A couple of months ago, I picked up an Eee PC with the thought that it’d be a good thing to have on trips and whatnot — the last few trips I’ve been on, I’ve barely been able to open my laptop after the person in front of me has leaned back in their seat, whereas the Eee PC has such a tiny footprint that it’d be ideal for cramped spaces.

While it’s groovy that the Eee PC runs Linux, I’ve been thinking about how to put openSUSE on the little beast. Lucky for me, Sonja Krause-Harder is already working on it as a Hack Week II project:

(I wonder if desktop effects would have any prayer of working on the Eee PC?)

Nice work, Sonja! The files aren’t up yet for this, but Sonja writes that the documentation and whatnot will be up on the wiki later. I hope to bump mine up to 1GB of RAM from 512MB before I head out to Nuremberg on Sunday, and I wouldn’t mind putting openSUSE on it before then, too.

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a few days — in case you’ve (nearly) missed it, this week is Hack Week 2 (or is that Hack Week II? Revenge of Hack Week? Son of Hack Week?)  — we turn the developers loose for a week to work on “side” projects without having to worry about usual duties and deadlines. Or, as Hans Petter Jansson puts it, “the programmers at Novell, get to goof around with more or less whatever project we find interesting.”

You can see what Hack Week I helped create over on the SUSE Idea Pool. If you want to give developers some ideas on what to work on, you can add an idea on the ideas site.

A couple of interesting projects have caught my eye.  Federico Mena Quintero is working to reduce login time for GNOME. Hans Petter Jansson is working on a Mono-based app called “Sterling” for money management that would be more streamlined than GnuCash. Andreas Schneider and Sven Schober are working on a rewrite of lomoco, a tool to manage the vendor-specific options of Logitech USB mice. (Since I’m using a Logitech USB mouse right now, this one sounds fairly interesting to me…)

I’ll be profiling some of these projects in more detail in the very near future. If you’re working on something fun and interesting for Hack Week II that you’d like to draw attention to, drop me an email or leave a comment.  (Remove the “nospam” bit from the email before sending…)

While I was browsing Planet SUSE, I noticed that Duncan Mac-Vicar is working on faster package management and is looking for help in testing and such:

The whole stack is now designed as unix tools, so this will allow our repositories to ship solv files, which can in turn be downloaded by libzypp. So you don’t need to generate a cache locally if the solv file is already available on the server. This is not implemented yet.

There also other open issues. We don’t parse translations and only the suse media parser stores attributes like descriptions. Patches and packages are not installed (but this has also another reason I will talk about it later). The package management user interface won’t compile (I haven’t tried) yet.

This new level of performance would allow us to bring package management on openSUSE not to the smart or yum level, but a complete new generation ahead. And this will open the door for smooth integration with CIM and PackageKit and will bring fresh air during the road to the next generation of SLES and SLED.

If you are an openSUSE contributor, we do need help with testing, and there are lot of “mechanical” jobs to do which don’t require much experience with the platform (but compiling). If you want to see this in 11.0 and can contribute, please contact us .

Since I know we all want to have the fastest package management possible, I’m sure there will be a mad rush of openSUSE folks looking to contribute.

Oh, and Duncan totally gets it right here:

I haven’t blogged since some time. We have been working hard to get package management stack changes in so we can have them in one of the next alphas. I wanted to make a small pause and write about it because communication is (sometimes) as important as coding

Emphasis added, and I couldn’t agree more…

Checking out Nat’s blog earlier today I noticed that he, too, has succumbed to the Twitter bug. His assessment of Twitter(ing) might be a tad harsh — I like to think of Twitter as blogging for people with really short attention spans, or as a nice form of Web-based text messaging…

I wonder if I should add Twittering to the methods I mentioned yesterday as a method of low-impact PR: don’t have time to write up a long post about project updates? Pop in a short note on Twitter. Create a Twitter account for your project that folks can watch for updates, and just drop a short note there daily or at least weekly.

Do enough people in openSUSE use Twitter for it to be worth using? My account is here, I’ll be updating it pretty frequently, though I can’t promise all the, uh, tweets (?), will be openSUSE-specific.

After watching the Linux and open source space for the better part of 12 years, it’s occurred to me several times that our largest problem is not technical — it’s promotions. Think about it — Linux is a fantastic desktop OS, and would be even better with more user momentum behind it (because we’d have far greater hardware support, etc.) — so why isn’t Linux taking the world by storm?

Partly because we have a PR problem. As Sarah Stokely

While desktop use of open source is less than one percent, this has been predicted to double this year. And with market penetration approaching 25 percent, open source browser Firefox is gradually eroding Internet Explorer’s lead in the browser market.

So how is it that even senior members of the IT sector can still be operating under the impression that open source has failed? This signals a big PR failure, not a technology failure. The visibility of open source is lagging way behind its capabilities. Despite being several decades old, open source and open licensing still needs proving to the market.

That’s so very, very true, and I’m glad to see people talking about the importance of marketing and PR for open source. Though marketing isn’t one of those things that open source developers get excited about, it is a necessary component to a successful project. Projects that fail to promote themselves usually don’t succeed.

This is something I’ll be talking about a lot — how openSUSE contributors (and other open source contributors) can help to promote the project.

I was brought on board, in part, to help increase the visibility of the openSUSE Project, and all the good stuff that’s being done by our developers. But, this isn’t something one person can do alone for any project — it’s possible for one person to spearhead the effort and be out in front of the project, but to be most effective, other folks from the community have to get involved too. So, what can you do?

A couple of things come to mind:

• Blog — I’d love to see openSUSE contributors blogging about their efforts and discussing the state of their projects — and, when needed, asking for help in areas where the project(s) could use assistance.
• Talk — I’ll be attending a lot of shows this year and giving talks about openSUSE and community issues. However, I’d like to see lots of openSUSE folks at shows and regional events discussing their specific projects and how to get involved with openSUSE. There are far too many LUG meetings and regional events for one human being to attend.
• Publish — Want to promote openSUSE and make some money, too? Yes! Publishers will actually pay for well-written articles that discuss open source technologies and/or tutorials that demonstrate how to use technologies. Lots of magazines and Web sites are hungry for author. Contact me if you want some advice on how to get in touch with these folks with a professional query letter. (Hint: writing “how about openSUSE?” to the editors address isn’t quite enough to convince an editor that you’re going to deliver a decent article…)
• Be Open and Friendly — I can’t stress this one enough. As an openSUSE user and contributor, you can help bring in more users simply by being friendly and supportive to new users. Never, ever “go negative” about other distros or OSes — just let people know what’s great about openSUSE, and they’ll be interested.

That’s four ways you can help promote openSUSE without any marketing background at all. You don’t know anything about “branding” or “messaging” to anyone — just take some time to publicize how you’re contributing to openSUSE (or other projects) and be positive about it. If the open source community can work together to overcome the technical hurdles that we’ve faced in creating Linux and the ecosystem of open source software we have today, surely we can tackle the PR problem.

Just back from SCALE (well, “back” is a relative term — I’m actually at Novell’s Waltham office today, rather than my home office in Florida) and I’ve got to hand it to Ilan Rabinovitch, Orv Beach, Gareth Greenaway, and the rest of the gang involved in organizing SCALE — the show went off without a hitch, and it was a lot of fun as well as a great opportunity to get together with other members of the Linux and open source community.

Ted Gould of Inkscape, and Ilan Rabinovitch of SCALE

Hallway Track

While I find planned sessions fairly valuable, the most interesting part of any conference for me is the so-called “hallway track,” which is when you have a chance to actually meet face to face with other folks in the open source community. No amount of contact via phone, IRC, IM, and/or email can substitute for talking to people face-to-face. (Particularly when you combine face-to-face with the “beer in hand” protocol…)

One good way to meet lots of people in the community is to just hang out at the project booth and help answer questions. I was not, thankfully, alone in the booth this weekend. We had openSUSE evangelist Martin Lasarsch in for SCALE, all the way from Nuremberg, Germany, and Josh Dorfman from the Waltham office to help answer questions and take comments about openSUSE.

Giving out swag doesn’t hurt, either — we gave away a ton (not literally…) of stuffed tuxes, Geekos, openSUSE t-shirts, and openSUSE 10.3 DVDs. We were showing off the openSUSE desktop with Compiz and KDE4, and it seems like Compiz is still new to a lot of folks — judging by the “oohs” and “aahs” we were getting when we’d demo the desktop effects.

Great Talks

I only had the chance to attend a few talks — I went to see my friend Rikki Kite on the Women in Open Source panel on Friday, caught Stormy Peters’ talk on Friday as well as her keynote (”Would you do it again for free”) on Sunday morning. Again, thanks to the SCALE organizers for starting the day at 10 a.m. instead of 9 a.m.!

Women in Open Source panel at SCALE

I also caught Don Marti’s “ifdown -a” talk, about being more productive by being offline when you’re trying to work. Don had some really good ideas and examples, but I’m not quite sure that I’m ready to go into offline mode, excepting when I’m working on a flight…

Ted Haeger was unfortunate in drawing the end-of-conference death slot — that’s the slot when the bulk of attendees have already packed up to catch an early flight home or adjourned to the bar — but still managed to draw a respectable crowd to his talk. Ted talked about Bungee Labs‘ “Bungee Connect,” a way to build online apps through the Web browser. It’s an interesting business model, but also bumps up against some interesting problems in licensing, which he discussed at some length. It should be informative to see how those issues shake out as Bungee grows.

Me and Ted Haeger at SCALE

Unfortunately, I missed Jono Bacon’s keynote on Saturday, which is a drag because Jono never fails to give a good talk.

Summing Up

I really can’t say enough good things about SCALE, as a conference — it’s well-organized, draws an excellent group of open source enthusiasts and contributors, has great talks, it’s inexpensive to attend, and very convenient if you stay in the Westin hotel while at the show (the show is held downstairs). I was glad that they decided to expand the show to three days (two days of tracks plus an extra day at the beginning of mini-conferences and “SCALE University”) as that’s a much better timeframe to settle in and get into the rhythm of the show.

Since it seemed fairly relevant, I made a point to attend Stormy Peters‘ talk “What does a community manager do?” on the first day of SCALE. Having just taken on that role here with openSUSE, I was curious to see whether my job description was in line with Peters’ interpretation of the community manager role, and also wanted to see if I could snag a few good ideas.

Stormy Peters talks about community managers

I was pleased to see that 1) a lot of people in the room (maybe one-third) were community managers (if by that title or another), and 2) the people in attendance seemed to largely agree on what, in fact, community managers are supposed to be doing.

So what are community managers supposed to be doing? Well, here’s a short list:

• Community managers advocate for the community.
• Community managers help the community grow.
• Community managers work as an “interpreter” to explain community problems to the developers and the project leadership/company.
• Community managers tend to the overall health of the community.

What community managers don’t do:

• Community managers don’t tell people what to do.

That’s probably the most important point right there — community managers for open source projects have a responsibility to care for the relationship between the company and the open source community, to advocate for the community, and to help the community grow — but it’s not a “managerial” role in the sense of having authority over the community. It’s really the other way ’round — a good community manager is working for the community, and that’s what I’m interested in doing with openSUSE.

Apparently, it’s a growing field, too — Peters says she found about 50 companies looking to hire “community managers” — and many of these companies are outside of open source. That tells me that a lot of companies are looking to understand their customers and have a two-way conversation with the folks who support their business. (As opposed to, say, the one-way communication between organizations like the MPAA and RIAA — where customers have been saying “hi, we really want to have music and movies in formats we can enjoy on any device, without the nasty DRM, thanks!” and the RIAA and MPAA have been saying “we can’t hear yooooou!” and “prepare to get sued!” That’s the most extreme example, but the bottom line is that a lot of companies could do a better job of listening to the people they do business with — and some are starting to realize that.)

Overall, Peters’ talk was a lot of fun, she’s a really engaging speaker and did a great job of getting the audience involved and getting feedback from the group — I’d strongly recommend catching one of her talks if you have the opportunity to do so at another conference and to check out her blog. She’ll be giving a keynote talk here at SCALE on Sunday, and I’m really looking forward to that one as well.

I’ve been hanging out in #openSUSE-project for a few days now, and the question posed to me most frequently is what desktop are you running? I guess this is usually a straightforward question — pick a desktop you like and stick with it, right?

Right now, I’m using KDE on my main desktop. Let me show you it:

I’ve got a dual-head video card, and two 20″ Dell widescreen monitors — which openSUSE 10.3 had no problem detecting and putting to work. (I like a LOT of screen space…)

But I’m also running GNOME, on my spiffy new work ThinkPad. And I use Xfce on my desktop from time to time, too. Why? A couple of reasons — one, it’s a habit from my days as a freelance writer to run multiple desktops. Being familiar with more software meant being able to pitch and write more articles.

Two, I want to kick the tires, so to speak. When a new release of GNOME, Xfce, or KDE is out, I can’t wait to get my hands on it. (Kudos to the openSUSE team for having KDE 4.0 and 4.0.1 packages out fast, fast, fast!)

Also, over the years, I have gotten to know a number of GNOME and KDE developers and contributors, and I want to be able to see what they’ve been working on and give an honest opinion if I’m asked. But, mostly? It’s the fun. I enjoy using KDE and GNOME, but for different reasons.

So, what’s on your desktop, and why?

It hardly seems like a year has passed since I attended SCALE 5x, but here it is time to pack up and head out for the sixth Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) — which takes place this weekend, February 8 through February 10 at the Westin Los Angeles Airport.

I had the good fortune to attend last year and had a great time. Looking at the line-up for this year’s show, I suspect it’s going to be even more fun.

Because old habits die hard, I’ll still be reporting from SCALE this year. More specifically, I’ll be blogging about the show and will try to get some quality photos from the event as well. (While I’m on that topic — I’m looking for a new digital camera to replace my aging Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z20. Any suggestions from openSUSE users on best choices for digital cameras, or cameras to avoid at all costs?)

So, look for photos and reports from SCALE this weekend. If you’re attending, be sure to head by the openSUSE booth — I’m looking forward to meeting some of the openSUSE community live and in person, and participating in the “hallway track” at the show and talking shop about Linux, open source, and openSUSE.

I’m all about getting feedback from openSUSE users and potential users, so if you’re at SCALE, make a beeline for the openSUSE booth and let us know what you think about openSUSE.

See you in LA!

Fire up those IRC clients and head over to the #openSUSE-project channel on Freenode today at 17:00 GMT for the openSUSE Project meeting. One of the key topics we’ll be discussing this week is the proposed Code of Conduct. Given the importance of the CoC, I hope we’ll see a record turnout in IRC today to participate in the discussion.

There will also be an update on the status of Factory and the build service. The rest of the agenda is available on the wiki — you can post questions to be discussed during the meeting via the wiki, or ask tomorrow via IRC.

Be sure to watch the Meetings page, we keep a list of upcoming meetings there so everyone can keep track of the schedule and participate. We also have a KDE meeting coming up next week, February 13, at 19:00 GMT. Hope to see you there!