I’ve been meaning to do this for a while… I have an Eee PC, but want to go ahead and put openSUSE on it — which isn’t quite as straightforward as putting openSUSE on a standard laptop or PC.

Lucky for me, Sonja Krause-Harder took the time to figure things out and document the experience of putting openSUSE on the Eee PC. Now all I need to do is follow the instructions and slap openSUSE on the machine. I’ll give a report on Monday about it, and the openSUSE on Eee PC experience, after I’ve had a chance to do the installation.

Also, I’d love to hear from openSUSE users who have installed openSUSE on “unusual” hardware — especially if you have some documentation for other users to follow.

Just a quickish note to anyone looking for me on IRC lately — when I am logged into IRC, I’m logged in as “jbrockmeier” rather than “zonker” because someone else on IRC registered “zonker” long before I was spending vast amounts of time on IRC.

So, sorry for any confusion — but if you’re looking for me, keep your eyes peeled for a “jbrockmeier” on Freenode, and “jzb” on OFTC (when I’m there).

You’d think that there wouldn’t be very many people using the “zonker” nick, but I guess that’s at least two. Three, if you count “zonk” on Slashdot.

Update: This post was inspired by two events today — James Ogley has kindly started adding IRC nicks on Planet SUSE, and having someone trying to find me on IRC and failing because I was not logged in as “zonker.”

Planning to attend LugRadio Live and/or LinuxFest Northwest? openSUSE will have a booth at both of these shows, and we’re looking for a few volunteers to help answer questions and talk to other community members at the openSUSE booth.

We’d love to have more community representation at the booth, so if you’re going to be around and have some time available, we’d love to have you! Interested? Drop me an email and we can work out the details.

Speaking of IRC — just a reminder to watch the openSUSE meetings page on the wiki. Today there’s a KDE meeting in just a little while (at 19:00 UTC/20:00 CET) and a GNOME meeting tomorrow at 17:00 UTC/18:00 CET. Please be sure to attend if you’re interested in KDE or GNOME. (Or both…)

If you can’t attend and/or just want to know what’s discussed, the logs are posted after the meetings — so check the wiki for the transcripts after the meetings.

Wanted to point to an excellent post by Benji Weber, calling for participation in IRC:

The #suse channel on the freenode IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network is one of the places users can go to get support with openSUSE. The channel has suffered a little over recent months from the loss of some regular participants. Since the opening of the openSUSE project many of the channel regulars have become involved in other areas of the openSUSE project, leaving less time for user support on IRC.

While the regular participants may have decreased, the throughput of users seeking help shows no sign of abating. There is a danger that with fewer people helping in the channel, users will either not get help or be put off by the attitude of a few in the channel.

There are regular complaints from a few about the state of the #suse IRC channel, often as an excuse for not participating. This does somewhat irritate me as it is one of the easiest things to fix yourself. Simply join the channel and participate, even a single person does make a big difference to the whole channel. Complaining helps nobody, and only serves to discourage those who are helping.

A couple of comments — first, I’m really happy to see openSUSE community members being proactive and trying to improve avenues of communication and support. Many thanks to Benji for stepping up here.

Second — if you have some time available and you’re familiar with openSUSE, please do join the channel from time to time to assist new users — we have a number of support avenues for openSUSE (mail, IRC, forums, etc.) but IRC is really useful for some folks because it’s available in real time.

Finally, I want to stress the importance of being polite and helpful to other members of our community. Remember that there’s another person on the end of the IRC client (or mail client, or forum, whatever) and that it’s extremely important to put our best foot forward in communicating with new users and with other community members.

If you’re going to be in #suse or other openSUSE-related channels, please remember that a user’s first contact with a member of the community could be the last contact with our community, or it could be the first step to a long and healthy relationship where a person eventually becomes a contributor to the openSUSE project, or (more likely) somewhere in between.

But it’s very important to remember just how powerful first impressions can be, and also to remember that negative interactions are often far more memorable than positive interactions — and if someone comes to IRC or the mailing lists or forums and has a bad experience, they’re much more likely to relate that experience to others.

Let’s please not give anyone cause to spread the meme that the Linux community in general, or the openSUSE community in particular, is unhelpful or rude. The very concept of open source is one of being helpful and sharing with other people — that should extend beyond the code and distribution of code to the demeanor of those who represent our community to new users.

I would hate to think that we would lose even one potential Linux user because someone in IRC failed to be polite and helpful. And Benji is right, complaining* is usually useless — if you see a problem in the community, the best thing to do is to step up and say, “right, what can I do to help?” or just start doing what you can. Have fun with it — life’s too short to focus on the negative.

Again, if you have time and want to help new users, please join #suse and help as many folks as you can. As often as I’m the road, it’s been a bit difficult to be in IRC very often, but I plan to make a point to be in IRC as much as possible the next few days after I get back from OSBC. Please say “hi,” if you see me (jbrockmeier) signed in.

(*This is not to say that openSUSE members are not open to constructive criticism or having it pointed out that there’s a problem — there is a difference between trying to point out a problem and just complaining. I hope everyone in the community will always feel welcome to contact me or the board or other members of the openSUSE team.)

It’s been a few days since BrainShare 2008 wound up, and I thought I’d try to put up a quick summary of the event for those in the community who didn’t have the opportunity to attend this year.

Now, BrainShare isn’t an open source “community” show per se — it’s primarily about Novell’s enterprise products and partners, and lots and lots of sessions for Novell’s customers to dig in and learn about various technologies from Novell and its partners.

However, there was still a fair amount of interest in openSUSE at the counter in the Technology Lab, and the two sessions Adrian Schroeter and I did on KDE4 were fairly well attended. The openSUSE booth was primarily staffed by Adrian and Martin Lasarsch this year, and they did a great job of answering questions about openSUSE and the openSUSE Build Service.

Thanks much to Will Stephenson for putting the KDE4 presentation together — sorry you couldn’t attend, Will, I hope you’ll be there next year! (Will proposed the session in the first place…)

In general, in the tech lab and away from the tech lab, I found that a lot of BrainShare attendees were very interested in openSUSE and understanding how openSUSE relates to Novell’s enterprise products. The simple elevator pitch I settled on for those brief conversations is that openSUSE is the foundation for Novell’s enterprise Linux. Or, as Josh Dorfman likes to say “openSUSE is the lifeblood of SUSE Linux Enterprise.” Also found a lot of people within Novell who are interested in helping openSUSE, which is quite encouraging.

BrainShare from the inside

So, this was my first BrainShare as a Novell employee — I attended in 2006 as press, but seeing it from behind the scenes is something else entirely. Like a lot of week-long conferences, if you’re going to attend BrainShare (as an employee, attendee, or partner) plan to get plenty of rest before and after the event.

If you try to do even two-thirds of the stuff on the agenda, plus going out in the evening with other attendees and to the sponsored events (like the Collective Soul concert Novell hosted at the Energy Solutions Arena Wednesday night…) you’re going to be pretty well wiped out by the end of the week.

Hack Week keynote

My big focus while at BrainShare was putting together the Hack Week portion of the keynote for Friday. Novell has a tradition of displaying new technology and such on Friday, and a lot of attendees seem to really look forward to that part of the show. It’s also a little more casual than the Monday and Wednesday sessions.

I definitely owe Guy Lunardi a big thanks for his help putting together the Hack Week presentation, and a big thanks to all the presenters who did demos:

• Srinivasa Ragavan and Rob Luhrs — who did the Evolution and Teaming + Conferencing demo (Srini came all the way from India to show off his work from Hack Week, integrating Evolution and Teaming+Conferencing.)
• Frank Rego and Ranjan Gupta — They demoed some work Novell is doing on embedded virtualization.
• Boyd Timothy and Calvin Gaisford — Boyd and Calvin showed off Tasque and some integration with Giver and Tomboy.
• Guy Lunardi and Brady Anderson — they did the “threefer” demo, with OpenOffice.org improvements, GNOME Conduit, and a look at Banshee 1.0 that included some very last-minute improvements courtesy of Aaron Bockover.

You can find some awesome pictures from BrainShare Friday on Eric Ward’s photo set on Flickr. I wish my pictures turned out as well as his… great stuff.

I was pleased that the demos went off without a hitch during the Friday keynote. Also, a little surprised since at least one demo would blow up each time we’d rehearse… of course, that’s why it worked during the live show — if the demos had functioned properly during rehearsals, everything would have suffered from massive fail during the show.

Now, what the BrainShare attendees didn’t see is all the work that went on behind the scenes to prep for the keynotes. For example, for Friday’s demos we started talking about and planning the demos in late February. We had help from a number of people like Scott Hayes, Janice Hill, Mike Morgan, and Troy Monney to organize the demos, prepare all the slides and help us with staging… they worked some long hours before and during BrainShare to make sure that the show went off without a hitch.

I have to say, I thought it was a really good show, and I’m looking forward to having more time to plan for BrainShare 2009.

Polishlinux.org has a great preview of KDE 4.1 by Korneliusz Jarzebski, which has tons of screenshots and info on KDE 4.1 applications and new features. Spiffy!

As I’m getting ready for the big Friday keynote here at BrainShare, it occurred to me to mention a few other events where I’ll be speaking in the near future:

• SDForum in San Francisco, Monday March 24th — moderating a panel.
• OSBC in San Francisco, Wednesday March 26th — appearing on a panel. (Also note that Novell’s Roger Levy will be appearing on a panel discussion about the future of operating systems.)
• LugRadio Live US, April 12th - 13th (Also at LugRadio Live from Novell– Miguel de Icaza and Aaron Bockover, both of whom probably need no introduction.)
• Penguicon, April 18th - April 20th

And many others are in the works. So that’s where I’ll be — but I want to start putting together a calendar of events for all openSUSE and Novell folks who work with open source, so if you’re speaking/presenting at an event in the nearish future, please send me a note and let me know — I want to make sure everyone knows where they can find openSUSE people out and about!

And if you aren’t speaking or presenting, please think about doing so — this is one of the best ways to get the word out about the work that you’re doing. We have tons of experts in the openSUSE and Novell community, and lots of people are interested in hearing about the work that you’re doing. So — if you need some help brainstorming topics and whatnot, also feel free to email me and I’d be happy to try to help other members of the openSUSE community to place talks and so forth.

Hello from Salt Lake City! Today was the first full day of BrainShare sessions at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, Utah.

First thing this morning I went to the General Session (a.k.a. “keynote”) with Ron Hovsepian, Jeff Jaffe, John Dragoon, and Jim Ebzery. (If you couldn’t make it, or just want to relive the experience, the vids are already up on the BrainShare site here.) The room was packed — not sure how many people were at the general session, but it was a huge room, and looked quite full from where I was sitting.

Jeff talked about Novell’s Fossa project, which is about “computing and collaborating with agility.” (The fossa is a particularly agile animal that’s native to Madagascar.) Jeff spent a fair amount of time talking about Linux and the importance of open source to Novell’s strategy.

Even though I knew that already, it’s good to hear it articulated during a major keynote like this — and, of course, it’s important to talk about with Novell’s partners and customers. One of the things I’m enjoying at BrainShare is the opportunity to talk with people who’ve been using Novell stuff for years and years, and who are getting excited about Linux and open source. It’s also fun to get to talk about openSUSE with BrainShare attendees.

I had a chance to wander backstage after the keynote… I don’t mind saying that Novell really has some grade A showmanship going on. Seriously — I’ve spent quite a lot of time attending trade shows as a journalist, and I don’t think that I’ve been to any other shows that are quite so well-produced. (The Salt Palace, by the way, is huge — I wonder if I can rent a bike for getting from the Technology Lab to the Press Room…) After the session I spent a fair amount of time catching up with fellow Novell employees that I typically only interact with over the phone, or via email and IM, and spending some time at the openSUSE counter in the Technology Lab.

Tomorrow Adrian and I will be giving a presentation on KDE4 at 4 p.m. We went over it this afternoon, and I think it’s going to be a good session — many thanks to Will Stephenson who put the presentation together originally, but was unable to be at BrainShare to do the presentation himself.

If you’re at BrainShare, be sure to stop by the openSUSE booth in the Novell Technology Lab. We’re showing off openSUSE Factory and answering questions about openSUSE development and the build service.

I’m happy to announce that the openSUSE Project has been accepted to Google’s Summer of Code 2008! Now the real fun begins!

We’re now in the “interim period” for students to discuss application ideas with mentoring organizations. (That’d be us.) Students will then have from March 24th through March 31st to apply to Google. See our ideas page, and Google’s SoC 2008 FAQ for more info and timeline.

Kudos to Google for acting quickly on this — applications for organizations were due last Wednesday, and I was notified this afternoon that we had been accepted. That’s pretty speedy, given the number of applications I’m sure they had to read through.