FreeSoftNews

The openSUSE Project is proud to announce the 1.0 release of the
openSUSE Build Service. The 1.0 release provides all the features
necessary to support building openSUSE in the public build systems and
allowing direct contributions to openSUSE from all contributors.
Developers can now submit contributions to openSUSE directly at
build.opensuse.org.

The openSUSE Build Service allows developers to create and maintain
packages for openSUSE and many other Linux distributions, including
CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, Red Hat, and Ubuntu. With the 1.0
release, the openSUSE Build Service expands its scope to building the
entire openSUSE release, and provides everyone with the same access
and transparent interface to work on the openSUSE distribution.

• Read more: openSUSE Build Service 1.0 Released

We are pleased to announce:
Issue 29 of openSUSE Weekly News is out! [0]

In this week’s issue:
* openSUSE 11.1 Roadmap
* Novell Client for Linux Public Beta for openSUSE 10.3
* People of openSUSE: Jan-Simon Möller
* John Anderson: Find duplicate files by content not name
* Lukas Ocilka: Package Search and One Click Install in YaST
* Miguel de Icaza: Moonlight 0.7 is now Available

[0] http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/29

Last weeks issue: http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/28

Have a lot of fun!

–
Jan-Simon Möller

Invitrogen is a billion-dollar supplier to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, with 4,700 employees worldwide and a history of supplying many of the world’s leading laboratories in groundbreaking research like the discovery of the AIDS virus.

To help promote its innovative work, Invitrogen announced this week that it is standardizing on Novell’s SUSE® Linux Enterprise for its servers. From the press release:

Read more at CNet

http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME/Ideas/11.1

The openSUSE-GNOME Team needs your ideas.

In preparation for starting work on 11.1, the GNOME Team would like you
to submit your ideas for what you would like to see in openSUSE 11.1.
We have a deadline to accept ideas and assign them to appropriate team
members by July 7th.

Any ideas submitted after July 7th may or may not be included in 11.1
depending on available resources.

Thanks and we look forward to your great ideas,
Bryen

With openSUSE 11.0 out the door, it’s time to start thinking about openSUSE 11.1. The public release of openSUSE 11.1 is scheduled for December 18, 2008, six months after the release of openSUSE 11.0.

The full schedule for the release cycle is as follows:

• Thu, Jul 24: openSUSE 11.1 Alpha1
• Thu, Aug 21: openSUSE 11.1 Alpha2
• Thu, Sep 18: openSUSE 11.1 Beta1 - snapshot release
• Thu, Oct 02: openSUSE 11.1 Beta2 - snapshot release
• Thu, Oct 16: openSUSE 11.1 Beta3 - snapshot release
• Thu, Oct 30: openSUSE 11.1 Beta4 - snapshot release
• Thu, Nov 13: openSUSE 11.1 RC1 - snapshot release
• Thu, Nov 27: openSUSE 11.1 RC2 - snapshot release
• Thu, Dec 4: openSUSE 11.1 GM - final release
• Thu, Dec 18 openSUSE 11.1 public release

This is, of course, a tentative schedule. Any critical or show-stopping bugs may delay betas and release candidates.

Major areas of interest in this release include:

• GNOME 2.24
• KDE: KDE 4.1.1 (optionally KDE 3.5.10)
• Continued improvement in the software update stack
• Linux kernel 2.6.27+

Want to get involved? The start of a release cycle is a great time to get involved in openSUSE development. See the How to Participate page on the openSUSE wiki for details.

See the full 11.1 roadmap on the openSUSE wiki for more details and updates.

Note that Coolo and Michl are on vacation until the end of next week, so let’s start the discussion on features once they are back on the opensuse-factory mailing list,

Andreas

Issue #28 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!

In this week’s issue:

• GNOME Helping Hands Project Launches
• People of openSUSE: Tanja Roth
• Masim Sugianto: How to Make openSUSE 11.0 GM Live USB
• Benjamin Weber: openSUSE 11.0 KDE4 inclusion
• tuxmachines.org: Battle of the Titans - Mandriva vs openSUSE: The Rematch

Last fall when the two mega-distros openSUSE and Mandriva both hit the mirrors, it was difficult to decide which I liked better. In an attempt to narrow it down, I ran some light-hearted tests and found Mandriva won out in a side-by-side comparison. But things change rapidly in the Linux world and I wondered how a competition of the newest releases would come out. Mandriva 2008.1 was released this past April and openSUSE 11.0 was released just last week.

My history with Mandriva goes back eight years. It was the first Linux distribution I was able to make work and paved my way to freedom. openSUSE swept me off my feet when 10.0 was in development and I’ve followed it closely since. I like both of these distros very much and as this article will show, it is very difficult to pick a favorite. But lets try:

Read more at tuxmachines.org

The GNOME Team will host its first Helping Hands event this coming
Friday, June 27th at 14:30 UTC in the #opensuse-gnome IRC channel on the
FreeNode Network.

This will be an extended two-hour event where various members of the
GNOME team will talk about different features of the GNOME desktop and
offer assistance in setting up your custom environment.

You can find out more about the Helping Hands project at
http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME/HowTos.

Incidentally, there has already been talk on several fronts about
expanding the Helping Hands project to cover all areas of openSUSE. If
you’re interested in being part of the project, feel free to contact me
via email or suseROCKs in IRC.

Bryen Yunashko
Helping Hands Coordinator

In case there’s anyone left out there who doesn’t get that the UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) is a big deal for the Linux desktop consider that arguably the most important business Linux desktop, Novell’s SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10 SP2) is now available on MSI’s (Micro-Star International) new Wind Notebook.

The Wind NB-Linux is what Intel would have us call a NetBook. It uses a 1.6-GHz Intel Atom microprocessor and comes with 512MBs of RAM and an 80-GB hard drive. For networking it uses 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and conventional Ethernet.

Read more at Practical Technology

The openSUSE-GNOME Team is proud to announce the launch of the Helping
Hands Project. Our first event will be the Helping Hands Grand Opening
in the #opensuse-gnome channel on the FreeNode IRC network, June 27th at
14:30 UTC. To find out the time in your area,
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=6&day=27&year=2008&hour=14&min=30&sec=0&p1=0

The Helping Hands Project is designed to bring together experts from
various areas of the GNOME environment with users who want to learn more
about openSUSE-GNOME and applications that run in the GNOME environment.
Helping Hands Experts will present on the topic of the week and then
open the floor up for questions and answers from users.

• Read more: GNOME Helping Hands Project Launches

I was offered the chance to have an initial look at Novell’s latest Linux offering openSUSE 11. It’s a distribution I’ve tried in previous versions but often had trouble settling on. It seems very popular on enterprise desktops along with Red Hat. I got a copy of the KDE4 LiveCD and gave it a spin.

Kernel Version: 2.6.25.5-1.1-default
Packaging: RPM managed by Yast
Desktop: KDE 4 (GNOME and KDE3.5 versions available)

I fired up the KDE live CD to be greeted with a KDE4 desktop; the full openSUSE DVD comes with GNOME, KDE3.5 and XFCE installation options so there’s plenty of choice. I used the install desktop icon and during the disk set-up stage it detected my disk’s partition layout and actually offered to perform the operation I would normally choose manually: wiping and installing the 12-Gb root but preserving and mounting the larger /home partition (shown in Figure 1). This was impressive.

Read more at Linux Planet

The openSUSE Project is proud to announce the release of openSUSE 11.0 –
everything you need to get started with Linux on the desktop and on the server.
Promoting the use of Linux everywhere, the openSUSE Project provides free, easy
access to the world’s most usable Linux distribution, openSUSE.

The 11.0 release of openSUSE includes more than 200 new features specific to
openSUSE, a redesigned installer that makes openSUSE even easier to install,
faster package management thanks to major updates in the ZYpp stack, KDE 4,
GNOME 2.22, and much more. Read all about the updates in the release at
http://news.opensuse.org/?p=891.

• Read more: Announcing openSUSE 11.0 GM

We are pleased to announce:
Issue 27 of openSUSE Weekly News is out! [0]

In this week’s issue:
* HOT! Upcoming o p e n S U S E 1 1 . 0
* People of openSUSE: Rupert Horstkötter
* Sneak Peeks at openSUSE 11.0: KDE with Stephan Binner
* Tips and Tricks: Jigish Gohil: Getting NVIDIA and ATI drivers on openSUSE 11.0
* Planet SUSE: Ben Kevan: Why upgrade to openSUSE 11 from openSUSE 10.x

[0] http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/27

Last weeks issue: http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/26

Have a lot of fun!

–
Jan-Simon Möller

Over the weekend, Accessibility pages were created on opensuse.org’s
Wiki (See http://en.opensuse.org/Accessibility.) The intent is to
highlight efforts made within the openSUSE community to improve
Accessibility (a11y) standards within our distribution, as well as
become more aware of who within our community works on a11y issues.

I invite everyone to come visit our new wiki pages and get yourself
listed in the People Directory if you have any involvement whatsoever
with a11y.

Thanks!

–
—Bryen—

Let’s rejoice a “There are no dumb questions” culture.
But I really need you to have a “No dumb answers” policy before I answer your question.