Christoph’s Blog

So, after getting back from FOSDEM on Sunday night (without much delay at the airport, by the way) I was extremely tired (and somehow this tiredness didn’t completely go away yet) in the first place, but at the same time very happy and enthusiastic about having had the chance to participate at FOSDEM. In a nutshell: It was an exceptionally event and it was so much fun to meet all the community people in real life! We had some nice presentations, including the first public demo of the openSUSE build service in the openSUSE DevRoom and a lot of interesting conversations at our stall. Next time we will have to bring some UMTS/GPRS cards to be able to actually use the internet for a demo — we could have thought about that earlier. In any way, I’ll definitely try to be there next year ;)

As I write this, I’m still watching some of the recordings of the main tracks, that I couldn’t attend unfortunately. Be sure to check out this and this to get the videos. Some of them are really entertaining and of course instructive — but hey, why did you guys had to choose XviD for video compression? Anyway, we are still working on post-processing our own recordings of the openSUSE DevRoom talks — this will hopefully get finished within the next days. Many thanks to Jürgen for taking care of this!

If you are really impatient, I’d recommend reading the FOSDEM 2006 page on the openSUSE wiki, which already features our slides! In addition to that we have collected some photos that various (mostly SUSE) people have taken at FOSDEM on a special openSUSE.org subdomain, which I won’t disclose here and now ;) Many thanks for Marcus Meissner for collecting, sorting and arranging this gallery. [Hint: You might want to play around with some names to guess the URL as the pictures are online already.] In short: Those slides, pictures and of course the audio & video recordings will probably be announced within the next couple of days — stay tuned!

Oh, today I had an appointment with my orthodontist to finally get rid of most of the brackets (4 of them are still left for some final optimization) that have been bugging me for the last two years. Hurray ;)

That’s it for today — I’ll be mostly offline until next Monday, as I’m in Göttingen for some free time compensation.

Hey folks, we (i.e. some 20+ SUSE people) safely arrived in Brussels a few hours ago! Just now I returned from dining at a Mexican place, to finish some slides for tomorrow’s presentation ;)

That’s it for the moment — I’m really looking forward to seeing ya at FOSDEM!

After a bumpy Beta1, we seem to be back on track again ;) SUSE Linux 10.1 Beta2 is finished and being uploaded to the mirrors as I’m writing this. I’v been testing early test builds of Beta2 for two days now and the “final” Beta2 is now running on my laptop. Thanks to Timo NetworkManager is actually working well now. And a new fontconfig package (which didn’t make it into Beta2) helped a lot to improve or at least re-establish performance of X applications. [We'll be looking into relasing this as a hotfix.]

On the university side I enjoyed some nice lectures this week — anyway I really need to spend more time studying! The exams are coming closer and closer every day now… ;)

First of all, I’d like to jump at the chance to wish you a happy, healthy and successful new year 2006!

The first week of university is finally over and I should have been studying much more last week instead of working and doing other stuff, but fortunately the weekend is approaching rapidly. And guess what, studying will be given top priority now — at least in theory ;)

Having said that, the last week was quite successful for openSUSE. We had a meeting on Wednesday to coordinate our FOSDEM participance. The outcome is a tentative schedule for the openSUSE DevRoom, which in my opinion is just awesome. I’m really looking forward to a great FOSDEM. Alright, to cut a long story short, be sure to check this out and visit this page.

That’s it for now — enjoy the weekend everyone!

Whether you are celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, or just a Happy New Year, I wish you a safe and happy holiday season!

As always, the last weeks have been very busy, both in terms of university and work. I have written my first test last Saturday - Financial Mathematics. It’s been a quite complicated test, but with some luck I might even have passed it ;)

While there hasn’t been much noise around openSUSE for some weeks, Juergen Weigert has just announced the minutes of the Build Service Team offsite meeting that took place November 24/25. Get ready for 16 pages full of brilliant ideas, creative thoughts and innovative proposals. As this document will most likely cause a lot of questions, we invite you to join us for a Q&A session on irc.freenode.net in #openSUSE scheduled Monday 2005/12/12 17:00 CET!

Next week Sonja and I will be giving a talk on openSUSE at the local university (Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg), check out this page for the details. The presentation slides are far from done - but hey, we still have some days to finalize them ;)

By the way, the upcoming Alpha4 of SUSE Linux 10.1 will contain some nice surprises and we might even go live with the localized (German, French and Spanish) wikis next week - so be sure to stay tuned!

That’s it for the moment on openSUSE - now I’m looking forward to a great weekend (and especially to a particular cocktail party on Saturday night)…

Alright, the FOSDEM mail went out the openSUSE@openSUSE.org maillinglist finally ;) Here’s a copy:

The sixth Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting (commonly known as FOSDEM, [http://www.fosdem.org/]) will take place during the last week-end (25&26) of February 2006 in the city of Brussels, Belgium. It’s an annual 2-day event hosting talks, tutorials, and stalls for the free software/open source community. It is organized by volunteers at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. Access to all parts of FOSDEM is free, but donations and sponsors are welcome to help fund the event.

As you may have already noticed (because Pascal blogged about it), we will have an openSUSE ‘DevRoom’ (Developer Room) @ FOSDEM and most likely a booth as well. Therefore, we are in the very early stages of preparation and would like to team up with you to organize the openSUSE @ FOSDEM event.

To start off, we would like to get your opinion on what topics, presentation, talks, tutorials, etc. you would expect from openSUSE @ FOSDEM? And if you would like to deliver a presentation, talk, tutorial? The ultimate goal would be to have presentations distributed equally amongst community members and SUSE / Novell employees.

Here are some possible topics, that are basis for discussion so far:

• presentations
  • openSUSE in general (what happend so far, what’s up next)
  • openSUSE build infrastructure
  • SUSE Linux 10.1 - highlights and features
• discussion
  • SUSE Linux 10.2 - discussion / plans for the future
  • Usability and Documentation
• tutorials
  • packaging the SUSE-way
  • using the build infrastructure
  • LIVE CD construction
  • Customizing SUSE Linux

That’s it for the moment, we are all looking forward to a lively discussion and a great collaboration.

Sorry for having been so silent over the last couple of weeks - I neither had the time nor the drive to do blogging. But that’s hopefully changing now, as I finally have a broadband internet connection at my new apartment (which surprisingly has led to little sleep for some days already)… ;)

Well, I “survived” university for more than a month now, which has actually been a lot of fun, but at work, the last weeks have been very tough, as you can surely imagine by reading the news. Let’s just try to forget about it and close those matters. Things can only get better.

Focusing on openSUSE, I’m really looking forward to the SUSE Linux 10.1 Alpha3 release, which is likely to happen any time now.

As you might already have noticed (because Pascal blogged about it ;)), openSUSE will be present @ FOSDEM 2006 in Brussels. Preparation as just begun and I’ll be drafting an announcement / request for discussion, to be sent out to the openSUSE mailinglist, today. Stay tuned.

Alright, it’s time to hurry off for lectures now…

I’v been very busy lately and it’s not getting any better ;) Two weeks ago I moved into my new apartment and had lot’s of fun assembling IKEA furniture and getting my stuff on-site. Now that the flat is furnished just marvelous, I’m enjoying it a lot. (However, it will get even better when I get my internet (6 MBit DSL) connection set up ;)) Because of all that, I couldn’t be very active on the openSUSE mailinglists, but I’ll try to catch up with that on the weekend.

Today was my first day at university and it turned out to be fun - ok, there aren’t any “real” lectures yet, but we are playing a business game called BIZplayer, where we simulate running a business. Our group managed to place first for the 1st round and second for the 2nd round, which was quite satisfactory ;) Now it’s time to party…!

Success! I surprisingly found a nice little apartment here in Nuremberg today. It’s nothing special, just 33 sqm, kitchen, bath and a living room/bedroom/workroom. The cool part about it: It’s only 400 m away from the “Maxtorhof” (aka. office ;)) and the WiSo (university). Oh, and it offers a magnificent view of the castle. Tomorrow I’ll sign the lease and get the keys… well, the only thing that bothers me, is the high fee for the estate agent. But I guess I have to bite the bullet.

Besides that, we added three new mailing lists @openSUSE.org today: opensuse-packaging, opensuse-doc and opensuse-wiki.