Quick note — if you’re hankering for KDE 3.5 on openSUSE 11.0, you can find some live CDs over here on Carlos Gonçalves blog. Very nice! Glad to see the community stepping up and building live CDs — this is something I’d like to see a lot more of.

Thanks Carlos!

Getting set for Friday at the Utah Open Source Conference — they’ve hit their target (and then some) of registered attendees, and the buzz here has been pretty good. Lots of great sessions, though I haven’t had a chance to attend any excepting the keynotes last night.

The booth has been seen steady traffic, but the location for the exhibitors here isn’t all that great — something the organizers really didn’t have a lot of control over, since they’re being given the facilities by SLCC. However, they’ve been tireless in helping people (speakers, exhibitors, and attendees) and giving the proverbial 110% and really going all out.

This is what I really love about community shows — I’ve had a chance to have a good conversation with a lot of our community, and I also had a chance Thursday night to have a good talk with Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields about ways we might coordinate and work together.

Speaking of his Fedoraness, Frields had his keynote last night as the closing event for the day following the nice spread of food put out by the UTOSC folks. Really good stuff, and sets the bar for my keynote this afternoon.

The theme of the conference is “HOWTO,” so I’m going to be talking about “How to bootstrap a community…” which will be all about community building and how companies can forge a strong community around open source projects. I will, of course, be talking about openSUSE and the progress that the openSUSE Project has made since its inception, but also looking at other communities and what’s been successful and what’s not.

The openSUSE community and Novell are pretty well-represented here, lots of speakers from the community. Wish I had more time to see all the talks!

Hack Week seems to be going well so far. Skimming Planet SUSE, I see that several people are blogging about their progress:

• Martin Vidner is working on OpenStreetMap Diaries via a GeoRSS Box Filter.
• AJ has an update from Hack Week in Nuremberg.
• Klaas Freitag is working on cross-compiling apps for Windows in the openSUSE Build Service.
• Jakub Steiner is working on a replacement font for Cholla.

Lots more going on. Looking forward to more updates on lizards.opensuse.org. Later this week, Novell and openSUSE folks will be hacking at the Utah Open Source Conference, so if you happen to be within driving distance of Salt Lake City Community College (Redwood Road campus) be sure to sign up and be there.

Royal Pingdom has combed the Google data to see which distros are being searched for most offen, and how that breaks down by region.

Some interesting results here. Key findings:

• openSUSE is most popular in Russia and the Czech Republic.
• The United States doesn’t hit the top five for any distro. (That is, people in the U.S. don’t search by name for any of the distros that were studied as much as people in other countries.) The U.S. doesn’t even show up in the top ten for openSUSE or SUSE.
• Germany comes in third in terms of searches for openSUSE.
• If you change from “openSUSE” to “SUSE” the results are a bit different. Germany moves up to first, followed by Nicaragua, the Czech Republic, and Cuba. SUSE still gets a bit more love as a search term than openSUSE.
• Utah is the state that has the most searches for Linux, openSUSE, and SUSE.
• Ubuntu is getting a lot more search traffic on Google, and maxes out in Utah and California.

What do these stats tell us? Well, it’s hard to draw major conclusions from these. Really, it only shows that people are interested enough to plop a search term into a browser — and may not reflect reality in terms of people actually using Linux or any specific distro.

What would be interesting would be to see Google’s data on people searching Google from systems running Linux. How many people are browsing from Linux as opposed to browsing about Linux.

Still, every little bit of data helps. We, and I mean the “collective we” of all Linux enthusiasts hoping to spread Linux around the globe, have a lot of work ahead of us.

Wednesday it’s wheels-up time to head to Salt Lake City for three days of fun with the Utah open source crowd. Thursday through Saturday is the Utah Open Source Conference — word has it that the conference is going to be chock full of excitement, fun, and great talks and info about open source.

I’m particularly excited about this show, because I’m going to be doing a keynote on Friday — I’ve given plenty of talks, but this is my first keynote, so it will be tons of fun. (Needless to say I’m going to be prepping, buffing and polishing my talk and slides until Friday afternoon.) I’m going to be talking about “How to bootstrap a community,” which I hope attendees will find equal parts funny, informative, and inspirational — not necessarily in that order. I also hope people will throw money at the stage, but I’m not counting on that.

We will, of course, be well-represented. We’ll have an openSUSE table in the expo area, and also a Hack Week room at the conference!

If you’d like to help out spreading the openSUSE love at the show, drop me a note and we’ll get you suited up to spread the word about openSUSE.

In case you missed the flurry of announcements last week and the weeks before, we’re doing Hack Week III this week (also known as “return of Hack Week,” “revenge of Hack Week,” or maybe “son of Hack Week”).

Skimming Planet SUSE I see we’re already off to a great start. Jakub Steiner (jimmac) is working on a free font replacement for Cholla, which is the non-free font used in marketing materials for openSUSE.

Robert Lihm has created some nice materials for us in the past, but because of the font issue, we’ve had a bit of a problem in terms of creating reusable materials that local groups can grab and edit to fit their own events and/or localize for non-English speakers. Obviously, that’s a problem, so I’m particularly pleased to see jimmac doing this for Hack Week.

I do hope we’ll have a healthy participation outside of Novell for Hack Week. I know we’ve got several community members who have been sponsored to travel to Novell offices and collaborate, and we’ve got Andrew Wafaa who’s been sponsored to go to Nuremberg to work on some video documentation of Hack Week and life in the Nuremberg office (”Geekos Gone Wild,” anyone?).

If you’d like to get involved this week, head over to ideas.opensuse.org and/or jump into IRC on the #opensuse-factory channel on Freenode.

And, as always, if this week doesn’t work for you, there’s no reason to feel constrained by an arbitrary set of dates. We have to pick a set of dates for Novell’s planning purposes, but there’s no reason at all that contributors in the larger community have to be bound by our timing. Since we have a three-day weekend coming up in the U.S., that’d be a perfect time for contributors to set aside and attack a project for openSUSE, or any time that’s convenient.

Tomorrow morning/afternoon/evening (depending on your time zone) we’ll be having an openSUSE Marketing meeting to discuss ways to promote openSUSE and projects within openSUSE.The meeting will be in the openSUSE-Project channel on Freenode at 15:00 UTC/17:00 CEST/11:00 EDT.

The agenda, so far, is over on the wiki — If you have anything to add, feel free to speak up on the openSUSE-marketing mailing list or just add a comment here. Right now, we have several things to discuss:

• openSUSE local groups
• Promote openSUSE in non-English-Speaking countries
• Helping Hands
• openSUSE TV
• openSUSE-tutorials.com
• Podcasts

Lots to do, but we’re always open to new good ideas.

In particular, would love some input on what everyone would like to hear in podcasts. For example – should we have an openSUSE Weekly News podcast in addition to the ever-popular text version?

One of my favorite Linux community shows ever was the Atlanta Linux Showcase. It was a fantastic, energetic show with just the right mix of commercial vendors (just a little bit) and community / hacker participation (a lot). (If you’ll pardon me for saying, while the business-focused and commercial shows are necessary and useful for the business side of the community, few people dispute that they’re less fun than community shows.)

Well, the Atlanta Linux Showcase is no more, but it looks like Atlanta’s Linux culture simply will not be held back! Got a note a bit ago from Nick Ali asking for volunteers to do a demo for the Atlanta Linux Fest. It’s taking place on Software Freedom Day, which is September 20th this year, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the IBM Hillside Conference Center.

Since I’m pretty sure Nick would prefer that his email address not be available for harvesting by the platoons of spambots that swarm the opensuse.org domain, please send me a note (zonker at opensuse.org — I already get metric tons of spam, what’s a little more?) find me on IM (xonker on Gtalk, jbrockmeier on IRC/Freenode.) or even send me a tweet (jzb) on Twitter.

Also, if you’re doing something for Software Freedom Day and want some openSUSE 11.0 DVDs to hand out, let me know.

This year, the Atlanta show is pretty small — they’re expecting about 100 people, but if I recall correctly, the Atlanta Linux Showcase grew from a small show as well. I’d love to see ALF (nice acronym…) grow into a mighty show like ALS.

In case you hadn’t heard, we’re running a survey to see what you (yes, you!) think about openSUSE.If you haven’t already, head over to SurveyMonkey and spend a few minutes giving us your unbiased, unvarnished, honest opinion of the openSUSE experience — so we can find out what you like, what you don’t, and what we need to do to improve in 11.1, and beyond!

As they say, if you don’t vote, you can’t complain. If you want to be heard on openSUSE, head over and take the survey. Results will be published shortly after the survey.

Woo! Thanks James for putting Planet SUSE right again. I was getting twitchy without my daily (or hourly) Planet SUSE fix. (And, of course, a big thanks for hosting it in the first place. I’m sure I’m not the only person in the openSUSE community that has Planet SUSE on the must-read list.)