions out there, but having said that, I also read a lot of loose or even wrong information. From my point of view openSUSE should be considered as the first step in opening up the development of SUSE Linux to the community. I think it is really important to understand that this process will take some time. The fact that we are starting off with the SUSE Linux 10.0 beta phase could be unpleasing in terms of pushing in new features/packages/technologies, because most of the development will be frozen already. Nevertheless I’d really like to encourage lively discussions, lot’s of testing for the upcoming beta and altogether a greate collaboration.

Ok, that’s it for now, I have to get ready to leave for LinuxWorld Expo. So, if you happen to visit LWE SFO, be sure to stop by at the Novell booth. I’m looking forward to seeing you there!