There will be a lot going on in fall this year in Prague. There will be awesome cluster of four conferences! And as I’m somehow involved in all of them, I want to promote them a little bit as well. So what’s going on? There is openSUSE Conference coming to Prague. We were planning where to have it, how to do it and stuff like that. During the planning of this one and one new Czech one called LinuxDays, I took Jos with me to the LinuxDays conference meeting so we can discuss how can both conferences help each other. Meeting was really great and we ended up with deciding to merge both conferences! Have them both at the same time, same place and make them both even more awesome! We also had Theo with us, who was by that time thinking about organizing new conference for Gentoo people. So we throw in another conference! What is the result? During weekend from 20th October to 21st October, we will have four conferences at the same place! Gentoo miniconf, LinuxDays, openSUSE Conference and SUSE Labs conference! And the openSUSE/SUSE Labs one will continue even for two extra days 😉 I’m really looking forward to it, to see all these communities merge. And to have a lot of fun, on this surely awesome multiconference! We even have a common poster and landing page as you can see bellow 😉

If you are following news regarding openSUSE and MySQL, you probably already know, that we have both MySQL and MariaDB in openSUSE to allow users to choose what they want to use. And if these two options are not enough, we’ve got server:database repository with newest and greatest development versions of both and MySQL Cluster on to of that. I think all this is great and awesome, that we have all of that.

If you follow MySQL community at least as much as I do (browsing trough the planet from time to time), you know that some exciting milestones were reached both in Oracles MySQL and in MariaDB. And as I love bleeding edge software, you can try all these exciting things prepackaged in openSUSE 😉

Oracles MySQL

Let’s start with news from guys at Oracle. Recently they released new MySQL Cluster 7.2. Yes 7.2 is GA now. And you can find a lot of exiting info online about how fast it is! If you don’t believe benchmarks done by others, try it by yourself! We have it in server:database repository for all supported openSUSE versions, SLE and few other rpm based distributions. Just add the repository and install package mysql-cluster_72. Pretty easy, isn’t it? 😉 So if you have MySQL cluster and want to take advantage of the latest improvements, give it a try 😉

Last week on Friday we had a KDE 4.8 release party in Prague. It took us some time to organize everything, but in the end everything went well. For those of you who missed the party, little overview (and some photos, sorry, no cake left).

Even though it was a Prague release party, we spoke quite a lot in English as well. Why? Well most of our speakers don’t speak Czech (yet). Theo was one organizing the talks and inviting speakers and doing all important stuff around the party and he managed to get here Cornelius Schumacher and Jos Poortvliet to come. Both of them has a long history with KDE, so they were giving great talks. For example Jos spoke about 15 new KDE features in 5 minutes and Cornelius about how KDE evolved over the time from small project done by few people to the current state where many people from all over the world works on it. Talk by Jos was also important from other reaseon. People could bet how long will it take and three closest to the actual time have won plush geekos! In the end five minutes talk lasted eight minutes. Apart from famous foreign visitors, we had talks by Tomáš Chvátal about translations and LibreOffice KDE integration and Theo also had a talk which I unfortunatelly missed because I was fetching party attendees in the reception and getting them up through the lift.

You all probably heard about Ubuntu for Android, right? Ubuntu is very good in the marketing and they can do a lot of locomotion around everything. So what if you have Android, want to use Linux distribution and Ubuntu isn’t your cup of tee? You can use openSUSE of course! Let me show you how…

As you may already know, there are initiatives in openSUSE community to get our great openSUSE running even on non-mainstream architectures. I’m particularly interested into openSUSE on ARM but I’m rooting for our colleagues who are working on getting PPC support in openSUSE. Of course we are using OBS to do that and there is one minor think that you might not noticed yet. Anybody can build for these architectures!!! It is still slow, so don’t enable it just for every repo you have, but if you want to help us and contribute to our porting initiatives, this can help you, save you some time and can make it easier for you to contribute!

As every year, FOSDEM was great! I spend some time at our stand talking to the people, telling them how great openSUSE is. I visited several interesting talks and met a lot of people, quite some of them I no longer remember (sorry), but I took some business cards and notes from some interesting talks. Some talks I haven’t got enough space to sit and type, some were too interesting to take a notes 😀
If I try to summarize most interesting stuff, there is a lot of going on toward standardized ARM platform, things are slowly settling down and drivers are slowly getting where we need them. And many people are interested in ARMs. Hurray! Oh, and btw. I had a talk there about openSUSE on ARM 😉
I also learned a little bit about TCP MultiPath. Sounded quite interesting. Providing classic socket API and using classic TCP streams to make sure everything works on already existing applications/infrastructure and creating new awesome features at the same time. Great lightning talk.
And there was also talk and some discussion how to get average people more interested and involved. Sounded like a good plan and let’s see what will happen in few months.
Overall, I had a great time on FOSDEM and missed most of it in previous paragraph. But as after every FOSDEM, I’m full of ideas and I feel really great to be part of the open source world!