As you probably all know, few weeks ago was openSUSE Conference 2010. And it was great event and I’m glad I was able to attend it. Unfortunatelly I had some troubles with my blog, so I’m writing about it now. I had there a small “workshop” about KVM & libvirtd and about why you shouldn’t be affraid of using them. Few slides that I came up with can be obtained here, but most of the time, it consisted from the discussion with people that attended it. But I want to write mainly about interesting things that I learned on conference.
Jos & Strategy
As many other people I was quite interested in strategy discussions. I tried to follow it for a while but then I got lost in discussions and all the e-mails that came. I guess quite some people lost track of the discussion for the same reason. But on the conference Jos had a presentation about strategy, so it was nice opportunity to get to know, what’s going on. And it looks like we already have some kind of strategy. We are trying to provide many choices, sane defaults, stable distribution focused on users that want to learn at least a little bit about the system or want to have work done. We are not going to be bleeding edge like Fedora (even though I heard that they are going to stabilize things) or “don’t ask me anything I hate computers” distribution for newbies like Ubuntu is. We want to be something reasonably usefull, but still offering plenty of choices for advanced users. And I like this strategy as it covers most of my computers.
Board & Foundation
Other thing that I found really interesting was meeting with the openSUSE Board where they spoke about creating openSUSE Foundation. And from what they told us, it is going to happend. Then openSUSE will be no longer dependent on Novell and will be able to live it’s own life. Maybe it would be even possible to avoid some stupid laws that exists in USA (from discussion it looked like that foundation is going to be founded in Europe). So let’s hope for the best.
openSUSE Connect
What I was really interested how it will turn out was openSUSE Connect talk and BoF. We Boosters were working on that and we’ve got all users imported there currently. But we needed some feedback and integration to the rest of services. We raised some avereness about connect and discussed some isues mainly about integrating it with openSUSE Build Service with Andrian and Thomas. Resolution so far is as follows. Build Service already can use LDAP for getting user data. And we want to support this use case. So options were to add support for another backend (Connect) or make Connect use LDAP. Easiest thing that we came up with is that Connect will mirror all data into LDAP. And after little bit of experimenting, we’ve got LDAP exporting plugin ready for Connect. It can certainly use some polishing, but it works 😉