Few notes about openSUSE Conference 2009

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.