I’ll be attending Penguicon 6.0 in Troy, Michigan from April 18 through April 20, appearing on a panel about Linux for Casual Users, and giving two talks: One on the future of openSUSE and another talk about Vim. Hope to see you there!

The openSUSE Project will have a booth at LinuxFest Northwest on April 27 and 28, in Bellingham, Washington. Please join us there!

The openSUSE team will be at LugRadio Live in San Francisco on April 12 and 13 at the Metreon. Please join us!

A quick reminder — openSUSE will have a booth this coming weekend at LugRadio Live US, which is happening at the Metreon in San Francisco, California on April 12 and 13.

If you haven’t made plans to attend yet, go ahead and register for the event — it’s a meager $10, I believe — and be sure to stop by the openSUSE booth where we’ll be talking about and showing off openSUSE.

We’re also looking for more booth volunteers — so drop us a note if you’re interested in helping out at the booth and talking about / demoing openSUSE.

Can’t wait to see you there!

After the public openSUSE Board meeting on Monday, AJ posted a proposal for the upcoming openSUSE board election that includes a couple of new ideas. Note that the ideas I’m describing here are not final yet.

One of the tough decisions was to decide who can vote. The proposal on the table right now is to allow openSUSE members and another person (who also is in the openSUSE community, but not confirmed as a member) that they vouch for to vote.

Also, a four-week period will be held after the proposal is finalized to allow people to become members so that they can vote.

See the entire proposal in the mailing list archive. Note that the board will be voting on this in two weeks, so if you have comments or suggestions, now would be the time to voice them!

OK, please indulge my nostalgia for a moment.

Like most children of the 70s, I grew up watching Sesame Street. I have fond memories of watching Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster, and Kermit the Frog a lot as a kid. (Looking back, is it just me that thinks it’s clear that Cookie Monster is a clear example of a major eating disorder?)

So, I think it’s pretty cool that the Sesame Street Workshop is running on SLES and Xen.

This is about SLES and not openSUSE, but don’t forget that it all starts with openSUSE — I wonder if we could have Geeko make a special appearance on Sesame Street?

I’m not exactly known for my GIMP skills, but I’ve been looking at the docs on creating Firefox Personas and seeing if I can knock something together that’s openSUSE-themed.

Here’s what I have so far — I can work on finishing it and submitting as an official theme if anyone’s interested, or would be interested in seeing openSUSE community members who have actual talent in the graphics department do Personas if there’s interest…

(Also interested in comments on usability.)

Quick reminder — we’re having a Packaging Days event tomorrow and Saturday. A number of openSUSE contributors will be holding an online workshop all day April 4 and April 5 on Freenode in #opensuse-buildservice.

Anyone is welcome to join, but it is helpful if you have some experience compiling software.

What will you learn? The event is designed to teach you how to create packages using the openSUSE Build Service. If you have any favorite applications that you’d like to see packaged for openSUSE — or if you’re a developer of any packages that you’d like to see packged for openSUSE — this is for you.

If you’ve been meaning to learn to package, this is definitely for you. Lots of openSUSE contributors with tons of packaging and build service experience will be standing by to answer questions. (OK, sitting by, more likely, but still…)

You’ll probably want to have an account in the build service, and look over the docs linked on the wiki about creating packages.

See the wiki page for more info, we’d love to have you! (Thanks to Dirk for pinging me to put out the reminder.)

Just curious — has anyone created an openSUSE Firefox Persona? I’ve installed the Personas extension, and wouldn’t mind having a Geeko/openSUSE themed persona to go with my Firefox.

Just grabbed Firefox 3.0 beta 5 — it’s looking real good so far, so I thought I’d post a few notes about the release. I spend far more time than is healthy at the computer, and Firefox is probably the application I use the most (next to Vim) so expect more commentary on this throughout the week.

Nothing jumps out at me as a huge change from Firefox 2.x, but I see lots of little improvements here and there, and it feels faster, even though I don’t have any hard data to support that.

This may be the release that causes me to break up with del.icio.us for good. Not because I don’t like the site/service, but because I always have to choose between using Firefox development versions or using the del.icio.us extension for Firefox. I strongly prefer using del.icio.us to using Firefox’s own bookmarks, particularly since I use multiple machines and trying to sync bookmarks between browsers is usually a pain.

But, it never seems like the del.icio.us extension supports the development releases. Since I like to hop on the development releases of Firefox with the last round of alphas or the first round of betas, I have to decide between my bookmarks or the browser for several months.

The good news is that I’m able to import the del.icio.us bookmarks with no problem. The bad news is that all of the tagging is lost, so all I have is an uncategorized lump of nearly 700 bookmarks that isn’t terribly useful in that form.

What is useful is that I can create a tag and then a smart folder from the tag and put that in my toolbar. So, I can have a smart folder of all bookmarks tagged with something like “openSUSE” and have them show up in one folder on my bookmark toolbar. This is how I was using del.icio.us, and it’s very convenient.

Back to work, more to come on the beta soon. If you’re using the Firefox 3.0beta builds, feel free to comment on your experience or any new features you find useful. I’d be curious to hear what others are finding.