Novell is working with Microsoft to help Microsoft cooperate and contribute to open source projects under open source licenses, and sticking with the existing standards to do so. Keen observers of the tech industry might note that this is a bit of a rarity, but it’s something that I hope we’ll see more of from Microsoft.

The announcement went out today that Novell and Microsoft are collaborating around the OpenPegasus project and other system management tools.

Thanks to Novell, Microsoft is going to be contributing to several open source projects — and making Linux easier to manage. Yes, you read that right. It will also make Windows easier to manage using Linux tools — which is going to be a breath of fresh air for Linux admins tasked with managing Windows boxen as well.

I spoke to Eric Anderson, vice president of engineering for Novell, about the agreement and got some additional details on how the deal came about, and a little background. Eric says that Novell was approached by Microsoft for help working on these projects and that we happily agreed to do so, as long as Microsoft work with those communities and contribute back to them.

Of course, one of my first questions was “what licenses will Microsoft be contributing under?” The OpenPegasus project itself is licensed under the MIT license, and other parts of the project involve providers under the SBLIM which is under the Common Public License, and providers that are under a BSD license.

Microsoft will also be submitting some code under one of its OSI-approved licenses.

Why this is important

Getting Microsoft involved, as an equal participant in the project, is a huge step. Microsoft has started to take tentative steps into the open source community, but this is one of the first times that Microsoft is going to be participating on equal footing with the rest of the open source community on a project started externally.

I may be an idealist — OK, I am an idealist — but I think nothing but good can come from getting developers to sit down together and work on common code — even when, maybe especially when, one of the parties at the table is Microsoft.

It’s hard to maintain a hard-line stance when you sit down and work with another person on a common problem. I don’t expect an overnight cultural change at Microsoft as part of this collaboration, but I think it will have a positive effect. The only way to find out is to try.

This is, of course, good for Linux and the community too — anything that makes it easier to manage Linux boxes along side Windows (or in any heterogeneous environment, for that matter) is going to help Linux adoption. Giving Windows admins tools to easily administer Linux boxes will help to remove some of the barriers to adoption in Microsoft environments.

I talk to admins all the time who express frustration in getting Linux into their environment, who have to fight arguments against Linux because it lacks the standard management tools that come with Windows. Well, that argument will be easily dismissed in the not-too-distant future, and I think that will help accelerate the adoption of Linux in the enterprise even more.

Of course, this is good for Microsoft as well. Its customers have been asking for Linux, and by providing better Linux support, Microsoft makes its customers happy, and helps Microsoft remain relevant with those customers. But this also means that Linux will continue to spread through the enterprise, and that’s not a bad thing at all.

It’s not just Novell and Microsoft in the management boat, though — this is something that has been a sore point for Linux for years, and we’re hoping that the community can work together on this front to make Linux management easier.

Eric stressed the opportunity in this arrangement for the Linux community to help improve Linux management capabilities as well. Eric says he’d like to see the Pegasus community work on writing management providers so that every service (where it makes sense) is manageable through this framework and so that the Linux management experience is as cohesive, powerful, and easy as any other platform on the market.

I couldn’t agree more — the easier it is to manage and work with Linux systems, all the better for Linux adoption.

It takes a pretty good event to make it worthwhile to cross the country to attend, but LinuxFest Northwest lived up to the challenge this weekend. The last time I made the trek to Seattle it was to see Robyn Hitchcock and the Venus 3 at the Crocodile Cafe, and I have to say that LFNW was almost as much fun — but it lacked Peter Buck on guitar.

LinuxFest Northwest took place at the Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham, Washington — which is about an hour and a half from Seattle, assuming traffic is good. Apparently, that’s a faulty assumption, though, as it took me about an hour and a half just to get a few miles out of Seattle on Friday after I landed at the Seattle-Tacoma airport.

But it was well worth the trip. I had a chance to meet a lot of Linux users — and openSUSE users in particular. Dave Herman, Wesley Taylor, and James Mason showed up to help staff the openSUSE booth, as well as Novell’s Frank Rego.

Thanks to Dave, Wes, and James the booth was very well covered during the entire fest — I hope we can continue to draw great volunteers like them at other shows.

I was impressed by the number of attendees that showed up for LFNW this year — the “official” count is, I think, about 750 people — but that is only based on the number of people who came by and took a schedule each day, which is sort of a lossy measure for the number of attendees. I am pretty sure the actual number is closer to 1,000 or more attendees.

The show was chock full of awesome — there were plenty of sessions going on most of the time, the exhibit floor was laid out really well so that people had plenty of space to get around and see the various vendors and projects exhibiting at the show. The organizers also leveraged the location, and had the culinary students at the college put on a nice salmon BBQ on Saturday that was very good — and absolutely stellar when compared to the standard convention food.

The facility is excellent for the fest — it has plenty of classrooms that are well suited for technical presentations. The location is very nice as well — and Bellingham is an inexpensive city to travel to, though it is a bit of a haul from Seattle.

The crowd that showed up for LFNW was really fun and I enjoyed meeting and talking to openSUSE community members and potential community members and users.

Sunday, at the end of the conference, we had a room to host a birds of a feather for openSUSE users — and I’m really pleased with the turnout, considering that it was the final slot of the day on the second day of the fest. (The turnout for Sunday was lighter than the first day, but still a good crowd.) We talked about a lot of interesting topics — pain points with openSUSE, what we could be doing better, and how to help promote openSUSE. I am really glad to see strong interest in promoting openSUSE by the community, and that so many people turned out to talk about openSUSE.

I’m really sorry that LFNW isn’t a longer show — the atmosphere of the show was really laid back and fun, and I had a lot of great conversations. I also really enjoyed meeting all of the fest organizers, and talking to them about how the show comes together and the tools that they use to organize the show. We also discussed how to spread those ideas, and you’ll be hearing more about that in the near future. There’s a lot of collective wisdom (and beer drinking, but mostly wisdom…) among the LFNW folks and other fest organizers I’ve been talking to over the past few years (notably the Ohio LinuxFest organizers and the SCALE group) that needs to be shared so that other groups can benefit from their experience.

Sitting in the Seattle-Tacoma airport now waiting for a flight, I’m wishing the weekend hadn’t flown by quite so quickly. I look forward to being here again next year.

A few weeks ago we announced that we’d be merging suseforums.net, suselinuxsupport.de, and the openSUSE support forums at forums.novell.com into one central forum under forums.opensuse.org. (You can visit the URL right now if you like, but there’s little there aside from the initial announcement…)

I just thought I’d provide a brief update on where that’s at, because I know things have been quite since then. (I got a question about the forums yesterday at LinuxFest Northwest.)

In this case, “quiet” only means that things are moving along quite well. The current thought is that we’ll be ready to launch the merged forums in mid-May.

We’ll be putting out a more formal announcement near the launch date, but I wanted to note that the forum merger is moving ahead as planned and all of the folks involved are working hard to provide a unified forum for openSUSE users and contributors.

I’m really looking forward to the unified forum and I want to thank everyone working on the project. In particular, I’d like to thank Rupert Horstkötter, Keith Kastorff, Kim Groneman,  Michael Loeffler, and Wolfgang Koller for leading this effort.  There’s been a lot of hard work put into this project, and it’s going to be really beneficial for the project once it’s completed.

Just a reminder, LinuxFest Northwest is this weekend in Bellingham, Washington. It should be a great fest, and I’m really looking forward to finally getting to check it out.

I’ll be speaking at the ‘fest, and so will fellow Novell employee Frank Rego. I’ll be talking about KDE4, Frank will be talking about the state of Mono. We’ll also have an openSUSE booth, manned by several local volunteers, myself, and Frank.

See you in Bellingham!

Spent a little while today getting an EV-DO card working with openSUSE 10.3. It was nowhere near as difficult as I was expecting it to be.

I found a decent resource on this site, though it specifies Ubuntu. I’m using wvdial to connect, and it’s fairly straightforward. The page makes it look more complex than it is, so I’m going to boil it down a bit more…

Here’s the wvdial config (found at /etc/wvdial.conf):

[Dialer Defaults]
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Baud = 921600
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Init3 = ATM0
Area Code =
Phone = #777
Username = xxxxxxxxxx@vzw3g.com
Password = vzw
Ask Password = 0
Dial Command = ATDT
Stupid Mode = on
Auto Reconnect = on
Compuserve = 0
Force Address =
Idle Seconds = 300
Auto DNS = 1


The modem line may be different depending on what device it’s assigned. I’m using a V740 Cardbus card with a SIIG Expresscard adapter that converts it to USB.

Just take the wvdial.conf that I’ve displayed there, change the username to be your device’s phone number (plus @vzw3g.com) and then save the file. Run wvdial and you should be connected in a flash.

Regular old wireless would still be a bit faster, but this does great in a pinch when hotel wireless is either unreliable, or when you’re at a show and the wireless connections have died from too many connections. (Which, it seems, they inevitably do…)

Now that the first beta is out for openSUSE 11.0, it’s time to dig in and really start banging on the release to catch bugs before the release candidates and final release. If you’re wondering where to start, Holger Sickenberg has put together an excellent resouce to help guide testing.

Holger has compiled a list of new features in openSUSE 11.0 that it would be a good idea to test to ensure that each and every feature works as planned and is as bug-free as possible. Holger has also included directions for testers, so it’s as easy as loading up openSUSE 11.0 and following the steps.

Any test that’s marked “idle” is fair game — so feel free to jump in and start beating up on the new features.

A big thanks to Holger for coming up with this page. This is exactly the sort of guide that users need to be able to use their time effectively when testing betas.

If you do find any bugs, be sure to check the Bug reporting FAQ and report the bug in Bugzilla. Also, don’t forget that we have a Operation YaST Smash on Friday from 09:00 to 18:00 CEST.

If you support multiple desktops, which one gets top billing? Kind of like Lennon and McCartney (please tell me that most of my readers are old enough to get the reference…), it doesn’t really matter very much — there’s so much awesome in each one that it’s just not possible to detract from the choices with an arbitrary decision about which one should go first.

There’s a discussion going on in the Factory mailing list about how to arrange the desktop choices when a user installs openSUSE 11.0. Stephan Kulow posted a screenshot of the selector to the list:

Of course, there were the inevitable (but polite!) comments regarding the order of the selection. I do like the suggestion that we replace the radio buttons with checkboxes, so users can choose multiple desktops from this screen.

And then Lukas Ocilka provides the helpful suggestion to arrange the desktop selections in a circle, so as to show no preference whatsoever.

As a sometimes Xfce user, I’d like to see that choice added to the list. Perhaps we should add Xfce and then place the desktops in reverse alphabetical order…

Maybe we could take a cue from Google, and add an “I’m Feeling Lucky” button here. Users who don’t have a strong preference could just take the luck of the draw and have the opportunity to get to know a new desktop environment.

Of course, it really matters very little what order the desktop choices are ordered in — the majority of users are going to pick the desktop that they’re familiar with, and it won’t matter if that choice is placed first, second, or third. The users who have no idea which desktop is which are probably going to pick the desktop that has the most appealing (for them) description — not the desktop that happens to be placed first.

Given that the two projects are working quite well together these days, it shouldn’t really matter much whether KDE or GNOME gets top billing, and not worth spending a lot of cycles on.

Here’s a great chance to get involved with openSUSE — no development experience required. We’re having a bug smash on Friday from 09:00 to 18:00 UTC in #openSUSE-Factory on Freenode.

The announcement is over on news.opensuse.org, and we’ve sent it to the announce list as well — but we could use more help in spreading the word! Please send the info to anyone who might be interested in joining in.

This is the first bug smash event we’ve done in a while, but I hope to see this become a regular event. This is a great way for contributors to help openSUSE devs focus on real issues rather than wading through a lot of duplicate or defunct bugs in Bugzilla.

This will help close irrelevant bugs, and draw more attention to relevant bugs that still exist.

I’d like to thank everybody who’s helped get this organized so far: Christoph Thiel, JP Rosevear, Stanislav Visnovsky, Duncan Mac-Vicar, Jiri Srain, and Andreas Jaeger. (I hope I didn’t miss anyone!)

If you have additional input on what we can do to help with bug triaging, please feel free to leave a comment. And remember — you can do this any time, bug smashing is not limited to bug smashing days!

Some really nice comments about the upcoming openSUSE 11.0 in this week’s DistroWatch weekly newsletter:

Many people expect the upcoming release of openSUSE, version 11.0, to be possibly the most important breakthrough in terms of desktop Linux usability enhancements and user interface updates. One of the magic tools that helps the developers accomplish their goals is openSUSE Build Service (OBS), an infrastructure for building openSUSE packages.

That’s some pretty high praise, there, particularly from someone (Ladislav Bodnar) who has been reviewing and watching Linux development for a very long time.

I’m noting this not to brag on openSUSE, but as a note to openSUSE contributors — all of the hard work you’re doing for openSUSE 11.0 and the openSUSE Build Service has not gone unnoticed. In fact, it looks like people are getting very eager to see what openSUSE 11.0 looks like. I think people are going to be very pleased.

Got back from Penguicon late last night, and I’m digging into the email that’s accumulated over the past few days…

Penguicon is definitely not your average Linux show. It’s a little bit Linux, a little bit sci-fi, and a lot of carrying on. On Sunday, I did a presentation on Vim and a few folks in the audience asked if I’d make the slides available — so here they are as a PDF. 

A big thanks to Aaron Thul and the Penguicon folks for the invite! Penguicon was run exceptionally well, and that’s no small task for a show that brings together such a disparate group of people and topics. The logistics for booking all the various speakers (”Nifties,” and “Guests of Honor” for the keynote-types) has to be insane, but it all came together really well.

I had a great time at the show, had the opportunity to talk to a lot of people about openSUSE and Linux in general (and Vim, always one of my favorite topics…), and got to meet (very briefly) John Scalzi (an excellent sci-fi author), Randall Munroe of xkcd fame, Webcomic author Jennie Breeden and nerdcore rappers Dual Core. It pleases me greatly to know that there’s such a thing as geek rap.

Anyway, I’m very glad that I made the trip — it was a great time, and I hope to be invited back next year.