openSUSE Summer Camp Greece 2011

Summer in Greece! Is the weather too hot for you to code or contribute to your favorite FOSS project? Do you need some motivation and a refreshing swim? Come to our Summer Camp!
The Greek openSUSE community is organizing its first openSUSE Summer Camp, in central Greece at Grand Platon Hotel at Olympiaki akti. This is is the beach of the city of Katerini. The doors will be open from the 15th to the 17th of July 2011, at the Heart of Summer!

Sounds awesome, I’ll book my tickets.

So, you’ll be there. What can you expect?
Our goal is to bring FOSS communities closer and encourage people to contribute to their favorite projects.
A lot of people, with little to a lot of experience can benefit from the workshops included in our program, during which we will work on things like translation, wiki usage, coding, packaging and much more, showing how to work inside a community and how to collaborate with others!

Hmmm. But I could go swimming…

There will be relaxing and swimming of course! But hey, we have a common passion, don’t we?
We love what we do, we are having fun contributing to FOSS and we hate doing it alone in our rooms during Summer time. Besides coding, translating and all other ‘working stuff’ there will also be plenty of sun and beach, a large swimming pool and plenty of beers – all paid by you since we only sponsor the sun, the fun and all the other free stuff…
We are looking forward to seeing you at the openSUSE Summer Camp Greece!
Please use info@os-el.gr to contact the team organizing the event.

openSUSE strategy voting close to the finish line!

As we wrote three weeks ago, June 30th is the deadline for voting for the openSUSE Strategy!

Relevance

2 years ago the subject came up at the openSUSE conference: what do we want? That is not a simple question. We are a large community with wide-ranging diverse backgrounds, goals and interests.
Having a coherent answer matters: it shows potential new contributors what they can (although not limited) contribute to; it helps us make decisions. Do we focus on fancy web stuff? Do we go for a stable or more experimental product? Do we simplify at all costs or cater to more advanced users? These and more are questions brought up in our strategy discussion.

Discussion

It took a long time – we are an open community and as such, strategic discussions take time. However, we went through the effort. Lots of input came from a variety of people – each iteration had sometimes over a hundred comments. You can view some of the although you should notice that co-ment is just one of the ways we collected feedback (others being the mailing lists, IRC, forums and more).

Serious

While the current proposal is not meant to be limiting new directions or will be forever set in stone, it is meant to provide clarity to our community for the time being. So we do want it to be taken seriously. We develop major software products promoting open source and the use of Linux world wide. We’re a major Linux distribution, the second largest by most metrics. We provide a packaging build service that is used by distributions more than just openSUSE.  We have an obligation to deliver a consistent, quality product to our users. And to provide an open and fun place to be around for contributors. We can’t satisfy every need to the fullest, but what we can do is make clear what we are trying to do here.
Providing that clarity to our users and contributors through this strategy is a major step towards our future. So, we need our membership to vote. To make your voice heard and to know if it truly has the support it needs.
So, if you’re an openSUSE Member, go, read the document one more time and cast your vote!


Source

openSUSE releases milestone 2

About 3 weeks after the first milestone for openSUSE 12.1, today the second milestone has been made available. Following the Roadmap, this is the second of 6 milestone until the openSUSE 12.1 release in November.

Milestones

openSUSE is developed in a repository called Factory. Packages flow from the devel projects into Factory upon OK from the release team following the Factory Development Model. During the development cycle (more detailed model) periodic releases are made available for testing – these are the milestones. Six of them become available. After some several freezes go into effect, the component freeze just before the fourth milestone for instance. And about a couple of weeks after the last milestone the first of two Release Candidates is made ready for testing. The final openSUSE 12.1 release is expected on November 11th.

Progress since the previous milestone

The first milestone had a huge number of changes and improvements on top of the latest openSUSE release. Again, many packages have been updated. You can check the latest package versions on this page. What are the major changes?

• Firefox 5 RC
• Horde4 packages (php5-pear-horde)
• “The Board”
• rawstudio
• llvm/clang 3.0 snapshot
• many smaller updates to KDE and GNOME applications and desktops

Also nspluginwrapper is now updated which will allow a more stable Flash plugin on 64bit platforms. With this change you can now watch two flash videos at the same time. And over 100 new packages have been added, including extensions for Banshee, some small tools like DDS2tar and brainfuck interpreter, Cdecl (turns C/C++ gibberish into English), cint (small C/C++ interpreter) and a number of other devel and language tools.

systemd

On the openSUSE project and factory mailing lists a discussion is taking place centered around the new systemd init system. After the introduction of the road to systemd for openSUSE 12.1 by Frederic Crozat, issues, complaints and limitations of systemd are being discussed and dissected. Changing an init system is an invasive change and systemd has ambitions beyond just replacing sysV not everyone always agrees with. Work will be needed to ensure a stable and usable init system for 12.1 and the team welcomes help and bugreports!

Helping out easier than ever!

As expected from a development release, there is still a lot of work to do, so your input at this early stage will be a huge help in making the final release into the beautifully polished work that we aim for. openSUSE 12.1 Milestone 2 has a list of most annoying bugs here, please add issues you find and help fix them. As Will Stephenson recently blogged, fixing an issue is a matter of BURPing on build.opensuse.org! Find a how-to here.
So go and see for yourself what the next version of openSUSE has in store for you at our download center.

By  Jos Poortvliet
Source  

1ο openSUSE collaboration weekend camp

Ο καιρός έχει ζεστάνει για τα καλά και ήρθε λοιπόν η ώρα να κανονίσουμε

...τις καλοκαιρινές μας εξορμήσεις!

Για φέτος είχαμε μια πολύ ενδιαφέρουσα ιδέα...

Σκεφτήκαμε να κάνουμε κάτι διαφορετικό!

“Μια εκδρομούλα που θα συνδυάζει παραλία με ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ!”

Έτσι λοιπόν θα μαζευτούμε όλοι μαζί δίπλα στη θάλασσα για να παρακολουθήσουμε διάφορα workshops (μην ξεχάσετε να φέρετε τα laptop σας!) και θα δουλέψουμε πάνω στα αγαπημένας μας project!

Μια συνάντηση που γίνεται από την κοινότητα... για την κοινότητα!

Δηλάδή τον κάθε έναν από  ΕΣΑΣ, με σκοπό... (εκτός από τα μπάνια) τη συνεργασία!

* Πότε;
   Το  Παρασκευοσαββατοκύριακο 15-16-17 Ιουλίου 2011!  

* Πού;
   Στο ξενοδοχείο Grand Platon Hotel ( http://www.grandplaton-hotel.gr/ ) στην Ολυμπιακή Ακτή στην παραλία Κατερίνης.   
   Λεπτομέρειες για το πώς να έρθετε μπορείτε να βρείτε στη σελίδα http://www.os-el.gr

* Ποιος;

  Η ελληνική κοινότητα openSUSE που διοργανώνει το 1ο openSUSE collaboration weekend camp, θα φροντίσει για την ομαλή ροή του προγράμματος, τον χώρο και τις λεπτομέρειες της διοργάνωσης.

 Απευθύνεται, όμως, σε όλους τους ανθρώπους του ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ, οι οποίοι μπορούν να συμμετέχουν καθώς και να πραγματοποιήσουν το δικό τους workshop!  

  Αν θέλετε να κάνετε κάποιο workshop δεν έχετε παρά να μας στείλετε email με μια σύντομη περιγραφή του, μέχρι και την Τετάρτη 6/7.  

* Γιατί να έρθω λοιπόν;

   Στόχος μας είναι να φέρουμε πιο κοντά τις κοινότητες, ενθαρρύνοντας έτσι τη συνεργασία, και να δουλέψουμε όλοι μαζί πάνω στα projects που μας ενδιαφέρουν, ενδυναμώνοντας την επικοινωνία ανάμεσα στα μέλη της ελληνικής κοινότητας ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ.  

Φυσικά δε θα λείψουν οι αμέτρητες βουτιές στη θάλασσα και οι άφθονες μπύρες!

Γιατί αγαπάμε αυτό που κάνουμε και περνάμε ωραία συνεισφέροντας στο ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ ακόμα και το καλοκαίρι!

Όσοι θέλετε να συμμετέχετε επικοινωνήστε μαζί μας για να δηλώσετε συμμετοχή ώστε να μπορέσουμε να οργανώσουμε καλύτερα τη διαθεσιμότητα των δωματίων!

Για περισσότερες πληροφορίες & δήλωση συμμετοχής:
 - Επικοινωνήστε μαζί μας στο info@os-el.gr ή
 - Μπείτε στο κανάλι μας #openSUSE-el στον IRC server Freenode.
Οδηγίες για το πως να συνδεθείτε στο irc μπορείτε να βρείτε εδώ: http://el.opensuse.org/SDB:XCHAT

Ελληνική κοινότητα Mageia

Το Madriva ήταν εξ' απ' ανέκαθεν μια από τις διανομές που μου άρεσαν ιδιαίτερα. Το φόρουμ τους, ήταν πολύ εξυπηρετικό και τα παιδιά εκεί βοηθούσαν αρκετά και ήταν ευγενικότατοι. Χτες μου ήρθε μια ειδοποίηση στο mail μου για την δημιουργία του νέου τους φόρουμ. Είναι ακόμη στην αρχή αλλά είμαι σίγουρος ότι θα πάει το ίδιο καλά. Κατέβασα το iso και το Σ/Κ θα το εγκαταστήσω για να το δοκιμάσω, σε καμία βδομάδα θα σας πω και τις εντυπώσεις μου, αν και είμαι πολύ θετικά προδιατεθειμένος με την συγκεκριμένη διανομή και με την δικτυακή κοινότητα.
Μπορείτε να βρείτε το φόρουμ της κοινότητας εδώ http://www.mageia-gr.org/forum/
Να ευχηθώ καλή τύχη στα παιδιά για την προσπάθεια τους και μακάρι να δούμε και κάτι παραπάνω από μια δικτυακή κοινότητα στο μέλλον.