It’s Freitag already? I’ve been in Berlin since Tuesday evening, and busy with LinuxTag since then. The first two days of LinuxTag have been a lot of fun and really interesting. We’ve had a lot of traffic in the openSUSE booth, and I’ve been walking around and talking with some of the people from other projects and companies. The booth directly next to us is full of embedded Linux projects, including some motorized critters that look like fun to play with. In back, we’ve got the JackLab booth, so we’ve been getting some interesting music to accompany the openSUSE discussions…

Martin Lasarsch did a great job planning for the show and getting everything set up. It’s a shame the car was too full of swag for me to ride with him to Berlin… the train ride was great, though. Had a great talk with Robert Lihm, who speaks English, German, and Czech, about language.

Spent some time talking with Max Spevack about how openSUSE and Fedora might work together and about a few projects that are also underway (like using Smolt with openSUSE as well). Also wanted to give Max a look at Zypper, but the network didn’t want to cooperate… Zypper’s blinding speed was, sadly, foiled by an uncooperative network. (It doesn’t matter how fast package management works if you can’t, you know, actually download the packages. Don’t get me started on show networks…

The downside to shows, of course, is that you usually just see the hotel and show facility, and not much of the city where the show is being held. That’s a shame, because Berlin looks really interesting, and I wish I had some time to go out and explore the city a little bit more. From what little I’ve seen of Berlin so far, it looks like a really cool city.

But, I’ve been having plenty of fun and interesting conversations here at the show, and I really enjoy being able to talk to openSUSE contributors and users in person rather than on the phone, via email and IRC. Until they perfect a “beer over IP” protocol, shows are still much more fun…

Tomorrow, we have a full schedule of openSUSE sessions starting at 10:00 a.m. Martin Lasarsch will start off the day with the “state of openSUSE,” and then I’ll be up to talk about some of the things coming up in 2008 and 2009, plus a look at openSUSE 11.0 with Stephan Kulow.

Adrian Schroeter will be giving a presentation on the openSUSE Build Service, Henne will be covering multimedia with openSUSE, Beineri will be talking about KDE4, and we’ll also have talks on Wine and virtualizing Mac OS X on openSUSE.

And, of course, the openSUSE booth has demos of 11.0 and we’d be happy to show off the new features and answer questions about openSUSE 11.0 and the openSUSE Project. Or just stop by to say hello and let us know what you think about openSUSE!

Now I’m off to see Nat’s keynote… should be very interesting.

It’s show time! Spent much of yesterday traveling to Berlin, and then helping set up the openSUSE booth. (Which mostly consisted of doing whatever Martin Lasarsch asked us to do, since he coordinated and organized most everything for our booth here at LinuxTag…) Was supposed to ride up to Berlin with Martin, but the rented car didn’t have enough room for two people, all the booth stuff, plus luggage.

That was a bummer, but I had a really pleasant train ride from Nuremberg to Berlin with a bunch of SUSE folks, then met Martin at the booth to move everything in and then set everything up — and we followed that up with an excellent dinner and wrapped up around 11 p.m. or so last night.

I’m totally psyched for the show — I’ve mentioned before, I’ve heard a lot about LinuxTag, but never had the opportunity to attend. Looking around the show floor yesterday, it looks like it’s going to be a really interesting show.

If you’re going to be at LinuxTag, be sure to come find us! Updates from LinuxTag as events warrant…

We’re getting down to the wire now — with only 24 days to go (and counting…), it’s time to start planning release parties.

If your LUG or local openSUSE group is planning a release party, let us know! And if you’re not, why not? Throw an installfest, or just get all the openSUSE and Linux users you know together to talk about the latest release, have some refreshments, and be social. (Take plenty of pictures, too — we want to see you!)

Note that you don’t have to throw your release party the same day as the release — so if you’re working for a living, maybe June 19 isn’t the best day to go out — but the following Saturday is good too.

By the way, if you’re an openSUSE user in the Tampa area in Florida, drop me a line. We should definitely organize a shindig to celebrate the release of 11.0. It’s just a question of where and when.

I wanted to provide another update on the merged forums progress. As you might have noticed, we didn’t quite manage to launch the merged forums as we originally hoped to do in mid-May. Yes, I know, it’s the first time in the history of open source that a release date has slipped…

In case you’re wondering, the release date slipped because of problems with database imports from the various forums — as you might expect, this is a bit on the complex side, and the forum wizards have been working out the best way to import users and posts from the other forums.

We should be over that hurdle now and back on track. The current target date is now June 9. It’s particularly important to us to have working forums by the time openSUSE 11.0 is ready, so we’re not too far away now.

Once again, I want to thank the leaders of the individual forums (Keith Kastorff, Kim Groneman, and Wolfgang Koller) for all of the hard work they’ve put into this process, and I also want to thank Rupert Horstkötter for helping shepherd the process.

I’m at the Nuremberg office today, getting set to head to Berlin tomorrow for LinuxTag. This will be my first LinuxTag, so I’m pretty psyched about the show — I’ve heard about LinuxTag for years, so I think it’s pretty exciting to finally have a chance to see what all the fuss is about.

Don’t forget that, in addition to the booth at LinuxTag, we also have an openSUSE Day at LinuxTag on Saturday. We have some excellent talks — Adrian will be discussing the build service, Stephan Binner is going to be talking about KDE4, Henne Vogel is going to be talking about Multimedia with openSUSE, and quite a bit more — be sure to eyeball the schedule on the LinuxTag page to make sure you don’t miss something good!

And, of course, we will be at the openSUSE booth each day at LinuxTag, giving sneak peeks at openSUSE 11.0, so please be sure to drop by and say hello!

I installed beta 3 a few days ago, and have really been enjoying it — the only thing that’s bugged me so far is that patterns are missing right now, which was already a known bug  by the time I noticed it, and I think it’s already been fixed… so it looks like things are really shaping up well for the 11.0 release.

We’ve already had some good press coverage of 11.0 betas — such as this article on Ars.  I think that’s just the tip of the iceberg, though — I got an email over the weekend from Kristin Shoemaker, one of the bloggers over on Download Squad, and she’s really psyched about the 11.0 release already:

“Still doing some tweaking on my silly nvidia card, but I have got to say… Damn! about the whole install process now! (And yes, it’s a good Damn!)

It’s a nice plus to be able to install from a LiveCD, but the time it took to install the base system… What a huge improvement. I mean, night and day. I am so impressed. Partitioning was easy (actually, I never found it horribly *difficult* in the old version, either, but for some reason, finding the right “mode” to do my partitioning previously always led to my clicking the wrong option the first time…)

Also really had a nice chuckle at the point X was configured… The little “Don’t Panic!” message that comes up on the terminal is cute. My first run with SuSE (and Linux) I had purty graphics all through the installation, and then I was dumped to a command line when the disk restarted. So I had to laugh.

Anyway, tell everyone there they’re doing an awesome job.”

So, yeah — to all the folks working on openSUSE 11.0, you’re doing an awesome job. Not that it wasn’t obvious before, of course.

The FOSSCamp idea is, from one angle, fairly dicey — you take a bunch of people interested in topics that are generally similar (in this case, free and open source software), mix well, and allow them to come up with an agenda that’s their own and which will (one hopes) be productive.

I’ve always been an advocate of a strong “hallway track” for shows — i.e., ample opportunity for attendees to mix it up outside of a structured set of sessions. I’ve been to too many shows where you start to feel like a hamster on a wheel — too busy running from one session to the next to actually stop, breathe, and chat with the other attendees and presenters.

Yes, it’s wonderful to listen to experts talk about the topics they are expert in, but one can only stand so much being talked at without any time to talk with people. At least that’s true for me — maybe I’m just scarred from too many years in college.

But FOSSCamp is essentially all hallway track, right? Maybe that is pushing it a bit too far in the other direction.

In some cases, that might be true. However, it seems that this FOSSCamp managed to get the balance right. I attended several sessions that seemed very useful — including one where the original session didn’t happen due to the session leader not showing up, so we eventually just wound up having a discussion (mostly) about communication between projects, how best to provide software to a community for testing (I admit it, I couldn’t help slipping in several plugs for the openSUSE Build Service here…), and the best ways to credit other projects for work included in a distro (for example, the need for acknowledging where features come from, and how best to give credit).

So, big bonus for the FOSSCamp model of allowing attendees to build their own conference — this works when the attendees are motivated to be involved and share knowledge.

(In the interest of giving credit, I should mention that FOSSCamp was sponsored by Canonical/Ubuntu, prior to their developer summit this week.)

We also had good planned sessions Saturday morning around Packagekit and Saturday afternoon around distro collaboration. There were also good sessions on Friday, but I think Saturday was the better day — after all involved had one day to get acquainted and (for me) a day to overcome jet lag a bit.

In general, I think the FOSSCamp model is a really good one. I’d like to see more conferences have at least one FOSSCamp style day — probably best if served up in the middle of the conference so that attendees have an opportunity to get settled, get acquainted a bit, and confer a bit on what sessions most people might benefit from/like to attend.

If you happen to be a Python wizard, or can deliver a presentation as if you were, the PyOhio folks might like to hear from you:

PyOhio, the first annual Python programming mini-conference for Ohio and surrounding areas will take place Saturday, July 26, in Columbus, Ohio. The conference is free of change and will include scheduled presentations, Lighting Talks and unconference-style Open Spaces.

You can read more about the conference at http://pyohio.org

PyOhio invites all interested people to present scheduled talks. All presentations are expected to last 40 minutes with a 10 minute question-and-answer period. PyOhio will accept abstracts covering any area of Python programming. A classroom area with computers will also be available for possible hands-on sessions.

So, if Python is your thing, feel free to submit a proposal! Submission deadline is June 1 — so get cracking!

Getting ready to head to Europe for a couple of exciting events: FOSSCamp Prague and LinuxTag. FOSSCamp is Friday and Saturday, at the Corinthia Towers Hotel in Prague.

LinuxTag will be at the end of the month in Berlin, at Messehalle Funkturm. I’ve never been to LinuxTag or a FOSSCamp, so I’m really looking forward to these events — I’ve been hearing about LinuxTag for years, so I can’t wait to see what it’s like in person.

As always, I’m going to be looking to spread the word about openSUSE and meet as many openSUSE users and contributors (as well as potential users) as I can. If you’re at LinuxTag, be sure to drop by the openSUSE booth and say hello. There’s no booth at FOSSCamp, but I suspect it won’t be too hard to spot me at the event, or one of the other openSUSE folks who will be there.

Barton George has posted the podcast we did at Sun CommunityOne just a short time ago. Has it really only been a few days? Wow. Time flies…

The podcast features Fedora’s Karsten Wade, Ubuntu’s Jono Bacon, Glynn Foster of OpenSolaris, Barton, and myself.. Like the panel (which wasn’t recorded, apparently), this was a good deal of fun to do — very laid back, and we all seem to agree on most topics with slight differences about the approaches that should be taken and so forth. Plus, Jono, Karsten, Glynn, and Barton are all good guys and fun to talk to.

It’s not so much a “smackdown,” really, as a lively conversation, but “lively conversation” does lack punch as a teaser…

It’s available in Ogg and MP3 format, so pick your favorite format and enjoy!