Friday, July 1, 2011

TheHackerspace opening: When Great things happen

 I rarely envy people, one of the times I did it was when some guys from Athens announced the creation of a Hackerspace there. I also envied them wen i saw that they started making good work and organizing well. After that I heard about the creation of P-space at Patras and I thought that it was only a mater of time for some people to make something similar to my City.



 A few weeks ago I heard that Efstathios Hatzikyriakidis along with Stavros Kalapothas and Stergios Kalamopoulos where starting a local Hackerspace. I knew Efstathios and he had helped me on the past when I once sent him an e-mail because I wanted some help for Arduino. He was very helpful back then and in a way he had earned my trust.

  So yesterday it was The-Hackerspace opening, and it was an open invitation for everyone to attend and have a talk about our City's Hackerspace. Almost 30 people where there, all curious and all genuine interesting (at least from what I can tell) for it. We had very interesting talks while waiting for the organizers to present us their ideas about the-Hackerspace and you could find all kind of people among us, from hackers to Window users.

At a certain point the people that gathered us all there got our attention and started presenting us their way of thinking of how they would like  the-Hackerspace to work. I was amazed. Their ideas were (are) progressive but at the same time doable. I admit that it was far from what I expected to see in a good way. From what I saw and from the talk we had after their short presentation, other people had the same opinion with me. After that we had a cake and a few hours later we left with the best impressions.

If you are from Thesssaloniki or from a city near there is no excuse for not at least make a visit there. You can find more information about the location of the-Hackespace at http://the-hackerspace.org/location/.

In a city that Great things rarely happen, the-Hackerspace is something at least innovating and it surely deserves our attention and support.

Thursday, June 30, 2011

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

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

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