a_jaeger's blog

We have just announced the release of the first release candidate of openSUSE 10.3.
RC1 is now available to download via software.openSUSE.org/developer.

Call for Testing

If you want to help testing our standard test cases, please coordinate with others and subscribe to opensuse-testing@opensuse.org (subscribe)! I'd like to do a special call for testing our update stack. Besides the installation itself, updating packages is one of the most important criteria so that we can deliver fixes and you can install software. Some test cases are available at http://en.opensuse.org/Libzypp/Testsuite. Please also use the updates we're going to put on our update server. You can install packages and updates with the YaST Qt and Gtk packager modules, with the opensuse-updater applets for GNOME and KDE and additionally with the command line tool zypper.

Thanks,

Andreas

Andrew Morton has spoken at different occasions about testing of the Linux kernel and asked users to test the current development version and report their findings.  For our openSUSE releases we have in general a frozen version and add only fixes for bugs that are encountered during testing - but stay with the same version for the lifetime of a release.

With our openSUSE Build Service we build a daily kernel, where we take the current upstream development kernel without any patches (besides those we need for building a RPM).  We do call this the vanilla kernel. It can be downloaded from:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Kernel:/Vanilla/SUSE_Factory/

Btw. if you test the vanilla kernel, report any problems to the Linux kernel mailing list (for details check the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/) and not to the openSUSE bugzilla.

On the http://news.opensuse.org website, you can now find interviews of openSUSE community members. The first interviews are of:

• Pascal Bleser, known especially for the Guru repository of packages,
• Stephan Kulow, the current project manager for the openSUSE distribution
• Francis Giannaros, who organized the bug slashing weekend and launched openSUSE-Community.org.

I suggest to read their interviews! We will publish more interview, all of them will be available on the openSUSE news site.

If anybody likes to help with doing the interviews, please speak up on the opensuse-project mailing list.

I'd like to say a big thank you to Anica for designing and conducting the interviews and to Stephan for integrating them nicely into our site.

Coolo as new project manager for the openSUSE distribution has released the first beta of openSUSE 10.3. Today he released the LiveCDs as well.

There are many exciting enhancements and features in the new release. Among these are a whole new and greatly improved package management stack (libzypp), significantly faster boot time, parts of KDE 4, a 1-CD KDE Install and a 1-CD GNOME install, beautiful green artwork, a new One-Click Install technology that integrates with the openSUSE Build Service and much more.

To download the media, go to our new download page at http://software.opensuse.org/developer.

For details, see the longer entry on http://news.opensuse.org.

This weekend is an openSUSE bug slashing (for details check this article). The goal was to fix and reduce the number of open bug reports. I checked the number of bugs on friday evening and compared to now, the number of bugs waiting for information (in NEEDINFO) has been reduced by 20 per cent while the number of open bugs (NEW and ASSIGNED) did not change much. The reason is that the weekend has turned also in a bug reporting weekend since openSUSE 10.3 Beta1 has been released last week. So, some are fixing bugs, merge duplicates and others create new ones. I do think it's a success and would like to thank all that participate!

If you still like to join, show up on the # opensuse-bugs channel at irc.freenode.org.

Today I've announced the new openSUSE news portal. This news portal will provide the latest openSUSE news. We will continue to send important announcements to the opensuse-announce mailing list, but they should also be added to this site as well - and the site will get further entries from the openSUSE community!

We also have a calendar (with .ical) for events and other important openSUSE events.

Looking forward to see you at http://news.opensuse.org