European Wafaa

It's been a little over a month since the last update and as always there has been progress :-) First let's get some of the numbers out of the way, currently we have 4202 packages built successfully, with 120 failed which is leading to 582 unresolvable. Remember this is for a full openSUSE Factory (12.2) build. Not bad, but we still have a way to go if we want to have an ARM port ready for 12.2's release - yes that is our hope and intention. Some of those packages that have built successfully still need tweaking, as an example mkinitrd and perl-Bootloader.

There has also been a change to the internal native build farm. This was what had been set up with the sponsored hardware to do a parralel build of Factory to verify that QEMU was indeed doing the job properly. It was previously setup using an development OBS instance for speed and as a proof of concept really. The internal native ARM build farm has now been moved to the IBS, this is the internal production instance that is used to many of SUSE's products. One of the advantages is that is has very good performance including uptime and is pretty stable compared to the sometimes unstable development instance that was used.

One of the reasons for this move to be made possible is that the team working on the ARM port have been able to sufficiently show that it is possible to build almost the complete distro for the ARM architecture and that it is maintainable. It is still *NOT* an official port and as such there is no commitment to make it an official product, but (yes there's always a but :-) ) it is a good showing that we are sufficiently advanced and that there is little holding us back, including dropping the many dirty hacks that were put in place to get things going.

Other than the uptime and performance advantage, moving to IBS also allows other interested developers within SUSE's network to quickly check out builds, submit patches or debug things on native hardware. It is still requested that submissions are made against the delopment projects within OBS but this way people can test there submissions before they get pushed out.

Another of the advancements since last time is that we now have working Kiwi based images for both the Pandaboard and Efika MX Smartbooks/Smarttops. The Efika images even have working graphics and sound \o/ We are still working on ironing out the build failures which will clear the unresolvable backlog slowly but surely. there will still be some packages that need deeper fixes, but they shall be conquered.

It isn't all rosey though, that would be boring. Several things are still outstanding (apart from fixing packages), we still have no integration with the distribution and there are plenty of issues with hardware-near items, so we have plenty of work to do. Saying that though there are more people joining in the fray using not only hardware that we have but also using their own ARM hardware to get some of the latter fixed. Part of the issue with hardware-near components is the state of the ARM kernel, each SoC still needs its own kernel until Device Tree is ready. So we don't plan on sitting back and sleeping, but more help is always welcome ;-)

To enable wider access to building on ARM there are several initiatives underway, one of them is to wait for the new Cortex-A15 based SoCs which will have full hardware support for the likes of KVM; but that's still a few months away before the first boards are available so other options are being investigated. Once something has been found and works hopefully we can have native arm builds on the OBS, but as I said that is still on the horizon and is a mid term goal at the earliest.

Much of this would not have been possible without the very kind sponsorship of devices from Genesi, Pandaboard.org/Texas Instruments, ARM and the openSUSE community. Also the hard work of the many members of our community; I'm going to try and name a few here and it is by no means an exhaustive list of people - Alex Graf, Adrian Schroeter, Dirk Muller, Marcus Schaefer, Bernhard Wiedemann, Michal Hruseky, Joop Boonen, Andreas Farber, Reinhard Max, Uli Hecht, Matthias Eckermann, Torsten Duwe and Tomas Cech. We have also had a load of help from engineers of Genesi themselves, ST-Ericsson, Linaro and also we would not have been able to get so far without much of the work that Ubuntu, Mer and Fedora have done. On behalf of the wider openSUSE Community, thank you to all of you!

Actually, I love openSUSE :-)

It's been almost a month since the last ARM porting update so here's a little christmas present to you all.

Dirk Müller sent out a status update to the mailing list, but I thought it would be a good idea post here for you scoundrels that aren't subscribed :-)

Thanks to some great work by loads of people including (but not limited to) Alex Graf, Adrian Schröter, Dirk Müller, Marcus Schäfer, Joop Boonen openSUSE's ARM port has come along nicely.  We are now at about 4200 successful packages out of a total of around 4700 for a complete distro, an increase of roughly 700 packages.

There are some localised issues for ARM but they are much much fewer than before. As we are building against Factory we naturally are affected by Factory's occaisional desire to break for the sake of breaking, but again those breakages are realtively few.

Marcus has managed to get Kiwi support to build ARM images (with a patch or two from Joop); Kiwi can run on Pandaboards, and also generate suitable images for for Pandaboards – the other boards and devices will come later. Alex, Dirk and Adrian have been busy beavering away as usual with package fixes, improvements to qemu and general OBS tweaks; they have also got the internal ARM OBS instance into a great shape, this is distributed between the Nürnberg and Prague offices and the nodes comprise of EfikaMX, Pandaboard & Beagleboard. It basically builds factory in parrelel to the public OBS but generally is more successful due to running on native hardware, whereas the public instance uses qemu which sometimes doesn't want to play nicely in the playground; we (well OK Alex) can then look at getting a fix for qemu or we import the succesful package into the OBS can move on. I'm still battling with kernels for the Snowball, but I think I'm almost there.

One of the bigger issues we have is that there is no graphics support, if you think graphics issues on x86 based systems is a pain wait till you look at it on ARM! ;-) This is being worked on so it's just a matter of time, there are ways and means around it but they are far from elegant.

As everyone likes videos, Joop has created another great video showing openSUSE running on a Pandaboard (Joop uses one of those aforementioned ways & means to get graphics working) and Michal Hrušecký has a video showing openSUSE on his Asus Transformer Tablet (yes it's still in a chroot but look at that ncurses yummyness :-) )

Just to remind you that you will be able to see first hand some of the ARM porting goodness at FOSDEM in Febuary so make sure you come along ;-) Till the next update, have a fun and Geeko filled time

I am very pleased to announce that ARM Holdings has joined our current sponsors, by providing a pile of Texas instruments OMAP4430 powered Pandaboards and some Samsung Exynos4210 powered Origen boards! Many thanks to the fine folks in Cambridge for their most generous donation.

In addition to that, thanks to the community's donations, we have also obtained an ST-Ericsson Nova A9500 powered Snowball board. Huge thanks to everyone that has made this happen. I know we originally were aiming for Pandaboards, but we need to make sure we aren't leaving anyone out. Saying that we still need some more, so don't stop helping out (please).

We are cracking on with getting things working, and even have openSUSE running natively on a few devices, although there are some very rough edges at the moment.

Sorry that no news has been dished out with regards to the openSUSE ARM porting effort, but that's mostly because things have been busy (honest!)

For starters we have now successfully built around 3500 packages out of a total of about 4700 for the full openSUSE ditribution. So we are well on our way. It hasn't been easy going though, and we still have lots of hurdles, hoops and obstacles to overcome.

Alex Graf has been beavering away into the small wee hours getting among things lots of fixes into qemu to help with builds, fixing kernel builds that I and Adrian Schroeter created, and generally being an engineering machine.

As I mentioned Adrian Schroeter has been busy with creating as generic a kernel as possible to be used in the OBS with qemu. He has also been busy fixing packages in association with Dirk Mueller, Reinhard Max and others.

Joop Boonen built u-boot and submitted it into the relevant devel project. So we now have the means to properly boot an ARM based system.

I've been busy building hardware specific kernels, which I'm still learning how to do properly. As it stands we have kernels built for Freescale powered EfikaMXs, Texas Instruments powered Pandboards & Beagleboards, Nvidia powered Tegra2 devices (mainly Trimslice) and soon ST-Ericsson powered NovaThor devices like the Snowball.

Work is still on going, one really good thing is Kiwi support for ARM is being worked on. Marcus Schaefer has rolled his sleeves up and is attacking it with gusto, and making good progress. It is by no means a done deal, yet. It does show though how versatile openSUSE's toolsets are. Hopefully it won't be too long until we can get things working, and hey maybe even get those fine folks in SUSE Studio to add ARM as an architecture so that we can have highly customised ARM builds :-)

As I also mentioned, the kernels aren't perfect yet. So we still need to do more testing and fine tuning. One item that was identified (by Alex of course) was that we have an issue with unwinding. There is a "hack" identified to get things working but a proper fix is still being sought.

We also have some exception handling issues which prevents us from builing Java and Java related apps which in turn are preventing us from building a lot of the remaining 1200 or so packages. We do still have some packages that need fixing which don't require any of the exception crippled packages, so feel free to jump in ;-)

There are some areas that still need some love on ARM, like hwinfo and also our darling YaST. X drivers are also a bit of a grey area, actually they're more likely to be missing.

All in all we still have our work cut out for us, but we are making good progress.  I can't say when we will have working images for people to try, so don't ask; but trust me, I will make sure to let you all know when we do. I am hoping to have something working in time for FOSDEM and hopefully show it off there.

Just to give you an idea of what we are using the hardware that has been donated so far: EfikaMXs are currently employed natively building packages, one of the issues we have with qemu is that it can be tempremental at times and isn't suited really as a long term solution as it stands. So the EfikaMXs build all the the failed packages to make sure that qemu isn't at fault - we found a load of packages built, and as such were imported into the OBS to get things rolling on. They are also being used to help out with Kiwi support. Pandaboards are being used for testing and bug hunting mostly, but also for packaging. There is also one device of each type for kernel testing/tuning.

So if you're interested and aren't afraid of getting your hands dirty (or occaisionally burnt) do join in. Jump on IRC (#opensuse-arm on freenode) and let's have fun together.  Oh and don't forget this is a community effort and as such we still need a bit more funding to get some more devices.

For those that aren't subscribed to the openSUSE Project Mailinglist:

As was announced last month, the Board is looking for some new blood. As such I intend to run for one of the available seats. Yes people, your lovable FunkyPenguin is hoping to be able to represent you and all your crazy ideas (I've got some of those myself ;-) ).

I know of a few other candidates that are running, and they're fine upstanding folk of the openSUSE community. I believe you should think long and hard about who you would like to represent you.  The Board is in place for you, the community, and as such it is up to you to say whom you would like to represent you.

For those that don't know me: I'm known as FunkyPenguin on IRC, I often wear a kilt, I've been a contributor to openSUSE for at least five years and been a user for much much longer. As part of my contributions I was very active in the GNOME team, I helped to bring the now defunct MeeGo UI to openSUSE, and lately I'm helping to port openSUSE to ARM, as well as general packaging of bits and bobs.

I'm a fairly no-nonsense kind of chap, and I will say things as I see them (I will endeavour to ensure I take people's sensibilities into account too). I also like to believe I'm an approachable person, so if you want to speak to me off the grid then that's fine too, although I do prefer open communication.

So for now in the words of Porky Pig, that's all folks! I'll be speaking to you (and hopefully not at you) soon.

Andy

The big update is that a couple of kind companies have stepped up and sponsored some hardware for the effort to get openSUSE on ARM. Huge thank you to:

They have kindly sponsored and shipped several EfikaMX devices. Thanks to Peter Czanik for organising this on our behalf.

Ti in association with the PandaBoard community have kindly sponsored and are shipping several PandaBoards.

Thank you, this is a huge help.

Now that we have some devices on our way it doesn't mean we can sit back and relax, we still need more devices. Yes, I'm going to say it again - Please help the Geeko and donate as much or as little as you can (preferably not zero ;-) ).

So what else is new? Well openSUSE has managed to run on a couple of modern ARM devices. Joop Boonen managed to get openSUSE running on his PandaBoard. He even made a couple of videos:

First boot of openSUSE ARM port on Pandaboard

First Boot of a openSuSE ARM port on Pandaboard via monitor/keyboard and serial operation

Michal Hrušecký managed to get openSUSE running on his ASUS Transformer Tablet (albeit in a chroot), he has also provided information on how to do this yourself if you're feeling brave :)

We still don't have anything that we can release yet, as we are still working to fix packages. We are fighting forward and we will succeed!!

So HackWeek VII has been and gone, but work has not stopped in getting our beloved Geeko some ARMs.

Now I'll be the first to admit, things have been a wee bit scrappy in places. This isn't anyone's fault, it's just that we want to get things rolling ASAP. Thing is, we need more haste less speed; we need to be somewhat more concerted with our efforts. So instead of trying to get everything to build in one hit (would be great if that was possible), we are going to target patterns of packages.

With that in mind Joop Boonen was good enough to pull up a list of the packages required to build the Jeos pattern, I've added it to the wiki in a table to show the status of the required packages. If you would like to help out, look at the the Jeos Package List page and add your name in the column and when you submit a fix pop the SR number in too.

Once we have the Jeos list complete, we can then move on as each subsequent package set will build on this. Next up will be the Minimal X, after that we get onto the big bad boys of GNOME/KDE/LXDE/XFCE.

One item that is holding us back is hardware - we are encountering a whole heap of issues with Qemu, which takes time to resolve and as such takes time away from getting things working. So please help us out by donating as much or as little as you can to the effort.

As I mentioned before, we have an initial target platform identified for testing the work of all those involved in the openSUSE ARM port. The problem is we need to obtain the hardware.

I am in discussions trying to get some corporate sponsorship of hardware, but we can not rely soley on those kind companies that would like to see us succeed. We as a community need to help ourselves succeed, as such I've set up a campaign on Pledgie to enable us the community to contribute to the effort for obtaining hardware.

With these funds, we the community will be able to purchase 5 (maybe more) PandaBoards which will help developers fix packages and also test the port to ensure everything works. Until the new ARM based chipsets are released, which could be the middle of next year, we will also need a substantial number of boards to provide a decent enough amount of compute power for OBS to build natively.  OBS is great, but there are limitations with emulating the environment in Qemu. Having physical hardware will remove these limitations and enable us to prove that openSUSE is a world class ARM distirbution.

So please help us to help you, donate what you can so that we can reach our goal of €1,000.

I just sent this into the -arm mailing list.

This is a hot topic, and one that seems to generate the most noise.

I've had a discussion with several people about target hardware, and I've also looked at what our peers are doing and saying. At the same time I've been trying to see what options we have for getting some sponsorship for hardware.

There were three devices in the running, all are classed as development boards - so no case or external prettyness (beauty comes from within anyway):

TI PandaBoard
Samsung Origen
ST Ericsson Snowball

After discussing, the preferred nominee is the PandaBoard. Several factors led to this decision, it has an integrated wired network connection; is well supported by the incumbant distros; widely used within the wider ARM open source community; and it has Pandas (OK only in name but still!)

So if you want to prep and get some hardware, then go for the PandaBoard (as soon as the Cortex A15 is released, we'll be looking at them).

Yes, I know it's a developer board and not an end user product. Unfortunately there aren't actually that many end user products that you can sensibly use for development at the moment. Sure, there's the TrimSlice the DreamPlug and a few others, but after consulting someone that is far more knowledgable and aware of the wider landscape, we went with their recommendations.

Oh and things are moving pretty fast folk!! \o/

One of the things that came out of the recent Geeko Love-In for me was a new project to immerse myself in within openSUSE. Yeah I know, we have enough existing projects already so why create a new one? Simples! Believe it or not but openSUSE is behind the curve in a specific segment, and that segment has yet to explode to its full potential. That segment is ARM.

No I'm not talking about your upper body appendages, but the architecture that powers most of your little devices (and some bigger ones too). Almost all smartphones, tablets and many other consumer devices are powered by ARM from one of the numerous licensees.

Didn't openSUSE do something about this a while ago? Yes we did. Unfortunately the effort seems to have bitrotted somewhat, there were numerous reasons and I don't even prophesise to know the all either.

As such I'm going to try and kickstart things, and see it through and hopefully see it grow.  As I mentioned, this idea came up at the conference when I was talking to numerous people (I forget how it all started, but that doesn't really matter). There was an overwhelmingly positive view on the matter, and that for me was all that counts. Now let me be crystal clear here, *THIS WILL NOT BE A ONE MAN SHOW!!* I mentioned previously that my view is that we as a community are pretty lazy at times with getting our hands dirty. As such if you think things are going slow or not going in the direction you would like, don't moan. Get your hands dirty and help make a difference.

The process will not be an easy one either, so don't expect a port to magically appear over night. If we're lucky we might be able to have a working port in 6 months. Maybe longer, maybe shorter; ultimately that lies with us as a community. 

Stage one has begun already thanks to Adrian Schroeter, Alex Graf and Dirk Mueller. Stage one comprises of getting the boot strap process to work. At a cursory level this means getting the packages required for setting up a build chroot environment and for building these packages on the target ARM architecture. This will possibly take a fair amount of time, and no I won't give any timelines for this - how long is a piece of string?

openSUSE has a couple of advantages here, 1) we have the OBS which can cross build and if need be cross compile packages for numerous architectures (ARM included) so we are going to make a start with that; 2) SUSE are going to be doing another HackWeek (I think it is next week) which means Adrian, Alex, Dirk and anyone else that has knowledge, experience or interest can join in the fun and pain almost full time for a week - let's not kid ourselves here there is a high probability for lots of pain, but also fun ;-) Thing is HackWeek is not just for SUSE staff, it is also for the community. You can join in and spend some quality time on the project with those that know a whole heap of stuff, and learn from them and maybe even teach them something too.

We are going to be targeting ARMv7 nothing older I'm afraid this means CORTEX-A8 and above (looking at A9 primarily and then the new A15 when it's available), it gets too messy otherwise and it is already messy enough.If you have knowledge and experience, please help out. If you don't take part you have no justification to complain - you've got to be in it to win it ;-)

So I'm basically just giving you all a heads up on this effort, and will update you as regularily as possible (I'm hoping to do something weekly maybe). In the meantime, if you're interested join #opensuse-arm on Freenode and the opensuse-arm mailing list. *DO NOT HARRASS* for updates, if there is something to say it will be said. If you've got a question, ask and *WAIT* for an answer. If you want to help out but want to know how ask and *WAIT* for an answer. I will try and get something on the wiki soon, with a todo list etc.

Thanks and here's to getting our Geeko some ARMs.

Unfortunately the good times have come to an end, one of the best shindig in a long time has been and gone. Friends from far away have returned home, as have I.

Yes, the openSUSE Conference of 2011 was an absolute blast. Seriously, I had an absolute scream. As I mentioned before I was expecting a whole heap of fun, and boy did the Geeko deliver!!!

I met up with all sorts of people, starting off with Richard Brown a.k.a. Ilmehtar at Gatwick airport (I didn't actually realised that Richard was Ilmehtar until about day 1 or 2 of the conference), oh and Michael Meeks. We pitched up at the hotel, checked in, dumped our bags and went straight to the venue to help sort stuff out.

Well, we didn't have to do much sorting out as those Thirsty Thirteen (you may know them as the Fabulous Booster Boys) had turned the derilect building into a fantastic conference venue. Not entirely on their own, they did have some help from a bunch of Greeks, some Swiss and some stray Brazilian (love you Izabel ;-) ).

Whilst catching up with some of the folk that were there on the Saturday, I got one of the best surprises that the Geeko could give me - I met up with a bunch of guys from Taiwan. Why would meeting a bunch of Taiwanese be so cool? Simples! These were some of the super heros that helped me fix, patch, kick and roll out Smeegol. With out their help and encouragement I doubt I would have survived. They are a cool and crazy  bunch of guys, and I am SO happy to have met them in the flesh.

Another great thing about the conference was the crate load of Old Toad, openSUSE's own beer. Not only did I drink plenty, but *everyone* drank plenty. The beer wasn't given away, near enough but not quite - each beer was €1 which goes back into the geeko bank to help finance future community efforts. I've no idea on how much was generated but I'm confident that we smashed through a four figure sum :). The only touristy thing I did this year was take a little tour with Uncle Klaas (dragotin to his fellow geekos), and about 20 or so other like minded thirsty Geekos. Uncle Klaas took us to the home of Old Toad, and got us a tour of the lovely little brewery that helped make the fine beverage. We sampled some fine beers (yes Pascal, they were actually pretty good even in comparison to the holy belgian fluid ;-) ), followed by some great food and as always we had excellent company.

The conference itself had some good talks, some of them were very technical, some of them struck a good balance, and others were totally non-technical - all in all a great mix, something for everyone. I'd just like to thank all the SUSE Labs guys and gals for joining us and making it one big happy family :-) I've always thought of the Labs folk as kind of 'Black Ops' sorta people, you know the type - "oh I could tell you what I do but then I'd have to kill you". This couldn't be further from the truth. Well, not that close at least :-P  Sure they're clever peeps, but they're also very human and lovers of all Geekos. Next time you see one of them, take a leaf out of Jos' or Pavol's book and give them a hug - you may need to ask first as they may think you're trying to steal their latest crazy idea ;-)

Let's see did I forget any other fun bits? Oh, I did indeed. There was the Conference evening party, where we had a fine specimen of a beast (sorry Henne but that mechanical bull was hawt!!). The outside seating area was partially transformed into a Western style ranch with poker tables, and yes a mechanical bull - I believe the night's record was for 71seconds or so. The food was great, and I'd like to thank the local butcher/caterers for some great grub.

That's not all, I also had the pleasure of attending Michael Willmer's keynote. For those that don't know Michael is the 'VP of Marketing and Global Alliances' at SUSE. He's an Attachmate veteran, and he's a suit. BUT... And it's a pretty huge but. He's no ordinary suit, seriously. This is not properganda, it's not marketing fluff. It is my own personal take on things. For a senior suit, the man turned up wearing his openSUSE t-shirt. He fired up his laptop and low and behold he's running GNOME-shell, sure it was in fallback mode but he is clearly not scared of cuts and bruises from software. He started his presentation and oh look, he's not using LO or any other presentation software, no PDF. He created his presentation in Inkscape with the Sozi plugin, and used Chromium as the actual tool to display it all. Just to remind you, Michael Miller is a senior suit at a large US corporation, yeah it's kinda tough to connect the two but this is the one and the same. He mingled with the crowd of Geekos afterwards and came back the next day for more Geeko love - oh and the obligatory ear bending from some people (not me, honest). I'm sure the roses will fade, but I'm quietly confident that there will be more positive than negative from now on. I'm not saying there wont be any rubbish, there will always be rubbish, just that the amount will be less and how it is handled will hopefully be better.

Yes, I thoroughly loved the conference this year. It was genuinely openSUSE's conference as the hard work was done by openSUSE not by corporate drones.  Nothing was dictated, it was decided. I seriously can't thank the Boosters enough for their hard physical labour. I'd also like to thank the conference teams, like those accepting submissions for sessions and the travel sponsorship committee. Also I'd also like to thank Alexia for tirelessly manning the bar dealing with weird reprobates. I'd like to thank Jillian and Katie for interpreting for Bryen. These two women aren't technical, although they kind of know some of the jargon and acronyms, they didn't really understand what they meant. Never the less the did a fine job in interpreting all the Geeko love for Bryen to fully enjoy. Oh and Coolo learnt a new thing from them too :)

I could end my ramblings on a high, but that wouldn't be cricket now ;-) So what was wrong? The simplest thing - PRINT PEOPLE'S IRC NICKNAMES WITH THEIR NAMES ON THE BADGES!!! Seriosuly, this is something that has been asked for at each conference. Kindly do it for the next one, please. That's an easy fix, the next one isn't so easy. We have a great and vibrant community. we have lots of clever people (yes, we do also have some stupid people), problem is we don't interact well with speakers and presenters. Seriously, we suck in that respect. I'm not saying I want to see and hear hecklers at the next conference, but if a presenter asks for audience participation bloddy well participate!!!!!

Now I know this post is a bit dry on eye candy, but I genuinely didn't many photos, and those that I did take were utter rubbish. So I shall link so some other Geeko's photos instead:

Max Lin's Album

Pascal Blesser's Album

Bo Maryniuk's Album

Andreas Jaeger's Album

Bruno Friedman's Album

I was asked the other day "What do you expect from the openSUSE Conference?" The simple answer is I only expect to have fun. Seriously, I expect nothing more, nothing less. I hope for a whole lot more, but I certainly don't expect it.

This may sound somewhat silly, but in all honesty that's how I feel. This conference (as are most others) is a great way to meet the people you interact with online,  there's something satisfying to be able to replace the digital person with a real flesh and blood person. You can thank someone in a real sincere way with a gift (could be a pint or something else) or slap them and let your anger out. Digital is pretty good, but having the physical is always better once in a while :-D

So if I take the original question and rephrase it to "What do you hope for from the openSUSE Conference?" then my answer at least for this year would be something along these lines:

* Learn more about some of the technology that powers openSUSE and that openSUSE provides - for me this is predominantly the sessions on Packaging and KVM but there are so many I'm not sure I'll be able to get to them all

* Make some new friends. This might sound a bit sad, but let's be honest these events beat the crap out of any social network whether it's Facebook, Google+ or Twitter.

* As this year includes the SUSE Labs guys & gals, I'm hoping to speak to several SUSE folk about ways to expand SUSE within my employer. We have numerous new initiatives that hopefully can be of benefit to both parties

* I've got a published session on the 5Ws of openSUSE contribution, which I'm looking forward to seeing the audience get involved with.  I'm also going to hold a BoF on Bongo's WebUI and as I'm about as artistic as a fart in a space suit I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of it.

At the end of the day the conference is what you make of it, so if you want a great conference come along and in the words of some futuristic Frenchman "Make it so!"

I'm going to be holding a Bof at the openSUSE Conference all about the 5 Ws of contributing to openSUSE. WTF is it about? Well I'm glad you asked (I don't care if you didn't ask, because I'm going to tell you anyway ;-) )

My intention is to have as interactive a session possible, I will take on the role of compère and with audience participation I will try and highlight where we have issues both as a project and as a contributor and try and get to some form of resolution even if it is just a plan not an actual fix.

So what on earth are the 5 Ws? Well they are Who (would contribute), Why (they would contribute), hoW (they can contribute), What (they would contribute), Where (they would contribute). I would also like to talk about the tools that are available for contribution and how they can be improved.

The key factor to this BoF session is audience participation, with out you the community it will be pointless. I want to see old hands and new blood at the session, and be honest. If you have a grievence then air it, if you feel there is a blocker let us know. Conversly if you think something is done right let us know, we are too proud a project & community to give ourselves credit. Everyone needs a bit of a pat on the back once in a while ;-)

So please come along and join in the discussion :-)

Yay openSUSE is having a shindig in September, yes it's the openSUSE Conference 2011 (aka oSC11). And seeing as the theme is rwx³ I've submitted a couple of BoF propossals.  Now they haven't been approved yet, so I'm not 100% sure they'll happen but either way I'll be there and will be keen to talk to anyone that is interested.

The first topic I'd like to talk about is as the post's subject says "Designing the missing Web UI for Bongo".

For un-aware the Bongo is an e-mail & calendaring solution that can trace its roots back to Netmail. It is directly descended from Hula, which was a proof of concept email & calendaring solution which had such luminary hackers such as Dave Camp, Peter Teichman, Nat Friedman, Garrett Le Sage and many others.  Unfortunately due to commercial and other management decisions Hula was terminated. Yes it was honestly cool, and as a PoC it actually worked. Thankfully it was an open source project and was forked just before the door was closed, into the Bongo project. As part of the code clean up and ongoing development the existing UI had to be dropped due to code complexity, size and lack of resources for maintaining it. Which leads us to where we are now.

What we have now is a MTA backend that can be distributed over multiple servers or combined on a single machine. It's pretty light weight and works. We support the usual protocols, so IMAP (with or without TLS/SSL), POP3, SMTP (currently we've had to disable outgoing TLS/SSL due to a bug), CalDAV (albeit in a simple form), anti-virus support for clamav, and anti-spam support with spamassassin. So the foundation blocks are there in place, all we're missing is the shiny frontend beauty.

Just to be clear Bongo is not aimed at the "Groupware" market, so it isn't aiming to compete with the likes of Zimbra, Exchange, Domino, GroupWise, OpenXchange etc. It is aimed at those that don't require the bloat that comes with those big products, those that want a simple clean way to deal with e-mail and calendaring. A competitor could be viewed as Gmail+Google Calendar, but self hosted at home/office or hosted as a service. Target audience I suppose could be viewed as individuals/families; SOHO that don't need the bloat or intricate understanding of servers like postfix or sendmail with dovecot or similar; educational facilities - you get the picture.

As I mentioned we have a fairly stable backend that provides email and calendaring, but the only way of interfacing with it is via a fat client (evolution, thunderbird, kmail, etc) - I use it at home. What we need is a way of getting to it via a browser. The aim of my BoF proposal is to discuss ways of meeting that requirement, what technologies could and maybe should be used, going through pros & cons and getting people interested in e-mail & calendaring and web design involved.

As a project we have some ideas on technologies used, but at the end of the day this whole web joojoo is kind of out of developer's field, so if one of you hipster hackers has a better idea and implements it then who are we to argue ;-) As an example we kind of like the idea of HTML5 but we don't have to be limited to that, at the end of the day we want a clean simple and functional UI - both user and admin. We have a blank canvas so anything goes.

As Bongo can be a distributed solution it would also be great if the Web UI could be re-used in a way similar to Roundcube or Squirrelmail, Meaning you could use it as a generic web based MUA hooking into almost any mail server. This isn't mandatory but a "would be nice to have" type feature. Initially we would be looking at something that provides core functionality - email, calendaring & contacts - but can be extended via a plugin system maybe. Again that's just a thought.

Hopefully we can get some real traction going and maybe after the BoF we can start to do some hacking on it :-) It would be absolutely awesome if by the end of the conference we had the beginings of a beautiful product.

So please register for the conference and join in the fun.

So word from the new Big Cheese, Herr Braukmann, is openSUSE is vital to SUSE - newsflash, this isn't new or surprising ;-) In the same breath SUSE is vital for openSUSE, again nothing new here. One problem though, there are many elements that still see them as void of each other and don't trust or believe in the community.  Hopefully with the re-organisation this will start to change.

One thing that SUSE has marketed for a long time is that it has the highest number of ISV software certified to run on their platform. Great! One question though - how as an openSUSE user can we help/benefit from this huge number of applications? Well most of the time if you want to use that software you have to build it from source with somewhat outdated documentation, and for the rest of the time you just plain can't use it as they don't make things easy.

Yeah, I know life would be boring if it was easy. But does it need to be this difficult?! In a word - NO. Let's not forget, we have the spiffy knock your socks off Open Build Service, so why not get them built in there and share the love for all?

Well the ISV may not want freeloaders using their products, they want money so naturally want you to buy the product. That washes for some ISVs, but not all. There are many that have a Community Edition or similar, which is ideal for us.

Why would openSUSE users want any of that bloated corporate rubbish? Well I would like easy access to some of it for testing and maybe even using.  Officially SLES is my employer's preferred distro, so being able to quickly and easily knock up a test instance would be great.  Also it works to the ISV's advantage, they get exposure. Most geeks are curious, and if they professionally have to deal with Linux they tend to be very curious. If a new product comes out that plays buzzword bingo, a CTO or similar will want the new shiny, so as responsible geeks it's our duty to be able to slap the suit back down and tell him the real truth about the product.

I would love to see packages from the likes of Alfresco, OpenBravo, Zimbra etc. available for us to use and test. So any chance some of the SUSE suits that deal with ISVs can help out?  Many of these products leverage Tomcat, and my packaging skills with the cat aren't that good (actually almost non-existant :-) ).

This is an area where we lack and one of our competitors spanks us - Ubuntu has a partner repository that enables many of these types of productsto be installed by users. We must match this, and then once we have matched it we must better it. We don't want to be spanked, we want to spank others!! (the spanking thing worked in my head, so I'm going with it :-) )

So any chance of any help from anyone?!

Just a quick post to enlighten those that use an Intel 945GME powered machine of a certain pixel limitation that you may not know about.

I'm a full time user of the spiffy new GNOME3 with the fancy gnome-shell mojo. As such it's on my primary machine, which at the moment is an eeePC 1000HE. Yup, that's a netbook with a small 10" screen and relatively low resolution of 1024x600 pixels.  As I'm sat at my desk I thought I would use my 17" Dell LCD monitor. So I plugged it in and selected 'System Settings>Displays' Without any issue it saw my external monitor and allowed me to enable it. I chose not to mirror displays as I'd like to take advantage of the larger screen.

POOF!! :-(

My CPU was getting spanked by gnome-shell, everything was grinding to a halt. I tried logging out and back in, but still my CPU was being pummeled. I tried rebooting, but that didn't change the hammering that my poor Atom was getting.

I asked the resident crazy Frenchman, no not Vincent but his compatriot in crime, Frederic. He wasn't sure if it was a bug or not, so advised to ask in #gnome-shell on IRC.

Off I clicked to IRC, and pretty much as soon as I asked my question - I had an answer from about three people; and they were all useful responses. Thankfully Emmanuelle gave me the clear answer:

The 945GME can only push a maximum of 2048x2048 pixels, so my setup was just too many pixels for it - 1024x600 + 1280x1024 = 2308x1624. Either I mirror my displays; lower the resolution on my external monitor; or disable the internal display (this is what I've chosen for now).

So there you have it, the Intel 945GME has a limit of 2048x2048 pixels. No maybes, ifs, or buts.

Some people may have noticed that I've been fairly quiet on the Geeko front, this has been mainly down to an insane amount of work but also some other bits and bobs.

Some of those bits and bobs are a result of my mind running away with me, I like to believe that I'm a good thinker, some people say I'm a daydreamer, others say I have an over active imagination. Personally I reckon they're all correct :-D 

This has a downside though of loosing focus.  If I was a business I would be bust or very close to going bust, as I no longer have sight of my core product and am trying to enter new markets with half hearted products that aren't of any use to anybody. So something has to change, and as such I'm looking at trying to calm down and regain focus.

Previously focus wasn't that difficult – after all I was charging around getting dear old Smeegol out. That was no simple task and was hugely enjoyable even though many things would really tick me off.  My pet project that I intended on doing was that little bit too crazy even for me, mainly because my C++ and Android knowledge isn't up to the task, no development experience of LibreOffice and not a huge amount f spare time.  As such I'm not going to be going forward with this.  Luckily thanks to those kind folk at Google, LibreOffice has been accepted into GSOC and I believe this is one of the projects that will be mentored.

I was also looking at getting MeeGo's new Tablet UI built on openSUSE, unfortunately I don't really have the heart at the moment for this for some reason, and I'm not entirely sure I'm prepared for the massive amounts of pain involved.  Oh, and as a minor item I don't have any hardware to dogfood with. So I'm shelving this idea too.

I'm going to try and go back to roots, which means chipping in and helping out with the GNOME team, after all we can't have it dominated by the French and Swiss now can we?  I am also lucky enough to be a co-mentor for GSOC in getting Entomologist better.  So this is something that I'm looking forward to – hopefully I get to slowly and comfortably get better with Android and C++ ;-) I also want to try and blog a bit more. I was hoping to be able to do some items as part of my job around Spacewalk and other bits, but unfortunately this hasn't materialised :-(  

So I'm going to try and focus any spare time on these two items, if anyone sees me do otherwise please slap me and remind me what it is I'm supposed to be doing.

I previously enlightened people to entomologist and also showed an image or two of it running on Android. Well now's the time to get your funk on and help test, file bugs and generally make it better.

You can download entomologist from the Android Market, or if you don't have access to the Market you can grab the .apk. When you launch it for the first time it checks to see if you have the required Qt libraries, if not it will ask you to install Ministro (if not already installed) from the Market (grab the .apk if you don't have the Market), once installed it then grabs the required libraries - probably best to be on a wifi connection rather than cellular just in case.

I know the UI isn't the best for mobiles - it works fairly well on my GalaxyTab thanks to the large screen & higher resolution. Reason for releasing now is so people can contribute ideas/code/bugs/etc.

If there are any UI designers bored and fancy a little piece of fun, then please join in - I'm not looking at anyone in particular, Mr LeSage & Mr Fitzsomon ;-P

So as I mentioned earlier I managed to port entimologist to Android. This post will hopefully explain how I did this.

The shopping list for this task is relatively straight forward:

• Android SDK
• Android NDK
• Java development files (on openSUSE I use java-1_6_0-sun-devel)
• ant (on openSUSE ant is too old, I use the binary tarball from the Apache site)
• Qt Creator for Android SDK a.k.a Necessitas
• Not necessary but could be helpful – Eclipse (on openSUSE don't use the packages available as there are things missing that prevent building for android, use the binary tarball from the Eclipse site)
• Ministro

First thing I had done was install and setup Eclipse, I then setup the Android SDK & Android NDK – that was done months ago. See the Android Developer site for good, clear instructions.

For setting up Necessitas, I used Alessandro's post & video as a guide, but there are also details on Necessitas' site.  After following the steps, I couldnt quite get things working, and I was starting to think that GNOME3 and Qt, were being children and bickering. No, they weren't. It was me being a dufus! I hadn't read the bit about ant needing to be >=1.8.0 :-) Download Ministro to somewhere safe (I popped mine in /opt/necessitas)

So to get things to work, I un-installed the ant rpm, extracted the bibnary tarball into ~/bin, and did a sudo ln -s ~/bin/apache-ant-1.8.2/bin/ant /usr/bin/ant

Now I wont pretend to know WTF I'm doing with Qt, as far as I'm concerned it's another alien language. Problem is I needed to tell Necessitas what Qt libraries entomologist needed, I had no real idea. I had a look at the source and the spec file and got some clues, so I added the ones I thought were needed. I tried a build and got further than previously (now that I had the correct version of ant!). I was now getting some weird missing library error, but I couldn't work it out. Along comes our new Boosters member Ismail Dönmez to the rescue.  There will be a lib$APPNAME.so that is created to work out which Qt libraries you need just do a readelf -d  lib$APPNAME.so.

In my case I did readelf -d libentomologist.so and got:

~/workspace/Entomologist-build-android> readelf -d libentomologist.so

Dynamic section at offset 0x4bda8 contains 29 entries:

It may seem obvious, but look at the ones that have (NEEDED) in them ;-) I was missing libQtXml.so. Simply add the missing Qt library either by adding it manually in $PROJECT_LOCATION > Other files > android > res > values > libs.xml, or simply tick the required one in Qt Creator by going to the Projects button on the left > Run > Package Configurations > Libraries tab

When testing your app, make sure you select “Install Ministro system wide qt shared libraries installer” from the Projects button on the left > Run > Deploy configurations, then select the .apk in the “Choose apk” button.

Once that's done, hit the “Play” button on the bottom left of Qt Creator and off you go :-)  I appreciate it may seem like a lot of work, but honestly it isn't that much. I buggered around for ages cursing, mainly because I hadn't checked my version of ant and didnt read the error message being spat out. I also didn't know about readelf -d.  All I need to work out and try now is publishing to the Market https://market.android.com/. So all in all have fun and keep being cute Qt :-D 

I like to think of myself as being fairly consistent, and I've had one request for a long time, a desktop bug tracker client. I even asked  if someone more adept in the ways of The Code could help. Unfortunately my call for help wasn't heard :-(

That was until HackWeek VI  came along! Luckily Matt Barringer (from those crazy cooks in the SUSE Studio team) heard my call. He picked up his code machine gun and blasted away \o/ 

A few days after HackWeek VI ended he enlightened me to his new masterpiece – Entomologist.  So what is it? As you may have guessed, it is a desktop bug tracker client.  It's cutely written in Qt, isn't final yet (is any software?) but works fairly well.  Why only fairly well? Simples, it only supports Bugzilla at the minute, but there are plans afoot to add others (please see the ToDo list). Once more bug backends are added it will be great (yes, this is a subtle hint for you to contribute code ;-) ). It is being put forward as one of the GSOC projects so fingers crossed ;-)

Of course you need some obligatory screenshots, so feast your eyes :-)

Seeing your bugs on the desktop

Seeing your bugs on the move.

Yes that's right, entomologist works on Android!! Sure the UI is a bit butt ugly on the platform, but the app works ;-)

I'll do a post on how I ported entomologist to Android shortly, it wasn't too difficult.

So if you want to give it a whirl, then head over to the homepage and choose your flavour of openSUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, Ubuntu or Debian (thanks OBS)

UPDATE:

For those that want to minimise the number of clicks the list of repos are:

• openSUSE 11.4
• openSUSE 11.3
• openSUSE 11.2
• openSUSE Factory
• SLED 11 SP1
• Fedora 14 (untested)
• Fedora 13 (untested)
• Fedora 12 (untested)
• Mandriva 2010 (untested)
• Mandriva 2010.1 (untested)

.deb packages are also provided:

• (K)Ubuntu 10.10
• (K)Ubuntu 10.04 (untested)
• Debian 6.0 (untested)

Yes, you read that correct - I am going to try and port LibreOffice to Android! :-)

Why? Simples, there are no ODF compatible products on Android for reading & writing. There is OpenOffice Document Reader which as the name suggests is just a reader, and also OOo is so 2009 ;-)

Now if I was a half decent hacker, this may not have been such a big deal.  Problem is I'm an absolutley crap hacker, with almost no experience or knowledge of Android or LibreOffice development. So why on earth would I try and do such a monumentally painful task? Two reasons - 1. I was challenged by an engineer that I respect to do it. 2. I've got an itch that needs scratching (actually I'm riddled with itches, and the Doc confirms it isn't a medical condition ;-) ).

So how to go about it? I'm still working that one out. As it stands openSUSE doesn't provide the necessary tools for the job - no decent ARM port :( So I'm going to have a play with Debian - after all 6.0 Squeeze is just out the oven so now's as good a time as any. If that doesn't work out I'll give Ubuntu a whirl.  Never fear oh mighty Geeko lovers - these alien installations will be going on my test machine. My primary machine is still running openSUSE, with GNOME3.

I'll try and document my trip through pain and fun, if for nothing else humour for those more seasoned than me at doing cooky stuff like this.

Just as a little side note - my primary machine, a Dell D820 decided to die just before FOSDEM. This has left me using my Netbook as my main machine. It took me ~15.5hrs to build LibreOffice on it.

As many people will know I've spent around 18 months of my spare time packaging and building the Netbook UX for Moblin/MeeGo on openSUSE.  Not on my own, but with a community around me. I would just like to say a huge thank you to that community, you've been great and spurred me on when I felt like the whole world was conspiring against me.

Sound a bit morose? Well in a way it is. Basically by all accounts MeeGo is stopping all work on the Netbook UX. Yup, all our hard work is now almost for nothing :-(

The first piece of evidence is the Release Engineering Plans for 1.2.  If you look at the bottom, you'll notice that the Netbook doesn't get any mention in Features, just bugs. Actually the same is for the 1.1 release.  In all honesty, the biggest change between 1.1 and its predecessor is that all refernces to Moblin was replaced with MeeGo. The next piece of info came at the fabulous FOSDEM XI (I'll do a seperate post on the event later). I spoke to several people directly and indirectly involved with MeeGo, especially the Netbook UX, about the lack of info on the Netbook UX. Each one of them said the same thing - MeeGo is putting the Netbook UX into Maintanence Mode, stopping any further development on it, and only providing bug fixes for major issues.  I asked if there was going to be any announcement, basically the answer was nothing official. They're just going to let it drift away - just like netbooks themselves have.

There are most likely a huge number of reasons, which is fair enough. I was given a couple of reasons - 1: Netbooks arent selling anymore, the Netbook ship didn't really sail away, but was sunk. 2: MeeGo doesn't want to invest anymore time or effort in gtk development, and wants to concentrate on Qt. Now I take this last one with a tiny bit of salt, only because both Intel and Nokia employ (or at least did so) a sizable team of GNOME developers. Saying that though, if they want to keep a roof over their heads they have to do what their employer says, and both originally started working with touch devices. So it does make sense as much as it doesn't.

So, I herby give immediate notice that I am now no longer going to be doing any further work on the MeeGo UX for openSUSE or anyone else.  I wont delete the repo for 1.0 but will clear out the 1.1 and 1.2 repos that I had - might as well give those resources back :-) . Now if anyone would like to continue what I and others had started, then let me know and I would be more than happy.

I cant say what the other distros are going to do, I've spoken to my counter part in Fedora, and they're having a think about it as they were busting their chops to get things in for the F15 release.  Either way I wish all involved luck.

Now before any of you conspiracy theory junkies get worked up - this has nothing to do with the whole MeeGo Trademark issue that Smeegol had with the Linux Foundation.  As it happens I was due to have a conversation with the Linux Foundation about the issues between us and them, but have had to re-schedule due to travel constraints from one party or the other.  I still intend to speak with the LF about the issues, as they are still present in the other UX's that they are developing.

So it's time for me to close off and say, so long and thanks for all the fish! I'll still be around, I'll probably start getting back into the GNOME swing of things, and help fcrozat with GNOME3 etc.  Oh and I've got a lunatic idea for a project which I intend to kick off (stay tuned ;-) ).

MeeGo is a trademark of the Linux Foundation.

I have packaged up the latest and greatest release (0.1.1.1) of the-board from Lucas Rocha.  If' you want a bit more background have a look at my previous post.

I also said that it was for 11.4/Factory only and that 11.3 was a WIP.  Well the progress is complete (with huge help from Frederic Crozat, and his great GNOME3 repo).

Yes, more people can have some of this cool shiny stuff. There is a but, and this is from upstream - it is still in development so you may loose a kitten or bunny, maybe even both ;-)  So come and join the fun and try it out, I've not generated a single .ymp file yet so click on your version of Geeko

11.3 - 

11.4/Factory -  

As many know, I have a few Android devices, and I know a lot of other openSUSE fans out there also have robot powered devices.  I decided the other day to try something during my lunch break - create a widget to show how many days left till 11.4's release.

Yeah I know it isn't an earth shattering application, but I'm not a code monkey, so any working code I generate is a serious plus for me ;-)

So my lunchtime project was inspired by the efforts of someone at Ubuntu who was doing the same for their Natty release.  I used this tutorial to help get me going.  I now present to you oSRCD - the openSUSE Release CountDown. 

It isn't perfect, but it is a start, so if there is anyone that is a bit more able in the ways of Android programming or artwork then please join in :-)

You can grab the source code from github or the .apk for manual install. And as it's a mobile app here's the QR code:

No, I'm not talking about this board - I'm talking about the cool project by GNOME afficianado Lucas Rocha - The Board.

There is a little gotcha with the packages - it is for openSUSE Factory/11.4 only at the moment. I need to work on backporting some of the shiny dependencies to 11.3.

Things aren't 100%, as I need to do a tiny bit of cleaning up with the packages, but it works pretty well for a 0.1.0 release ;-)

If you want to grab it then just head on over and click the magic button

I'm going to that fine city of Brussels (yet again) for one of the best conferences going (IMHO). If you're going grab me and say hi. If you're thinking about going, stop! JUST GO!!! :-)

tl;dr – To all you doomsday FUD mongers about Novell/SUSE/openSUSE STFU & let us show you what we can and will do!!

For those living under a rock, yes Novell has agreed to be acquired. Welcome to the world of business, and especially in software this sort of thing is very common.

Now for some reason a whole heap of people seem to think that this spells doom for Novell, SUSE and openSUSE. Why?  I really can't answer that.  What I do know is that all their negative speculation is at best counter productive, at worst foolish and damaging.

As with any form of speculation there are no facts to back up what they reckon is going to happen – hence the speculation.  If there is enough negative talk, negative things will happen. Current customers will look at switching from Novell products whether they be SUSE based or not, purely based on all the negativity that is being generated.

No-one is giving Attachemate a chance to prove what they have openly said – Novell, SUSE and openSUSE's contribution to the wider community will continue and that it is business as usual.  If you look at when Oracle bought Sun they said sod all about OpenSolaris and the rest of Sun. This is different.  The new overlords are actually communicating – maybe not as much as we would like, but hey it's a bloody good step in the right direction.

The latest negative piece comes from the 451 Group. Why the frig would Novell's purchase change their kernel contributions?  Why the frig would Novell's purchase change any of their current contributions to the vast array of projects including GNOME/KDE/Banshee/LibreOffice/Systemd and a whole heap of others?  Simple, it doesn't.

Don't get me wrong Novell has screwed up big time in the past, but we are working together as a community to learn from these mistakes.  All this negative noise is counter productive and just gets in the way.  If you want to see Novell, SUSE and openSUSE flourish hows about you roll your sleeves up and get stuck in?  If you don't want to chip in STFU and wait and see if something does happen.  Then you can berate us and tell us how and where we went wrong.

I've been stewing over a response on the MeeGo developers mailing list for some time now.  Basically the MeeGo Project and their steward, the Linux Foundation don't seem to be wanting to play this whole open source, open community game.  I wouldn't have any issue with it if it was just Nokia and Intel fumbling with MeeGo, it would be just another lost opportunity that big corporations screwed up on.  Problem is the Linux Foundation is involved and are supposedly the ones guiding the project.

In case you don't know, before I released Smeegol I asked some questions on the MeeGo Dev list with regards to what openSUSE can/can't do/use.  That kind of went nowhere.  Fedora have also tried asking and again got nowhere.  Debian have also asked, and after seven weeks the Linux Foundation answered.

In all honesty, I was insensed by the response. I spoke to my counterparts at Fedora and they too echoed my feelings. To allow those in the openSUSE and wider community who aren't subscribed to the MeeGo lists I'll provide my response.  For those in a rush:

tl;dr - Don't think MeeGo, don't say MeeGo, don't contribute to MeeGo unless it is on our terms, don't use MeeGo unless it is on our crippled distro, MeeGo is going it alone.

For those that want to see me rant some more:

Hi Ibrahim,

On Thu, 2010-12-09 at 13:12 -0600, Ibrahim Haddad wrote:
> Hello Didier,
>
>
> I am responding to you in relation to your inquiry below. First,
> thanks very much for sending the MeeGo Project these questions. We
> really do appreciate it. The MeeGo Project members devoted quite a bit
> of time discussing these questions to make sure the  responses are
> fair and most of all work to the benefit of the MeeGo project, its
> developers and the users of MeeGo.
>

Seven weeks to effectively turn around and say "No, no, no"?  I'm sorry
if I sound bitter or angry; but the truth of the matter is that I'm
actually fairly disgusted with how the Linux Foundation, Nokia and Intel
have all acted towards the wider Linux community.  For all the talk of
openness at the conference in Dublin all I see are closed doors and
barricades.

>
> To start with, the goal is to avoid any confusion around what is and
> what is not MeeGo.  Anything that is or will become associated with
> the MeeGo trademark has to be in conformance with the compliance
> program.  With that in mind, it becomes clear why none of the proposed
> uses of MeeGo  mentioned in your email are in line with the trademark
> policy and guidelines as they create confusion around MeeGo project
> packages, mailing list, project team name, etc.  For example, when you
> append MeeGo to a package name, it would be very reasonable to
> conclude that this is an official MeeGo package coming from MeeGo.com,
> which is not the case and could cause confusion both for your users as
> well MeeGo's.
>

I'm sorry but do you honestly think that users who install the MeeGo UX
on a distro be it openSUSE, Fedora, Debian or whichever are going to
think that it has come from the MeeGo project?  This doesn't happen for
any open source project that is available via a distribution. GNOME, KDE
etc welcome inclusion into distros and want downstream involvement.  Why
do you feel that MeeGo doesn't?

Trying to paint all users with a stupid brush is wrong and condescending
to both users and distros.  You appear to be missing a key factor that
myself and my counterparts are doing here - marketing MeeGo and enabling
the wider community to get involved and help make MeeGo better.  Why
should a developer have to install a new distro to be able to contribute
to the codebase?

Having meego in a package name shows where the upstream contribution
comes from.  Just like with packages from Google etc.  This is the most
basic form of attribution, and is only right.  Why are you trying to
force people to fork?  Yes, fork.  If you don't want people to recognise
your work and re-use it with almost no changes why have it in the open?

Linux users and especially developers can be fickle, they find a distro
they like and stick to it - quite often they are more faithful to their
distro than they are to their partner or loved one.  Forcing them to
choose between distro or contributing to MeeGo the chances are they'll
stick to their distro of choice.

When Moblin was around, it was one of three things - a User eXperience,
a distribution and a reference platform.  This worked well, so why have
you changed it?

>
> We would ask you to move away from using {M,m}-e-e-{G,g}-o or any
> subset of those letters or sounds in that order, alone or in
> combination with other letters, words or marks that would tend to
> cause someone to make a reasonable connection of the reference with
> the MeeGo mark. We specifically discussed one possibility for
> illustration purposes – which is to use MG in the place of MeeGo.  We
> do not think that a plain text MG, when used in reference to the code,
> as in a file or project or team name, would cause a reasonable person
> to be confused. 
>

This fanatical enforcement of the MeeGo trademark is going to do more
damage than good.  People have asked me what's different between MeeGo's
trademark guidelines and openSUSE's, and the simple answer is it is the
execution of the trademark that sets us apart.  Thinking that people are
going to get "confused" between Smeegol and MeeGo is ludicrous.  Sure
I'm not a lawyer/solicitor or any other form of legal professional, but
I don't need to be to apply common sense.

We are trying to promote MeeGo and further it in an already crowded
space.  Making us change package names, and removing any reference to
MeeGo gives you absolutely zero visibility.  At the end of the day,
openSUSE and the other distros have a much wider reach than MeeGo does,
and possibly ever will as a stand alone distro.


>
> We are available for additional discussions if needed and if you
> prefer to have a call to discuss we can certainly do that.
>

I have tried several times to discuss these issues, and have even tried
going off list to facilitate the dialogue in a more protected manner.
MeeGo is far from open to the community, if I was an ISV or ISV then
sure it maybe more open but from what I've heard even partners have a
tough time.

Being an exclusive project is a sure way to failure. Try being
inclusive, you'll have more chance of succeeding.  If you don't want
community participation that's fine, re-license to something proprietary
and you wont get bothered by those that want to help.  Yes you have
already re-licensed some code from open licenses to proprietary ones
without any announcement to the community, not a great open gesture.

>
> Best Regards,
> Ibrahim Haddad [on behalf of The Meego Project]
>
> PS:
> We started an FAQ at http://meego.com/trademark. We have added some
> text already and Q&A will be added there as they come.
>

I don't see a single question or answer in that FAQ, just a statement.
Not especially helpful to the community.

Regards,

Andy

Looks like it's been a while since I mentioned anything about our dear friend Smeegol – sorry.

As most will know MeeGo made a couple of releases: 

• 1.0.5 mostly an update to their original release
• 1.1.0 the new release with new API, and renaming most packages

So where is Smeegol?  Well we're pretty much there, although not 100%.  I have 1.0.5 all built and packaged including an image.  Problem is I seem to have hit a bug with network-manager-netbook – it doesn't seem to be displaying networks which is a fairly fundamental issue :-(

I have also got 1.1.0 built, but for factory only atm – I'm having some issues with tracker on 11.3.  Problem is when I try and run the image, I basically have an unusable system thanks to some Gconf fubar but I don't really know what.

You may have also noticed that I'm still calling it Smeegol ;-) Well the simple reason is I have requested clarification from MeeGo, Nokia, Intel and the Linux Foundation and so far I've received bubkiss!!  I heard loads of talk from the recent MeeGo Conference about how open MeeGo was, but it seems that they are only open to partners who can help them make money; not open to the wider community.  I am not alone in waiting for a response from them, Fedora and Debian are also in limbo waiting for information/clarification and general communication from them.  The difference between us is the fact that in openSUSE if you want something done the best way is to Just Do It :-)

So in a nutshell, before I make an official release of either I need people to test and report back to me what does and doesn't work.  I haven't tried doing an upgrade from 1.0.3 to 1.0.5 or 1.1.0 so maybe someone could try that.  Jump onto #opensuse-moblin on Freenode or the opensuse-goblin mailing list and let's continue to be trail blazers. Yes I know I need to align the mailing list and irc channel names, but I'm waiting for a conclusion to the name debacle first.

I would really love to get both releases out as a little christmas present to you the community, so who's up for some festive fun?

Yet again I get a dose of the Early Adopter jitters - I tried to hold out but I just couldn't. I went and got me some shiny robot lovin' from Korea, and boy do I love this particular droid - the fabulous (IMHO) Samsung GT-P1000 better known as the Galaxy Tab.

This is my third dedicated Android device, the first being the Motorola Milestone 11months ago, followed by the Nexus One around Easter time this year. I kind of understand why some people end up with so many Apple devices now :-)

I've got a lot I want to say about the device, so I'll be breaking it down into multiple posts.

So why the heck did I go for it? Well I had specific requirements from a tablet styled device:

1. It needs to be easily portable. Yes my netbook is portable in comparison to my laptop, but I need some form of bag even for it. Also it weighs a bit too, and isn't easy to use one handed.
2. It needs to have good media support. Yeah, I'm talking about that thing we all love to hate - codec proliferation!! Also screen quality helps here too as does audio quality.
3. Good network support. Basically I don't want to have to worry about buggering around setting up bluetooth pairings, hooking up cables etc.
4. Good applicatipon ecosystem. I want to be able to get applications that I want and need easily and conveniently without being tied to a big old school machine.
5. Video calling support. This isn't vital, but it is pretty damned close to it. Both my wife's and my family is pretty much disperesed across three out of four corners of the globe, and being able to do some form of video calling not only makes staying in touch cheaper, but we also get to see each other's ugly mugs.
6. Some light relief. This can be in the form of games or other methods.

I think they're fairly reasonable requirements.  So how does the Tab meet my six simple requirements?

1. The device is about the same size (height & width) as one of those weird paper book things (/me was horrified how long ago I last read a physical book :-/), and about as thick as a cheque book. I sits very comfortably in one hand, and I can easily grip hold of it wrapping my fingers around both sides. It is also fairly light, it only starts to get heavy after about 45-60mins or so of single handed holding.
2. It shines beautifully with media playback. It has native support for Divx which means anything my PS3 can play so can my Tab (almost all my DVDs are ripped so that I can easily watch them on any device). The 7 inch screen is great for watching films or web based video. Very clear and crisp and just generally great. Samsung's video player is also great. I'm not sure if it is the same as on the Galaxy S as I haven't really seen or used one of them, but the controls are very good and not intrusive. The music player is by far one of the best I've used on Android. The little touch of being able to access it using a drop down mini version whilst the screen is locked is great. My only grumble here is that I can't get it to scrobble to Last.fm, not a huge issue, but still...
3. Well believe it or not this tablet can also be a phone. It has full telephony functionality, the same as my Milestone or Nexus One. So that means I can get onto the net pretty much anywhere. Yes it also has wireless support as one would hope. So now I can always get online when I need to. Also as it is running 2.2 Froyo, I have the mobile hotspot functionality (I hate the sound of MiFi) so any of my devices can connect through it sans cables.
4. I know some people are going to rip the Android Marketplace a new arsehole, but seriously, have you tried Ovi from Nokia? Personally I have not had any issues using the Marketplace, apps are grouped fairly sensibly, details on the apps are fairly correct, it's easy to go to the apps' homepage and contact the developer. Oh and it has almost all the apps I want/need.
5. It has a 1.3MP front facing camera which you can use for either still photos - self portrait style - or video calling. The only issue here is getting cross platform applications. Yes Skype is available but it doesn't support video calls from Android (yet?). I'm not aware of being able to use the Gmail video chat thingy yet (also don't really know anyone using it). The only one that I'm aware of atm is Yahoo! which is a shame as most people I know have moved off of Yahoo and onto other services. But the main thing is the hardware is in place.
6. Well there are plenty of games available for android devices, some not so good, but some are very good, and they look great on the large sharp screen. Samsung have partnered with Gameloft to provide some 'HD' games, and on the whole these games are pretty good - NOVA is preinstalled, a FPS Doom style game which I like; I bought Let's Golf for some sporting sillyness, Dragon Hunter for some D&Desque fantasy RPG, and Asphalt5 for some accelerometer fun. They all look and play pretty sweetly on the Tab. There are more titles available and all titles are available for trial. Samsung also bundle in an ebook reader that accepts any epub publications you may have. It looks and behave just like the paper based ones, even with the sound & visual effects of turning pages. They also have their "ReaderHub" app, this holds three apps inside - a Newspaper app powered by PressDisplay, an Book app powered by Kobo, and a Magazine app powered by Zinio. All three of these work brilliantly and have a *huge* amount of content available. I'll stop there for now, and try and get the next post up soon. In a nutshell if you're wondering whether to get one or not and you ask me what do I think, my answer is YES get one. I've had mine now for almost two weeks and I don't regret it at all. My wife actually likes it, and my children have added "Tab" into their vocabulary (and no I don't meant the cigarette end, or the march with backpacks and full battle gear).  Oh and Angry Birds is stunning on the bigger screen :-)

So that's it for now, I'll come back with some more soon. If there's anything in particular people would like to know, just shout.

(P.S. this post was written entirely on my Tab ;-) )

I unfortunately received an e-mail just now from the Linux Foundation with regards to our precious Smeegol, and it appears on the face of it that they're not that impressed with our efforts.  Somewhat bizarrely as they have had plenty of opportunity to respond.

Now I'm not going to start ranting and raving about injustice etc, what I will say is this and it is a bit of a rant ;-):

Since Moblin morphed into MeeGo, things appear from the outside to have taken a bit of a dip for the worse :-(  MeeGo is now pushing the fact that it is a distro in it's own right which is perfectly acceptable and fair (although I think the world has enough distros).  There are several people within the paid community who look on our efforts and those of Fedora's as wasteful, and not for the greater good.  Sorry but bollocks to you!!

I wholly understand now why Canonical & Ubuntu dropped it and went down their own road with UNR & Unity.  They don't mind if someone else packages it and uses it - they and everyone else knows where it came from - for that I doff my cap to the Ubuntu crowd.

If the Linux Foundation really want to make MeeGo work and be prevalent everywhere they need to look to the wider community to help it.  Having a niche distro is all good and well, but without the wider eco-system that goes along with a distro you're buggered.  One of the reasons I started working on Smeegol is openSUSE has a fantastic ecosystem, we've got pretty good tools and have a shit load of applications available.  The same goes for Fedora.  We both also have a pretty vibrant community with lots of friendly and knowledgable people willing to help.

I unfortunately can't say the same for MeeGo.  They have taken the Build Service but closed the door on it, so application contributions can't happen easily. They seem to want to build a community from OEMs and partners, effectively become an exclusive community and not inclusive.  Harsh?  Maybe but that's what it seems like, and I'm not the only one to see it this way.

The biggest disappointment for me is the fact that MeeGo is supposedly under the Linux Foundation's banner.  These peeps are supposed to be championing the greater Linux cause, but can't see the cluster that is happening under their noses.  They are complaining that legally I can't call the project Smeegol or use any variation of MeeGo, and not use any of their logos/charchters/artwork/etc as it will dilute and weaken their trademark - WTF?!?  Hellfire, after we announced the release of Smeegol the first thing that people thought of when they heard it was Lord Of The Rings, NOT MeeGo or the Linux Foundation.  If you ask me (which I know no one is, but I'll answer anyway), actively pushing distros to include MeeGo will only strengthen the brand and mark, not weaken it.  I asked the question on the MeeGo development mailing list, and had absolutely no response from the trademark holders (that would be the Linux Foundation), only after a kind teddy bear of a kernel hacker (that would be Greg Kroah-Hartman) jumped in and started knocking heads did someone pipe up - Thanks Greg :-)  Even then it was a wishy washy response with no substance and not an answer.

So now I have my answer, and now I'm not so sure what next.  Yes I'm pissed off, and I think I have a right to be.  The crucial thing is I want to resolve this so that we can all get on and enjoy the shiny that is being produced.  I've spent the better part of eight months working on getting Moblin and subsequently MeeGo built and running on openSUSE, the latter was very tough.  I am still working on it, trying to get 1.1 build and ready, updating the network front-end as well as lots of other bits.

So, any suggestions on what to do next? :-)

So after many months of hard work, Smeegol is out the door.  Now contrary to what some folk may think, this was *NOT* a one man show - far from it!  I may have spearheaded the whole affair, but I in no way can take credit for it all - that doesn't mean I wouldn't accept any of your fine donations ;-)

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank many of the people that helped get this labour of love out the door.  Without them I most likely would still be floundering around, working out my backside from my elbow. This truely shows how great not just the openSUSE community is but also the wider open source & Linux community is in general.  So with out further delay, I'd like to thank the following people (in alphabetical order):

Aaron Bockover

Alan McGovern

Andrea Florio

Andreas Jaeger

Bertrand Lorenz

Bin Li

Dominique Leuenberger

Federico Mena-Quintero

Gabriel Burt

Gary Lin

Garret LeSage

Glen Gary

Greg Kroah-Hartman

Guy Lunardi

Jackub Steiner

James Tan

Joey Li

Jos Poortvliet

JP Rosevear

Marcus Ruckert

Michael Meeks

Pavol Rusnak

Raymond Woonick

Ross Burton

Vincent Untz

This list is by no means exhaustive, I would also like to thank the following projects in general: 

Banshee

Fedora Mini

MeeGo

openSUSE

SUSE Studio

Without you lot, my precious would never have made it out the door - THANK YOU!!

I thought I should let anyone that cares know what the latest status of my work is.  What work?  Getting MeeGo on openSUSE, of course!  I'm calling it Smeegol – SUSE MeeGo Linux, and this just happens to be the Teal Goblin – Teal is the code name for 11.3 ;-)

Well I'm not quite there yet (unfortunately) :-(  I have one major issue which is the Network Panel not displaying properly, and as such is difficult to use.  I also have a smaller issue with the web panel, but that is more of an annoyance rather than a blocker.

So in a nutshell that's the state of play.  Now I'm concentrating on getting things working on 11.3 and getting a working image, but if people would like to see things get into openSUSE 11.4 then there are some low hanging fruit for people to pick up and run with.  In a nutshell before things can make it into Factory, the spec files need to be cleaned up and made to comply with the Geeko's high standards.

So please join in the fun and have a look at the Meego:Netbook repo, and help out where you can.  I wanted to get things working first before I started to look at housekeeping.  Some packages already comply, but others most certainly don't as they were straight imports from upstream.

Oh and if you want to try Smeegol as it stands now, warts and all, you can grab the live image from here. If you're brave (or stupid) you can get the goodness via 1Click for 11.3 or Factory. Yes it is 32bit only at the moment, as when packaging I had too many x86_64 errors.  Please note that the Goblin may chew fluffy bunnies, sodomise gorrilas and generally be an imp!  You can file bugs if you wish over on BNC just select the Moblin Component

So please join in the fun and help clean up the Goblin :-)

I thought it was about time that I enlightened people as to what the
state of play is with my efforts of getting MeeGo 1.0 for Netbooks on
openSUSE.

The good news is I think I'm pretty much there :-)  I believe all the
essential packages are built now, although there is a *lot* of work to
be done in getting the packages into Factory.  The outstanding work is
mostly spec file housekeeping but non the less it will be a relatively
laborious task.

I am currently looking at getting a hybrid iso image built so that
people can install the goodness straight of the bat and have the image
available pretty close to 11.3's release - this may or may not happen as
fast as I would like but we'll see.

For those that are interested all the packages etc live in
Meego:Netbook, and the image stuff lives in the meego-live package in
there.  Any and all help with cleaning spec files and creating an image
is most appreciated.

Talking of thanks, none of this would have happened without the huge
amounts of help from DimStar, darix, dl9pf, joeyli, glin, mchang, mlin, mmeeks
and vuntz. Thank you *SO* much chaps!

I will try and get a 1-Click done whilst I work on an image.  If people could have a look at the repo and let me know if anything is missing that would be great - don't forget you can submit anything that is missing ;-)

As soon as I have anything new I'll let you know.   So if you want to join in the fun, then head over to #opensuse-moblin on IRC and the opensuse-goblin mailing list.  There are lots for people to do, and if you want to start contributing this is a good way to do so :-)

It looks like I've been asking you, the community, a load of questions recently on this here blog.  As such I thought it only fair to turn the tables and let you guys and girls do the asking :-)

If we can make a bit of a game out of this I would appreciate it.  So first up I'll give you a deadline of 1200UTC 17June2010 to get you questions in by.  What's the game?  Simple, I would like you lot to pretend you are interviewing our prospective Community Manager.  Does this sound a bit bitchy to you because I'm no longer in the running?  If so I genuinely don't mean it to be.  I just want you to actually search within yourselves, to work out what you feel is important to you when it comes to the role.

So all good games have a prize right? Well this shall be no different, the top 5 questions will each receive a prize.  So get to it and post your questions in the comments.  When thinking about what to ask, think about what you would like from the role, and why.  Also many big employers ask what appear to be oddball questions, but they are in fact very relevant - these types could earn brownie points ;-)

So get questioning!

It's been a while since I mentioned anything about Goblin and anything netbook related, sorry.  Anyhow as everyone is aware, Moblin has since been superseded by MeeGo.  The timing was a bit of a PITA for me, as it coincided with the Factory freeze, which means I couldn't update the relevant packages etc in-time for 11.3.

As it stands, 11.3 should have an almost fully functional Moblin environment – I say 'almost' as there were two packages that I just couldn't get to co-operate and build (the modified Moblin browser, and the Web panel).  They should not affect your enjoyment of the UX so I'm not going to kick myself too hard.   I have learnt several lessons though trying to get Moblin into Factory:

1: Getting things into the next distro release is NOT difficult.

I don't care what anyone says, the process is very simple and straight forward.  Importantly, there is a huge amount of help from all parties that deal with the acceptance etc.  If you need help or guidance, just ask! I can't stress enough how much help is available to people.  I would personally like to thank everyone that helped, but I know I will miss some people off due to my feeble brain.  As a start these people have been invaluable to the process - Andreas Jaeger, Marcus Ruckert, Stephan Kulow, Michael Meeks, Henne Vogelsang, Pascal Blesser, Andrea Florio & Dominique Luerenberger.  Thank you all (and sorry to those whom I missed of listing).

2: You need to plan, and plan well.

I started off with great intentions, but I didn't take into account how disruptive my daytime job would be.  Unfortunately I haven't wopn the lottery and as such I have to deal with “The Man”, otherwise I have no food or house :-(  Part of my bad planning led to me missing the cut-off for getting Moblin listed as an installable option from the get go.

3: Spread the love.

There's a saying I've heard many times and from many different places – A burden shared is a burden eased.  Do you know what?  It's absolutely true!  Even if there are only a couple of you dealing with a project, it makes things so much easier, and having more is just plain fun :-)  I tried to get some of you reprobates to join in, but you were all too busy.  As such the pace of progress was fairly slow.

4. Have fun doing it. 

This applies to almost anything you do, but especially when doing any form of contribution. If you feel that it is getting you down, take a break, try and pass the baton to someone else to carry it forward for a bit.  What ever you do, don't let it burn you out!  Loosing a contributor to burn-out is disastrous for the community, and is something we should all be aware of and on the look out for.

So that's the past/present, what about the present/future?  Well Goblin will live on, and incorporate all the new goodness that is coming out of MeeGo.  I do genuinely think that MeeGo is a vast improvement on Moblin, but as always there's room for improvement; and what better way to start improving than by getting the Geeko involved? :-)  As my contribution to HackWeek 5, I have started the importing process for all the MeeGo packages, into the OBS.  Believe it or not, there are only a handful of packages that can be carried over from Moblin which is a bugger.  Regardless I think I have got pretty much all the needed pieces in.

Problem is the way I've done it is pretty hacky – I basically just  dropped the contents of the SRPMs in and hoped for the best.  This was done mainly for speed, and I know that it isn't good enough.  Problem is I'm trying to balance my regular job and dealing with managing the renovation of my parent's house at the same time, so I really don't have a huge amount of spare time :-/  So this is where YOU come in.

Please help me to not only get Goblin updated to the latest and greatest that MeeGo has to offer, but also prove to everyone outside of the openSUSE community that we are a coherent and cohesive force to be reckoned with!  Too many people discount us, and just say that without Novell nothing would get done.  Please help me to help you to prove this assumption to be a load of rubbish.  We have the tools and knowledge available to us, so let's get on with it and get it done!  Oh and we have the real opportunity to be a leader here – the first distro to provide a full MeeGo experience!

So if you can help, then please join in on IRC (#opensuse-moblin), and on the mailing list ( make sure you are subscribed first).  The first step is to get everything building, from there we can move forward.  Oh by the way, this initial push is for the Netbook UX, but I'd love to see use get the Handheld/Tablet UX when that is released ;-)  I'm tempted by Garrett's name suggestion of Smeegol, but let's get it building and working first ;-) 

I've had a lot of people ask me both within the openSUSE community and outside of it, whether I applied for the vacant openSUSE Community Manager role.

In a nutshell, yes I did apply for it.  Why the past tense?  Well I got notified almost two weeks ago that I was unsuccessful :'(  The good thing that did come out of it, is that there seem to be some very good candidates in the running - let's face it, they would have to be pretty damned good to beat me ;-)

I would like to thank Novell for considering me for the role, and wish those that are in the running the best of luck!  Oh I'd also like to ask you, the community, to extend your support to whomever is successful in getting the role.  This doesn't mean that I'm giving up on the Geeko - hell I've invested too much time & effort to throw it away, and I have far too many friends within the community.

To the successful person: Please ensure you look after all aspects of the community, your colleagues working for "The Man" as well as those of us who do it for the love.  Let's not loose what we have by chasing that which we haven't :-)

Now back to some Smeegol madness with the Goblin!

Enterprise in the Community

It has been mentioned that the Geeko is somewhat of a schizophrenic at times, and do you know what I kind of have to agree.  The difference is I disagree on how the schizophrenia affects our dear friend.  Most people think that the multiple personalities are desktop related  - you know, KDE vs GNOME vs XFCE vs $DE.  I on the other hand feel it is to with audience - Enterprise vs Consumer.  Now don't get me wrong, the Geeko does a great job at both.  The problem is there doesn't seem to be a great deal of interaction between the two personalities.

Yes, some features from the enterprise product feed into the consumer product and vice versa which is lovely and vital.  What is missing is community interaction.  As it stands I see very little evidence of SLE customers interacting with the openSUSE community, and to an extent SLE is somewhat shunned as the illegitimate love child by many within the openSUSE community – which is just plain wrong!  There are times when SLE deadlines get on my nerves, but that is no reason to shun the staff working on it or disrespect the product.

In my job working for a major systems provider and integrator in the UK, we use a lot of SLE and others including Red Hat, AIX, Solaris and HP-UX.  The one thing that is constant is we don't interact with the communities of the OSes, unless it is via the Sales/Support departments.  Now it might be because of time constraints, but I'm not convinced.  I haven't seen any “customers” interact with the openSUSE community other than maybe with the Build Service.  Which is a real shame, as there are some great customers of the SLE product and some great people employed by them.

So how do our peers deal with it? To be honest I have no idea :-) I can only guess that they encounter the same issue, well potentially Red Hat & Fedora.  Ubuntu on the other hand have somewhat of an advantage, in so much as their enterprise product isn't a separate product but in fact part of the standard release.  So when it comes to getting ISVs, partners and customers involved they can safely say that *all* Ubuntu users can benefit from it – not just the enterprise customers.  This is a crucial point, as more people are likely to use the distro and play with it and then sign the big fat cheque for the support.  By that time they have already got involved with the community and will most likely continue to do so.

I'm not trying to tell Novell that they need to change their business model, all what I'm saying is we need Novell's help to engage their customers and partners to be part of OUR community – N.B Our Community == openSUSE *&* SLE.  At the end of the day it's a win/win situation for all parties – they can then get maximum exposure, an element of testing of their product without having to start from scratch to get things certified etc. We benefit from a bigger community thanks to their involvement, and have many more cool things to use/play with :-)   A key one here is that of ISVs, there are a shed load of ISVs that are certified against SLE – iirc somewhere in the region of 5000 apps.  That's an impressive number, but unfortunately openSUSE sees bupkiss! Absolutely nada, niet, nil points, zilch :-(  Looking at Ubuntu they apparently have a fraction of that amount – somehere in the region of 200 or so.  The big difference is that almost *all* Ubunteros can use or access those apps.  The same goes for IHVs – hardware is only certified against SLE products which is great, but openSUSE doesn't get a look in.  There are some vendors that sell their kit with openSUSE pre-installed but there isn't the same sort of love coming from the mothership for them which really could do with changing.

Looks like I digressed somewhat – sorry.  So getting back on track(ish) how many of you guys and gals use SLE professionally?  It could be either SLES or SLED.  If you do use a SLE product do you partake in the openSUSE community professionally or is it purely part of your undying love for the Geeko? If you don't is there a particular reason why not, anything blocking you joining in, or do you just choose not to?  If you do participate as part of your job, what issues do you encounter, what could be improved etc?

As always I would love to hear from you if you have anything to discuss on the topic of Enterprise in the Community. Remember this is for your benefit as part of the openSUSE community. So please join in and get discussing.

Yes I'm still at it, trying to get YOU the openSUSE community talking about what is important to you.  This time round I'd like to hear your opinions and thoughts about something.  I'm going to keep my views on the matter quiet until we get some dialogue going, so if you want to hear my thoughts (and let's face it who doesn't? ;-) ) best you start airing your opinions.

So what is the topic? That of Community Manager.  As many are aware, Novell have started interviewing for a replacement.  Some were not happy with how the role was done in the past and some and some were, but the key part of that statement is PAST!  Let's move on and look to the future, and as part of that looking forward to the future I would like to hear what YOU would like from the new Community Manager?

Let's take a moment to see what the official blurb for the job vacancy said:

"As openSUSE Community Manager, you will work to promote the openSUSE Project, openSUSE Build Service, and sub-projects such as the education project. Your key objectives will be to grow the number of openSUSE users and contributors, and further enhance Novell's relationship with the openSUSE community and larger community of open source influencers and project maintainers. You will work closely with the openSUSE community, Novell leadership, and broader open source community. This is a unique opportunity to take a high-profile role in the open source world and make a truly global impact."

The listed key responsibilities are:

• Develop and execute a marketing plan to promote and evangelize openSUSE, in order to achieve the key objectives above.
• Plan and execute launch plans for openSUSE product releases.
• Serve as a frequent public face of the openSUSE Project to the community by blogging; seeking and providing press interviews; speaking at conferences and other events; and actively participating in social media. You will deliver fresh perspectives and thought leadership in these activities.
• Work directly with & facilitate activities for the openSUSE Ambassadors & Marketing Team.
• Engage with, support and encourage openSUSE community members via online venues such as IRC, forums, mailing lists and others.
• Help to organize major events, including the openSUSE Conference.
• Work closely with key stakeholders from openSUSE and Novell.

So do you (dis)agree with what's there?  What else would you add?  Also if you feel there is a particular issue that the new Community manager needs to address what is that issue, why should they be involved and how do you think they could resolve it?  How would you advertise the position?

People are bound to have opposing issue on items, and that is fine - if anything it is healthy and should be promoted.  As always this is about having a discussion, not a flame war.  Please try and be curteous to your fellow community members and if you can't say anything constructive - don't say anthing at all :-)

So people, let's have your valuable opinions and thoughts on the matter.

So further to my post on a11y in openSUSE, I was asked how one would enable Accessibility.  Now to be honest I only kind of know how to do it in GNOME, so I set off on a little exploration of the other desktop environments.

It may seem strange that I'm trying to champion a subject that I don't really know, but that's part of the reason why I'm doing so.  Accessibility isn't supposed to a buzzword, it is meant to be a usable function for all.  Hopefully I can learn a bit along the way and get the message out there - oh and if you could do the same that would just be spiffy ;-)

I present what I have found so far below in a simple little pictorial guide of how to get to the general a11y settings.  I have tried four desktops - GNOME, KDE, XFCE and LXDE, I couldn't find anything in LXDE so I'll try and revisit it later once I've had more time.

For GNOME:

1. In the main menu select "Control Center"

2. Then under the "Personal" section, select "Assistive Technologies"

3. Select "Enable assitive technologies"

4. When you enable assitive technologies you need to restart your session for the changes to take effect.  You can easily do this by selecting the "Close and Log Out" button at the bottom of the window

For KDE:

1. In the Kicker menu select "Applications" then "System Settings"

2. In the "Personal" section select "Accessibility"

For XFCE:

1. From the menu select "Settings" then "Accessibility"

Like I said this is just a very quick guide on how to do it.  I'm very sure there are more settings to deal with, especially in KDE but I don't know them (yet).  If you do then please shout out and help.

One of the next things I need to learn is what applications are there specifically for a11y.  I know of a few but never used them (at least I dont think I have), and I'm sure I only know of a small number.

There is an 13 letter word that begins with "a" and ends with "y", can you guess what it is?  Yup, a11y is what I'm on about, also known as Accessibility.

I think the subject of a11y is possibly a very misunderstood one, I for one incorrectly associated it with disabled use of a computer.  I have been corrected (on more than one occasion) to the fact that Accessibility actually refers to the ability for anybody to be able to use a computer (or any other device) regardless of any impairment they might have.  So that means both people with and without disabilities are a11y users.  In addition to that, a11y can also help developers to automate testing - quite often UI testing.

An extreme case of a11y usage could be a blind person who can't see a GUI the way someone with 20/20 vision can, or someone with spectacles.  They may have to use a tool called a screen reader (Orca is common on Linux) that describes what's on the screen by speaking through the speakers.  So in order to get something like Orca to work, application UIs need to be understandable by Orca in a programmatic way and that pays off with the automated testing. 

So what's the issue?  Well from what I can see, and what I have heard, is that openSUSE sucks the goat's back-end when it come's to a11y.  In all honesty I don't have any real evidence to back this claim, but one thing I do know is that we don't really do much as a community about it.  Before anyone flips this to a "why isn't Novell paying for people to work on it full time" argument, shush!  This is a misconception that I think people have about corporate sponsors to a project; as it happens Novell does employ some folks to work on a11y indirectly thanks to the working partnership with Microsoft, check out the great work by the Mono a11y team.  If we as a community want to get some dedicated resources assigned to anything, we need to make the case first, we have to show that as a community we feel strongly about the subject and show to whomever is writing the cheques that we are doing the job but could do with a helping hand.

As an example, Red Hat and Canonical do not have dedicated a11y developers but they do have developers who keep a11y foremost in their minds as they develop and innovate projects for the masses.  We don't really have that as such.  This is where we can reach out to upstream and ask for some help and guidance.  Both GNOME and KDE have a11y teams, although it appears that the former is more active. 

Accessibility is not an easy topic to tackle.  If one doesn't understand the tools, how does one ensure the pieces you put together are working?  So how about we start learning, and do it well?  This is a subject that affects all users and developers, and is something that all DEs can jump on and help out.  Heck we may even learn a thing or two about how our colleagues/friends/enemies work ;-)  It affects us all, and as such we all need to help.

The European Eunion feels fairly strongly about Accessibility and as such there are numerous laws in place to try and ensure that users that require it are given an even chance.  They have also set up AEGIS to promote a11y usage.  In the United states the National Science Foundation is helping to fund HFOSS to help the a11y cause.  So as you can see there's a fairly big push from it from central government.  If we don't follow their example and neglect to have a11y in our focused sights I fear it could lead to a slippery downward slope for openSUSE.  If that sounds melodramatic then maybe it is, but it is something that I honestly do feel could affect us badly.

A quick and dirty way to get into a11y is to just enable accessibility in your session.  You shouldn't notice any difference, if you do then that's a bug!  File the bug, and make sure you mention that you have a11y enabled.

So as a community do you think this is something we could get behind?  I would love to see openSUSE 12.0 released as the most accessible distribution; Ubuntu currently makes the statement that they are the most accessible desktop system available and this is a statement I would love to show as false!  Not through animosity but through sheer prowess of the Geeko!  To do that we (yes that means you at the back, listening to your boom boom music and chatting to your friends on FaceSpace) have to roll our sleeves up and get educated and start educating!

I'm not looking for people to nod in agreement with my call for help, that is easy to do.  What I'm looking for is a concerted effort by all in the community to help make us Number 1!  There are lots of different ways to do this, but to do so we need to unite as one and work cohesively.  So please, help me to help everyone, and make openSUSE that much better!

You have to grant me that I'm persistent ;-)

OK so this time round I thought I'd do a quick round up of some of the feedback that I've received so far - some of it has been in the form of comments on this here blog, others have been responses on mailing lists, and some has been from direct converstation with me.  I'd love to get more from you, and ultimately you get more from yourselves.

The following is in no particular order, and if anyone has anything else to add then please let me know.  Also remember this is a discussion so feel free to discuss sensibly and calmly - usual flame ban is in place ;-) :

1. Still a lot of animosity between KDE & GNOME within openSUSE.
2. The Community Manager role is too focused on marketing, and not the Community.  People would like to see a more operational role, getting involved with the actual project.
3. It is unclear as to what Novell (being the project sponsor) would like from the openSUSE Project, and how do the two fit with each other.
4. There is a percieved distrust of external contributors, their code isnt good enough etc.
5. openSUSE needs to be pushed more by all parties.  There is a distinct lack of overt and covert marketing.
6. There is too much focus on Novell employees.
7. openSUSE has no clear goal or direction,  openSUSE appears to be fumbling along not really sure of what it wants or how to do things.
8. There is too much infrastucture, or the infrastructure isn't easy to navigate or understand.
9. Sometimes we are starting to lag behind upstream and don't necessarily keep up with the latest and greatest that is out there.
10. There is too much reliance on a handful of individuals, there isn't a decent spread of knowledge/power amongst teams.
11. There doesn't seem to be enough "full time" (I believe Novell employee is meant here) people involved in some teams which are core to both openSUSE and SLE. 

So do you agree with what some of your peers say?  If not then step up and let your voice be heard, even if you do let it be known.  Remember, as a member of the community you have a chance to influence your surroundings - not taking any action will only mean that you are to blame not those that took action that you don't agree with.

Oh yes, I'm still going at it folks! Let's discuss :-)

This time round I'd like us to discuss Collaboration, Learning, Listening and Leading.  Let me clarify what I mean by Collaboration; I'm NOT talking about Groupwise/Exchange/Zimbra/Alfresco/SharePoint/Kablink style collabortaion, but I AM talking about working with other parties and teams. 

Within openSUSE as with other distributions there are multiple teams/projects that in some cases could be classed as competitors - GNOME & KDE are a prime example.  Just because they are trying to get you to use them doesn't mean they can't have some commonality (other than the underlying OS).  I'd love to see more collaboration with other distributions, working with them on the topic of say RPM as an example.  Working with upstream DEs and other distros to improve the likes of a11y (that's accessibility for thos that aren't aware, you know - audio/visual/etc impaired), education. You get the idea?  Quite often we need to just look past our differences and get on with the job, soon we'll realise (hoipefully) that we are pretty much the same the difference is in the implementation.  If we focus locally on how we can collaborate within openSUSE alone then we need to work together with a focused vision and take a demographic, say developers, and get everyone interested to chip in with ways of making it easier and better for developers to use openSUSE.  Both KDE and GNOME can easily contribute to this, as can documentation gurus and others.  The key here is to have a clearly defined target and work together, effectively combining multiple teams into one.

So what about Learning?  Well the most obvious way to learn is from history.  I'm not saying we need to dig up the text books from school and see what Claudius Maximus Aurellius did in ancient Rome, but look at the histroy of openSUSE and see what we did right and crucially what we did wrong.  Look at it and see if it still applies today and how we can do it right.  Another way of learning is from our competitors and counterparts, the likes of Ubuntu, Fedora and all the other distros and projects do some great work (whether one likes to admit it or not).  We need to take note of what/how/why they did and see if it applies to us and could we improve it.  I think there is too much of a taboo on emulating what others do, if it works then do it!  Why on earth should we re-invent the blessed wheel?

Something that we are getting a bit better at is Listening.  We're not great at it, but the movement is in the right direction.  When listening it's best to just slow down a touch and actually take stock of what is being said, also take note of how it is being said.  The message could get lost or garbled due to the way it is being passed, and if we don't focus on listening we may not notice that little fact and end up not really paying attention to the message, when in fact the message is actually very important or beneficial to us.  We need to listen to not just our community but also to those communities that we interact with and indirectly depend on - I'm mostly talking about upstream here.  There's a lot of passive learning to be had from just listening ;-)

When it comes to being a Lead, you don't have to be a nominated by committee or anything - grab the bull by the cahunas and run with it! Go with your instinct, unless you are a complete loonie you will have some reasonable rationale for doing whatever it is and can easily explain to others why/what you are doing.  Don't be scared, empower yourself and show others that what you're doing is cool and actually benefits us. 

So does anyone have any examples of where we could benefit by collaborating?  Or what about how we can improve on the instances where we are already collaborating?  What about examples of lessons to be learned from?  Yes this could get political and charged, but remember stay calm and focused - it's easier for people to pay attention that way ;-)  How about listening, any examples of where we failed or where we actually got it?  I'd also like to see who you think show good leadership, and also how/why.  This isn't about who you'd like to see as the next Chairperson for the board or what ever but people that have grabbed those cahunas and run to the finish line.

There is one item that is constant throughout - focus!  If we stay focused then we can do almost anything, even by me a drink :-)

Yup, I'm still trying to get us, the openSUSE Community, to discuss ways we can improve ourselves.  This time round I'm going to look at Education, Coaching and Teamwork.  Again there is nothing groundbreaking or revolutionary here, but these are topics I feel are easily forgotten or misunderstood.

One item that seems to pop up fairly regularily regardless of which side of the fence you're on (Novell employee or not), is community contribution and ownership.  Basically some people think getting code/packages/whatever into openSUSE is harder than getting a rocking horse to poop.  Can I just say it isn't - honest! You just need to know the process to do it.  The flip side of the conversation is, why aren't more non-Novellians putting more code and what not into openSUSE?  Maybe because they don't know or understand the process?  So basically we are all to blame, non-Novellians for not asking for help/clarification and Novellians for not going out there and teaching.

So how do we educate?  Firstly that good old method of documentation, yup it's boring and tedious at times but if done right can save a whole load of hassle.  It does not mean people can just respond to calls for help with RTFM, it mean we have to point people to the correct section of documentaion and also give a little reason as to why they should read it.  Documentation isn't the only method we can use, after all we are well and truly in the Web 2.0 buzzword bingo era; let's use video (screencast/presentation/podcast), anotated images, code examples, comic strips, audio (regular podcast or one offs), and last but not least we could always throw a bit of each into a blog post :-).  We need more of the modern methods, they're much more palatable and fun from a consumer perspective.

Sometimes just having all this information can be daunting, and you can easily get lost in it all.  So we need coaching, some gentle guidance and when needed a good slap!  If we really want more people to take ownership then let's help them take ownership.  Just throwing it out there and hoping for the best is good for no-one, and if anything will just create a bad atmosphere and generate friction.  Let's make sure that those that want to do something get as much help as we can give, it may mean that Novellians have to spend a little bit of time holding people's hands but we will all see the gain.  Don't think that I would expect it all the time, if you take it for granted you won't get the oportunity again.  So to those that want the help, make sure you make it clear that you do want and need help and also try and calm any fears that it's a one off glory hunting mission.  It is a commitment from all parties, and you really need to stick with it.  It may well be that the best person for coaching you isn't a Novell employee, so ask around.  We can all teach each other a thing or two.  A great example of coaching is Darix and all the others in the Buildservice irc channel and mailing list.  Package building can be really daunting, and getting it right can be tricky at times.  Those guys and gals there are a huge asset to the community, they're friendly and very knowledgable.  You just need to not be afraid to ask a question.  If you don't understand an answer, say so!  If you learn something document it and let everyone else know.

Lastly try and not go it alone.  If you can do something as part of a team, then that's a massive win for us all too.  You don't have to shoulder all the burden, so you reduce the risk of burn out and we reduce the risk of you getting angry and leaving either the thing you were doing or worse off you leaving openSUSE entirely.  Getting other people's input can most of the time improve things and spreading the workload also means more peoiple have visibility on what is happening.  So should you not be able to continue for whatever reason (hopefully a valid one, and not because you're bored) then the ball keeps rolling.  It also helps with the whole knowledge sharing aspect, everyone learns a bit and as we grow stronger and brighter as a whole.  The borg is strong because it is made up of many, we can be stronger.

So have you got any examples of where you recieved education/coaching, maybe you had a bad experience trying to get some?  Please let me and everyone know.  We need to learn from our actions, and if we don't know whether they were good or bad how can we improve?  If you have an idea on what needs/can be done then discuss it.  Remember this isn't about me, but about you the openSUSE community.  Let's step up and really make a difference, and prove to all those naysayers that we do care and are actually doing something about it.

Continuing my series of getting the openSUSE Community engaged in how better to improve itself, I thought I would look at Transparency and Communication.  So what do I mean by these two?

If we look at the definitions of these two:
Transparency - Lack of hidden agendas  and conditions, accompanied by the availability  of full  information  required  for collaboration, cooperation, and collective decision making.
Minimum degree of disclosure to which agreements, dealings, practices, and transactions are open to all for verification.
Essential condition for a free and open exchange whereby the rules and reasons behind regulatory measures are fair and clear to all participants.

Communication - Two-way process  of reaching mutual  understanding, in which participants  not only exchange  (encode-decode) information  but also create  and share  meaning.

Okay so nothing earth shattering, which is good in so much as it should be relatively easy to attain.  No need for spiritual enlightenment.  One question I have is, how well do you think openSUSE is at achieving both of these?  Personally I think we have come leaps and bounds, but we can still improve (we can always improve ;-) ).

The building of the distribution is done in the open on the OBS, we get regular status updates from the chirpy and cheerful Coolo on where we are at and what is causing issues.  The Board conducts its meeting in the open on irc in #opensuse-project.  All the teams conduct their meetings in the open on irc for that matter, well those that have meetings - GNOME shall be resuming the regular meetings shortly. 

We have multiple methods of communication available - Mailing lists, IRC, Forums & the booths at events.

So on the whole I think we are communicating well, but are we communicating the right information and is it *all* the information?  That's where I would like your input :-)  My Only complaint I have is something that pretty much everyone who is passionate suffers from - we sometimes let our mouths run off and end up trying to flame someone.  Being passionate is great, don't ever loose the passion.  We just need to harness it, don't let it go too wild.  Also we need to try and be more respectful to others, not just people but projects and distros.  Whether you agree with them or not, there is no need to start throwing abuse or any form of nastiness.  By all means disagree with them but do so in a calm and collected manner, you will be respected for it much more.  If you do get carried away, then for goodness sake admit it and apologise!  Everyone is guilty of this to an extent, myself included.

As for transparency, I think we are certainly on the right track.  Almost everything is now done in the open, I'm not aware of anything done behind closed doors, again let me know if there is any.  If there is we need to know what and crucially why.  Yes I accept that there are occaisions where some things need to be done in relative secrecy but we need to try and keep those to a minimum and there needs to be a good reason for it - financial/legal/etc implications.

So please if you have any comments on either communication or transparency then let's have them.  Without them things will just tick along as they are, and possibly degrade (hopefully there will be none of the latter but....).

For those of you that are about to start shouting at me about iFolder.  Yes it is an old issue that is much more complicated to resolve, there are layers of old school Novell involved and as such it makes things much more complicated.  Also it isn't part of the openSUSE Project it is a Novell project, which is also another reason I believe that things haven't been resolved.  Should it be covered by the Geeko's fine umberella?  What can be done to improve things?  How can we communicate with those that are responsible?  As Jono and Aq say - this is only the start of the conversation.  It's up to you to to keep it going and find the answers you are looking for!

It's been a couple of weeks since my first Discussion with the Community, so as a follow on I thought I would cover the topic of Tools for the community.  In my mind I split tools into two groups - hard & soft.  What I mean by this is "hard" = infrastructure based, and "soft" = software based.

Some may seem pretty obvious to you, and some may seem like they aren't tools at all.  So to clarify what my definition of a tool is - something that enables or facilitates the completion of a task.  So that gives the "Tool" a pretty big scope :-)

Now as a community we have a lot of good tools already available to us.  One of the problems is that we don't really know about them or we've forgotten about them.  So as a refresher here are the "hard" tools (no childish snickering please ;-) ) I can think of, if you notice any that I've missed out please let me know:

• Forums
• Repository/Package Download
• Image Download
• User / Member Directory
• openFate Feature Requests
• Open Build Service
• Shop
• News
• Blogs
• Wiki
• Project Management
• Initial Support
• Home Page
• Bugs
• Mailing Lists
• Source Code
• Planet
• IRC
• Package Search for the OBS & wider community
• Community Wiki
• Notification System
• Video

There is a good mix of tools hosted on Novell infrastructure and that hosted outside of Novell.  For instance the Source code is actually on the Gitorious service, why should we have to maintain our own DVCS when there are open services available?  Also with the Video, we use Blip.tv and will also add YouTube to the toolset for distribution of openSUSE video.  The Planet is hosted on a community owned and run server as is the Community Wiki and package search.  So you can't say we are wholly reliant on Novell :-)

At the moment I don't see anything that we're missing, but I'm sure something will crop up and then we'll go "Ah if only we had XYZ", but when that happens we can look and see what best fits the bill and try and fix it.  The only complaint I think we have is that the integration between the tools isn't as good as it could or should be.  This is something that has been picked up on so don't worry too much, the Boosters are working hard to make things blend naturally.  So it will happen, just not over night.

Okay so that covers the infrastructure bits, what about the software side of things?  Well whilst at the Novell offices in Nurenberg for HackWeeKII, there was a discussion about how to get more people involved in the actual coding of things.  Some of the Novellians were curious as to why no-one was willing to actually pick up some of the code and start sending in patches.  Well I'd like to recommend we look at another big project at Novell, and also to some of the big upstream projects.

Firstly the other project is the Mono Project, those that want to spout holier than thou rubbish can just STFU and do that now!  The Mono guys & gals have made available Virtual Machine images, Live CDs, as well as the required packages.  They include all the required tools to develop with Mono, and also exmple applications and also code so that you can get going real fast.  They have effectivly created a Mono Developer's Kit, but crucially they use openSUSE and they do a fantastic job of pimping the Geeko! Thanks Mono Project, you're doing a sterling job! 

Secondly we have recently seen that KDE have created their Plasma Netbook Reference Platform using openSUSE & our tools, so if anyone wants to look at, tinker with, hack, or do whatever with it they can and easily.  GNOME have a Developer Kit available thanks to the fine Foresight folks (with a whole lot of love from Og Maciel).  It gives everything one needs to get to developing for the GNOME Environment.  Og has also taken the step and started to create a Developer Kit for Django.

So my little mind is starting to tick, and this to those that know me well is always slightly dangerous :-)  Why don't we follow these examples, and provide language and function specific developer kits?  Prove to people that it isn't difficult to make the switch to develop for their preferred language or what ever on openSUSE, give them Live & Installable ISOs, give them VM images. Give them the tools needed to get the job done!

We could always pimp these developer kits at the specific language conferences like PyCon, RailsConf etc.

We have many programming experts within the community, so why don't we pull from that expertise?  Let's get openSUSE Developer kits for Java, Python, Qt, Python, Ruby, PHP, and any other language you think is beneficial.  This isn't about what language is better than the next, it is about getting the message out and showing everyone that it really isnt hard to use openSUSE as your preferred platform.

So now that I've said my piece, what tools do people think we are missing?  Also what issues do people have with our current tool set?  For goodness sake don't just grumble about things let's discuss constructively so we can fix things!

A bad workman always blames his tools, a good workman utilises his tools to their full extent.

Personally I find that in Linux or any OS for that matter, keeping track of and dealing with bugs can be a real PITA.  This may be in part that I'm not a power user of the services available (they don't make it obvious how to fully utilise their service); also there are so many different types of bug trackers out there - bugzilla, trac, mantis, etc; it is also down to so many different projects use their own tracker; one advantage is that code/project hosting sites have their own - SourceForge, Gna!, launchpad, BerliOS, etc.  So all projects under these use the same tool/interface.  Yes bugzilla is probably the most common, but it is also one of the most modified - no two projects using it are the same and the work flow differs as much as the visuals.

As an illustration, I am active or have a keen interest in openSUSE & Bongo.  One uses a customised version of Bugzilla and the other uses GNA!'s Savane.  As a result, I am also in contact with a multitude of other projects (GNOME, KDE, Freedesktop.org, Moblin, Gwibber to name a few).  These all have their own bug trackers on different services, so to add them to the original two means I have at least seven different tracking services to deal with.  My dealings range from filing bugs, to monitoring a bug for information and even the odd occaison where I am assigned a bug to resolve.

Now I know they all pump out emails when something changes to the bug, but having to hunt through my email to get bug ids or whatever is annoying to say the least, not to mention filling up my inbox.  One big gripe is with people adding themselves to the CC list; do I really care if Chief Umbuzweiluh has added himself to the CC list for a particular bug? No!

Now what I would like is:

• An application that can either sit on my desktop or in the notification panel that can help me manage all my bugs.
• The app would need to be cross desktop friendly, so that it doesn't look out of place on whichever DE I'm using - yes I do use more than one :-)
• Ideally offer some form of offline functionality - caching/storing the information locally.
• I don't care what language it is written in, something that anyone can understand would be handy, heck I may even contribute some code if it is easy enough ;-)
• Support multiple backends, as I said I use lots of different trackers so getting the bulk of them supported would be ideal.

When I mention "offline" I would ideally like to have read+write access so that I can then update a bug say if I'm on the move and then the app syncs with the backend next time I'm online.  I appreciate this may be harder to implement so I'd be happy with read only access.  Basically the sort of information I'd like to see is something along the lines of:

|Tracker(1)|BugID(2)|Summary(3)|Status(4)|Role(5)|Product(6)Priority(7)|Severity(8)|+(9)|-(10)|

1. Which bug tracker is it on - Novell, GNOME, Launchpad, KDE, etc. Ideally show the logo of the tracker but if not a short text - BNC, BGO, LP, BKO, etc.
2. The bug number, ideally as a hyperlink so that it can be pasted into and email or IM conversation.
3. The bug summary. Basically whatever is put into the summary field of the bug.
4. The status of the bug - New, Assigned, Re-Opened, Unconfirmed, NeedInfo, Closed.
5. What is your role with the bug - Reporter, Asignee, CC.
6. What product is the bug against.
7. What is the bug's priority - Urgent, High, Normal, Low.
8. What is the bug's severuty - Critical, Major, Normal, Minor, Trivial
9. Add a bug by either ID or url.  In an ideal world one would even be able to generate the whole thing from scratch and when you add it it create the ticket on the service and fills in the bug id for you.
10. Remove a bug. If one is on the CC list it would unsubscribe you from it.

As I'm no code monkey I have no real idea on how to implement my idea, but what I do know is what I would like.  I would be more than happy for an app that just provided the above mentioned table, but in an ideal world the app would also provide the full conversation of the bug showing all comments and any attachments.  Baby steps first, get the basic information available then add features as things progress.

Now I would love for the app to do the notifying of bug changes for me so I can disable all the email notifications I get.  So having some form of notification area presence would be great, and even providing a bubble when something does change:

---------------------------------------------------
| N / BNC(1)|12345(2)|Foo Bar Noob(3) |
---------------------------------------------------

1. Logo or ID of bug tracker
2. Bug ID - clickable
3. What has changed - this could be Status, Role, Product, Priority, Severity

Now depending on how the app works will depend on what happens when one clicks on the bug id. Is there functionality for full context (fat app) or will it just open up in a browser.  The intial services I would like to see are (in priority) - Bugzilla, Savane, Launchpad, Trac, Sourceforge, and then anyting else.

So does anyone fancy being my hero and coding this for me?  It would be great if we could get this as part of GSoC - I'll add it to openFate and the wiki ;-)

If anyone knows of something that exists that provides this functionality please let me know.  Chris Lamb did create a GNOME Applet for the Debian BTS tracker that kind of did this so if it helps have a look here for the code.

I thought it would be a good idea to try and engage you – the fine openSUSE community – in discussion about "Us" the Community.  We seemed to have been spoiled by having a Community Manager, people kind of seemed to let him do the work or worse expected him to do so.  Now that we don't have that position any more we need to go back to basics and start rolling our sleeves up.  We've started but we have much to do.  As such this is the first in I'm not sure how many posts on the subject.
 
To save me having to repeat myself constantly I'll do a small disclaimer now:
THESE ARE MY OPINIONS AND THOUGHTS AND NOT GOSPEL! I AM NOT EMPLOYED BY NOVELL! I WANT TO GET A DISCUSSION GOING NOT A FLAME WAR!
 
In my opinion this topic is linked to my previous post about the "Planning For The Future".  The key here is to remain agile, able to flex, roll, bounce, jump and basically move with the times.  If we impose strict rigid requirements then things will start to crack and crumble.
 
So what do I see as key items needed to enable more community contributions, and get more non-Novellians involved in taking a more (pro)active role in the Project?

• Tools - we need an enabler of sorts that lets people start off small and get to grips with how things move, from there they can grow out and up.
• Transparency - ensuring that the decisions that are made are clear concise and understandable.  I'm ure not everyone will like the decisions but if they can see the reasons behind it then they can work with it and maybe come up with a better alternative.
• Communicate - this is something that has improved a lot over time but still has some ways to go.  There are certain parties that still don't understand how to communicate with the wider community but they can and are an integral part of the ecosystem, we need to educate and help them get better.
• Coach - no-one can get to a suitable proficiency in any subject whether it be academic/sporting/whatever without some form of tutelage.  To help lighten the work load on the employees that are trying to juggle between their enterprise workload and community workload we need to have them spend some time away from their corporate duties to help with some knowledge and skill sharing.
• Teamwork - stop depending on individuals, whether they are Novellian or non-Novellian one person can't do it all in their supposed subject matter of expertise.
• Educate - self market, not just to the outside world but internally too.  The openSUSE community is too modest for it's own good at times, we need to be more vocal about all the fantastic stuff we do.  We have to be clear and concise in the message we send out across the community.
• Learn - look at our peers and take a leaf out of their book sometimes.  Believe it or not they do do things right sometimes ;-) I'm not saying copy, but try and take the bits that are needed and roll it into what you want.
• Collaborate - work with our peers on universal matters.  This doesn't just mean cross-desktop, but also cross-project and cross-distro.
• Listen - take a moment to hear what is being said.  Just taking that little bit of extra time can help isolate the noise from the message and help you understand what is being said/asked.  Remember that not everyone is a native speaker of your language so things might get lost/confused in translation, which is where that little bit of time will help.
• Lead - you don't have to do things by committee.  If you see something that needs/can be done just do it!  We dither around far too much waiting for someone else to do it.  Do what you can and then communicate what you've done and what if anything is outstanding.

All the above link into one another almost inextricably, so not doing one will most likely have an detrimental effect on the rest.

We already have several items that are great examples of how the community can get on and do something great, a sample of those are:

• openSUSE Education - this team started from very little and have created one of the best educational derivatives of any distro.  There is a good mix of people involved, and no-one is paid to do it, even on the Novell side.  They're a well knit team of contributors that are more than happy to help people wanting to help them. They saw a gap and filled it, by taking a leaf out of one of our peers' book and enhanced it.
• Packman - the great resource for the common user.  They are one of the oldest community based projects relating to openSUSE or its earlier iterations that I remember.  They're approachable friendly and have a heck of a lot of knowledge.  They saw a need and did it.
• LXDE - a new desktop environment that is only a couple of years old.  It has effectively been packaged from scratch by one person and is now included in Factory and the upcoming 11.3 release.  There was no committee discusion about doe we want it in or should we have it in, there was an opportunity and it was capitalised on.

Now I'd love to hear from people on what they think is missing or blocking them from doing any/all of the above, I'd also like to know what it is that people find awkward or difficult in joining in and being more active.  Don't get me wrong I appreciate one of the most precious and costly commodities is pretty much standard across the board - that of time.  I suffer from that problem as much as anyone, but it doesn't stop me from contributing, sometimes I just ave to slow down and trickle the contributions rather than pour them.  So let's start the conversation and get ideas and complaints out in the open.  If you don't say it how are people going to know about it?

Remember that this is an open dialogue.  Pot shots, defamation of character, flaming, and anything non-constructive will NOT be tolerated.  Let's keep it clean and helpful.  Listing things that our peers do better than us and also what they do worse than us would most likely open eyes.
 
How one gets to the future greatly depends on how one deals with the present and learns from the past.