openSUSE Travel Support Program is on

Hi Geekos!
 I'm proud to announce the official kickoff of the openSUSE Travel Support Program. This program will provide openSUSE contributors with some financial support for traveling to conferences and events where they represent openSUSE.

The openSUSE Travel Support Program aims to support contributors representing openSUSE at events, conferences and hack-fests with their travel and hotel costs.


The Current Committee are:

* Kostas Koudaras (ambassador event planning)

* Izabel Valverde (finance & planning)

* Jos Poortvliet (advice & coordinating with SUSE)

Learn more about the openSUSE Travel Support Program at the wiki page we've created.

We look forward to doing this! If you have any questions, you can bring it up at the next openSUSE Project meeting (Wednesday 22) or email us directly.


Have Fun
Kostas 'Warlordfff' Koudaras

Amazing Google Code-In

Happy new year my reader, I wish 2012 to be a successful year for everyone. After many days sick in bed today I finally managed to do some work and review two tasks I had on hold(sorry guys), later I realized that students had completed 21 out of 24 task I had and I found that really impressive. Most of the tasks I had as a mentor where video tasks and translation tasks, basically things that will help newbies (and not only) to learn and do things easier with openSUSE. To be honest I never thought GCI would go so well and produced so high quality products but I have to say that things have changed a lot since I was a student and this was not so long ago ;-) .

I started along with the other 2 Stathis (Iosifidis and Agrapidis a.k.a Diamond_gr and Efagra), as they are GCI mentors too, to review the results of the work we got from it as a local community and so far it is quite amazing. Given the fact that the next few months we will try and improve the Greek wiki of openSUSE the GCI was so far a great help. 

I really hope most of the students will stay around and continue the amazing work they do if not openSUSE in FLOSS generally.

A dot in the map

I don't ever remembering suggesting a site but to be honest I rarely fall into sites that not many people know and worth mentioning, also most of the times I do, I am a bit bored on blog about it so I eventually never do ;-)

Today though it's different, I am taking a break from a presentation it was supposed to be ready...Well...Yesterday, but I am still looking for the right kittens photos to complete this presentation(...don't ask...). Anyway normally I would just watch a movie or something but I am a bit in a mood to blog and latelly I had too much on my plate and had no time to do it, so here I am.

Anyway a friend of mine, Efstathios Chatzikyriakidis had this briliant and simple idea, to make a map where people around the world would state their possition in the map and the OS they use. Some of you might find this useless but I find interesting the fact that I could see the preferance of people around me on what Open Source or Free Software they use and some of you might too. The site is called OSHACKERS and it is licenced under the GNU GPLv3 and if you are curious I would suggest to give it a look and why no register... 

openSUSE 12.1 RC2 installed

I was expecting RC2 for a week now since this was the deadline I had given myself in order to install 12.1. I am going to be honest, I was expecting problems and usually I wait for at least a month after the actual release date in order to install any distribution, I did that on 11.3 and on 11.4. I still don't consider myself an experienced Linux user but there was something in 12.1 one that made me trust my abilities and go on.

So I made coffee and started a clear installation. After the instalation finished I had a few problems but it was finally proven that all of the problems I had were PEBKAC problems and were solved due to the great patience people at the #opensuse-project and #opensuse-kde IRC channels showed with me.

I really got very impressed by 12.1, it is probably the fastest Linux Distribution I can remember I ever had,that systemd everybody are talking about and I still don't actually understand what it is seems to improved things a lot.
Stability was never really a problem on openSUSE and to be honest it is too soon to speak about that but I found no problems with that. Kernel 3.1 is working fine, nouveau driver worked just fine with my nvidia and there is no need to use a closed driver. KDE 4.7.2 is Great.
Generally I was impressed by 12.1 mostly because I was expecting to face some problems and I did not, either I am getting better, either openSUSE is coming again with another Great distribution made by the community to the community. What do you think?