FOSDEM 2013

I started writing this post after FOSDEM, but never actually managed to finish it. But as I plan to blog about something again “soon”, I wanted to get this one out first. So let’s start with FOSDEM – it is awesome event and every open source hacker is there unless he has some really huge reasons why not to come (like being dead, in prison or locked down in psychiatric care). I was there together with bunch of openSUSE/SUSE folks. It was a lot of fun and we even managed to get some work done during the event. So how was it?

Everybody probably already knows, that openSUSE 12.3 is going to be released this Wednesday. I’m currently in SUSE offices in Nuremberg, helping to polish last bits and pieces for the upcoming release. But more importantly, as every release, we need to celebrate it! And this time, due to the lucky circumstances, I’ll be here for Nuremberg release party!

Nuremberg release party will take place the same day as release at Artefakt, in Nuremberg’s city centre from 19:00 (local time, of course). It’s an open event so everybody is welcomed.

openSUSE 12.3 is getting closer and closer and probably one of the last changes I pushed for MySQL was switching the default MySQL implementation. So in openSUSE 12.3 we will have MariaDB as a default.

If you are following what is going on in openSUSE in regards to MySQL, you probably already know, that we started shipping MariaDB together with openSUSE starting with version 11.3 back in 2010. It is now almost three years since we started providing it. There were some little issues on the way to resolve all conflicts and to make everything work nicely together. But I believe we polished everything and smoothed all rough edges. And now everything is working nice and fine, so it’s time to change something, isn’t it? 😀 So let’s take a look of the change I made…

Last Thursday we had GPG Key & CAcert Signing party at SUSE office inviting anybody who wants to get his key signed. I would say, that it went quite well, we had about 20 people showing up, we had some fun, and we now trust each other some more!

GPG Key Signing

We started with GPG key signing. You know, the ussual stuff. Two rows moving against each other, people exchanging paper slips…

Last week I posted a survey about openSUSE Connect. Although some answers are still coming and you are still welcome to provide more feedback, let’s take a look at some results. Some numbers first. openSUSE Connect is not really busy website, it gets about 80 different visitors per day. Not much, but not a total wasteland. Related to this number is another one. More than half of the people responding in the survey have never ever heard about openSUSE Connect. So it sounds like we should speak about it more…

You might remember that in our team (openSUSE Boosters), we created openSUSE Connect some time ago. It was meant as replacement for users.opensuse.org that nobody knew about and nobody used. We hoped that it will attract more users and that it will be more user friendly way, how to manage personal data. Apart from that, we wanted to include more interesting widgets so it can become your landing page for all your efforts in openSUSE project. With that regards we created bugzilla widget, fate widget, build status widget and some more. We hoped that it would make difference and help people and that they will enjoy using the new site. During this summer my GSoC student created amazing Karma widget as well to make it more fun. And as Connect has been some time already in function, it’s now time to collect some feedback. Did it work? Do you like it? Or did it become just a wasteland? Do you think such a site make sense?

Almost two weeks ago, during the weekend, I was in Sankt Augustin to attend FrOSCon. Originally I didn’t planned to go as it is quite far from Prague and I was freshly back from vacation (and therefore quite without money). But I was asked by Sirko to give there a talk about Open Build Service and to participate in cross-distribution packaging workshop. Hard to refuse such an invitation. As the money was the only issue that was keeping me from participating, I decided to ask openSUSE Travel Support committee whether they would be willing to sponsor me. It was my first experience, but it turned out great and thanks to them, I was able to go to the event, speak about great things we have at openSUSE and have a lot of fun! My big thanks to them!