September 26th, 2005
We finally managed to reach a consensus on the locked/unlocked pages on openSUSE.org. Having said that, I just had the pleasure to announce the opening of three central pages: Download, Communicate and How_to_participate. However, some pages will remain locked. If you have change requests for those pages, please use the dicussion function on that very pages or refer to the opensuse-wiki mailinglist…
Which leads me to the second topic: Introducing new mailinglists @openSUSE.org. To advance communication/discussion on certain topics, we are about to establish additional mailing lists. At the moment we are having opensuse-testing, opensuse-packaging, opensuse-doc and opensuse-wiki in mind, but as always we are open to your suggestions. Please feel free to join the discussion now…!
So much for that. On Saturday I eventually got accepted at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg to set off to study information systems (IS) next semester (which is starting this October). Therefore I had to travel to Göttingen to leave university there (where I had enrolled as a precaution) and drive back to Nuremberg this morning. Now I’m looking forward to finding a new apartment and enter university soon. Oh, and I’m very happy to get the opportunity to continue working for Novell/SUSE as a working student… ;)
September 10th, 2005
For those of you who haven’t noticed yet, we released SUSE Linux 10.0 OSS RC1 a few days ago - I was just too busy to blog about it… ;) Today I was looking at the download statistics of ftp.gwdg.de which were absolutely overwhelming! RC1 already generated more 4 TB download traffic. Thanks Eberhard for making this possible!
After having had a relaxing time on vacation in Göttingen one week ago, the last week was very stressful. There were still some really nasty bugs around, that are getting fixed right now ;) Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to participate in some very interesting dicussions on the openSUSE mailinglists as much as I would have liked, but that will hopefully change within the next weeks.
Besides working on SUSE Linux and openSUSE I will have to find a new apartment here in Nuremberg, as I’ll stay here to continue working for SUSE and entering University in October. So, there’s lots of fun ahead ;)
That’s it for now, have a great weekend everyone and keep on testing SUSE Linux - the upcoming release will definitely be the best SUSE Linux ever!
September 1st, 2005
As you all know, Thursday is openSUSE day: Adrian just released SUSE Linux 10.0 Beta4 codenamed “Provo”. Because it will take some time until our mirrors catch up, we recommend the usage of BitTorrent to get the ISO images! These are the available torrents:
If you already have Beta3 ISOs, you just need to download beta3_beta4 Delta ISOs to be able to turn those Beta3 ISOs into Beta4.
Just in case you are unable (or just too lazy) to use BitTorrent, browse to http://download.opensuse.org to download the ISOs directly.
That’s it for now, have a lot of fun…
September 1st, 2005
After some very busy days last week and a painful Beta3 release (don’t ask for details ;)), I’m on vacation to Göttingen this week. However I couldn’t resist to install Beta4 on my laptop, when I saw the internal announcement. Except for a really nasty bug (#103031), the installation went pretty well! Now it’s time to go through all the applications that I like to use to check if they still work as expected.
Bye the way, did anyone find the way to “reproduce” the Easter egg on the installation disks AJ was talking about the other day? I was thinking of giving away one of those green openSUSE hats, that I brought over from LWE, to the first one who sends me a “how to reproduce”… How about that? ;)
Alright, time to sleep(21600);
August 18th, 2005
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:
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!
August 17th, 2005
…, 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.
August 10th, 2005
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 ;)
August 9th, 2005
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!
August 7th, 2005
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!
Juli 25th, 2005
Well, did I tell you guys that I’m going on a business trip to San Francisco (to attend LinuxWord) in about two weeks from now? I couldn’t belief it at first, but now, that I have the plane ticket and the hotel reservation on my desk, I start to realize… I’v always wanted to visit the West Coast of the USA (I have only been to the East Coast up to now) - so this is really a dream coming true.
A few days ago, when I was checking my passport, I found out that it was about to expire in about a month or so. To enter the USA you have to have a passport that’s at least valid for three more month - so I had to take last Friday off and travel to Göttingen (my hometown) to renew my passport.
I went back to Nuremberg on Saturday together my parents and my sister Toma-Elise. We really had a great day walking around the city, visiting some famous sights and having dinner at a place called “L’Osteria“. If you ever come to Nuremberg and want to have gigantic and tasty pizzas, you should really consider eating there.
Sunday was quite, I slept in, did some sports and went to the office to read mails and keep up with the lastes news in the afternoon (I don’t have internet access in my apartment in Nuremberg).
Well, that’s it for now - have a nice week everyone. I’ll try to report back in a few days…