Michal Hrušecký

Last Thursday I have returned from Germany, where I was attending openSUSE Conference 2009 and then we had a kick-off meeting with our new team. I'll write something about our meeting later. Now I want to write something about conference.

Conference was great. Meeting so many people interested in openSUSE. And so many interesting talks. Sometimes it was really hard to decide where to go as there were four simultaneous talks most of the time. My todo list was growing most of the time. I'll mention few talks I found most interesting in random order.

Pulseaudio

Most of us already heard about it. It caused some problems in 11.1 to some people. But it has many advantages. One nice thing is that it can behave like anything and work on anything. Well almost, but it can connect to some other sound systems and it can pretend to be other sound systems. Nice feature is streaming audio over the network. You can use speakers on computer somewhere else. Watching movie in the bed on my notebook while listening to the normal speakers connected to my desktop... This is nice but probably not everybody needs to do this every day. Ability to choose from multiple soundcards isn't a good example either. But what I think that might be useful for everybody is possibility to see which applications are using my soundcard, select different volume for each of them or boost main volume (even for applications that don't know how to do it or for applications where you can't find a way how to do it).

openSUSE @ ARM

Well, I've got some ARM based PDA, so hearing that I'll be able to run openSUSE on them is probably a good thing. I didn't tried it yet and I'm a little bit afraid if I'll have enough RAM, but we will see...

Web improvements

Quite some talks was about openSUSE webs. There was a talk about Software Portal. Really nice web with a list of applications available for openSUSE. Crash Database was also interesting project. Automatic reporting of crashes in openSUSE. But as we were told, before enabling it by default there has to be a few things solved first. There was also a gathering about creating new users portal with more collaborating and social features. This project doesn't exist yet, but sounded like a lot of fun. And one talk was about that we've got many different web pages and we need to connect them somehow so people will easily find all of them.

One member of openSUSE Community started very interesting project I want to inform you about. What is it about? It is publicly available virtual machine with openSUSE Milestone. So if you want to test how openSUSE 11.2 would look like without installing it on your computer or just want to show your friends why should they use openSUSE then this project let's you do so easily.

Author of this project is Jaromír Červenka and you can read something about this project in one of his blog posts. But as his blog is in Czech, I'll mention few things as well.

It runs on VMware Server 2.0 and availeable environments are KDE, Gnome and XFCE. But you can install anything you want as root account is avalable. How you can connect to the machine?

And last thing to mention - there is already fate request to creating something like this officially. So if you like this, vote for it

You probably alread heard about this from others. There is going to be openSUSE Conference during september 17-20 in Nuremberg. Everybody is advertising it and so do I. I also want to mention talks and events, I'm going to attend. These events are taken from official schedule and from Unconference schedule.

LibUI: Three interfaces for the price of one (Thursday 13:30 - 14:15)

One thing that is great about Yast in my opinion is that it's functionality is available through several different UI. You can choose Qt, GTK or ncurses UI. If I understand it correctly, libUI is making this easy to do. And I want to know more about this so I can use it in future in my future projects.

openSUSE Software Portal (Thursday 15:30 - 16:15)

Software portal is interesting project. It should contain list of openSUSE software and let users comment about software, show what they like or use and similar stuff. I don't know the details, but it is definitely interesting project although I think it is yet not well know and hard to find. I'm hoping to learn more about it.

openSUSE and ARM: GSoC and Beyond (Friday 15:30 - 16:15)

Well, I've got PDA with ARM processor and I'd like to see openSUSE on it. But it will be difficult to decide whether to go to this presentation or to the followin one

OpenSync (Friday 15:30 - 16:15)

OpenSync should be able to provide means to synchronize nearly everything with everything else. I've got gmail acount, I've got some local e-mail client on several computers, few PDAs... OpenSync should be ultimate solution and let me synchronize all these things. But unfortunately I have failed to setup it correctly. So maybe I will succeed after listening to this presentation

Git in the Build Service (Saturday 13:30 - 14:15)

Git is nice and Build Service is great although it has few problems... I'm curious if Git will solve some of them...

Key Signing Party (Thursday and Saturday 16:45 - 17:30)

I want to get my GPG key signed from many people

I want to inform our users that thanks to the efforts of Philippe Makowski, we've got Firebird in openSUSE now. He took over the package we had in Build Service, rewrote spec file from scratch, fixed quite some errors and adjusted package in many ways. And as the result Firebird package was finally accepted yesterday (1st of September) into openSUSE Factory.

What is Firebird and why you should be interested? Firebird is open source RDBMS (relational database management system) and it is derived from Borland InterBase 6.0. It won SourceForge 4th Annual Community Choice Award in category Best Project for the Enterprise and was nominated in other categories as well. I can continue and mention features it has, but I think that the best approach will be to point you out to the following web page:

Get to know Firebird in 2 minutes