I’m in Tokyo to attend the Open Source Conference (OSC) this weekend, and to meet with the local openSUSE community. I am very excited to be here and have the chance to meet with openSUSE users and contributors (and potential users and contributors), and other members of the open source community.

My flight got in mid-afternoon yesterday, so I haven’t been around Tokyo very much, but I’m looking forward to seeing more of the city and meeting colleagues and open source enthusiasts here. If you happen to be in Tokyo, I hope to see you at the OSC. Please get in touch, or just stop by the openSUSE booth at the OSC if you’d like to talk about openSUSE and open source. I’ll be here through next week.

Also — I’d welcome any tips about things to see and do in Tokyo! I don’t have a lot of free time, but I do have some free time built in to my schedule at the moment and want to make the most of it!

I know a lot of openSUSE users and contributors probably don’t look at the openSUSE landing page (front page) every day — I have most of the openSUSE pages I need bookmarked or have the URLs memorized, and rarely ever start from the front page.

So, you may not have noticed that the front page has been redesigned. Go ahead, pull up a new browser window and take a look.

Isn’t it fantastic? I liked the old page, but this redesign really looks great. Robert Lihm and Andreas Demmer have done a great job rethinking the page and putting a lot more information on the landing page without making it look cluttered or ugly.

One of the things the marketing team will be looking at now is how we can start improving pages further inside the Web site to better serve new users and the existing community as well. If you’re interested, please be sure to sign up for the marketing list and join in. The openSUSE Web site is the first contact for the project for many people, so it’s vitally important that it look good and be as usable as possible, and the new landing page is both usable and great-looking.

You might think that after attending a dozen or so Linux and FOSS-related shows in the last year, that I’d stop getting excited about upcoming shows — but, you’d wrong! Especially when it comes to the Ohio LinuxFest (OLF), which is coming up on October 11, in Columbus, Ohio.

The Ohio LinuxFest is one of my favorite community driven shows. The entire thing is organized by volunteers, and attendance is free for anyone who wants to show up — though they also have a Supporter Package for $65 for the people who want to spend money to support the event. And, yes, a lot of people actually want to spend the $65, since it goes to a good cause and helps ensure that the event continues every year.

I’m doubly excited about this year’s event, because I’m going to be doing the morning keynote. (I’ll be blogging more about that…)

Want to learn more about OLF? One of the Ohio LinuxFest rockstars, Beth Lynn Eicher, is going to be on the Linux Link Tech Show tonight to talk about what goes in to organizing the event, and what there is to look forward to. Beth Lynn will be on at 8:30 Eastern, so don’t miss it. (Well, if you do, they will have podcasts after the fact…)

If you haven’t registered - do it! It’s a Saturday very well spent. Lots of great talks, a great group of people, and a ton of fun. If you’re anywhere near Columbus, Ohio on the 11th, please join us!

There’s also an #ohiolinux channel on OFTC if you want to chat with some of the organizers and enthusiasts around OLF. It’s a good spot to hang out if you have questions about OLF, or want to volunteer. They’re also having a “Digg Party” tonight to try to drive up awareness for the show.

Well, I’m already nearly fed up with the election cycle in the U.S. — can we just vote already? — but I’m still plenty psyched about the upcoming openSUSE Board elections.

If you’re interested in running for the openSUSE Board, you have less than 24 hours to toss your hat into the ring. We have quite a few qualified candidates running — and more candidates than seats — so I’m pretty happy with the options. Of course, there are a few other members of the openSUSE community that I’d like to see running for the board, and I’d be happy to see a few more candidates slip in before the deadline hits tomorrow.

However, I do hope we’ll see a lot more people applying for openSUSE membership by tomorrow. Note that membership is above and beyond signing up as a user on the wiki and so forth — so, just because you’re listed on users.opensuse.org, doesn’t mean you’re eligible to vote. Browsing through the list of users, I see a lot of people who would be qualified to be members (and thus entitled to vote) who are not.

Again if you do any/all of the following, you’re probably qualified to be a member:

• Development
• Packaging
• Wiki editing
• Translations
• User support via forums, mailing lists, IRC, or other communication methods
• Giving talks and presentations about openSUSE / openSUSE projects, and generally promoting openSUSE

If you think you qualify, please follow the instructions on the Members page. The full schedule for the openSUSE board election and much more information can be found on the election wiki pages.

Just put up an announcement over on news.opensuse.org, about an issue with the Intel e1000e driver in the 11.1 beta 1:

The Intel e1000e driver on openSUSE 11.1 Beta 1 and SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Beta 1 might have a serious issue with the potential to damage the network card in a way that it cannot be used any longer.

Intel and Novell are currently working to analyze and solve the issue.

For the time being:

Please do NOT USE:

openSUSE 11.1 Beta 1
or
SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Beta 1

on systems with Intel e1000e hardware.

Any other hardware, including systems with Intel e1000 (without -e) network cards, is not affected by this issue.

I hope that the number of afflicted systems is very small. If you’re using a system that does not use the e1000e driver, then you should be OK — but if you do happen to have that driver, please avoid 11.1 beta 1 for now.

As soon as we have a fix or solution, it will be posted on news.opensuse.org and opensuse-announce. Of course, I hope you’re already subscribed to and follow opensuse-announce and news.opensuse.org already…

The next openSUSE Marketing Meeting will be held on Tuesday, September 23 at 15:00 UTC. (Which is 17:00 CEST, 11:00 Eastern, 7:00 Pacific, and 00:00 JST on Wednesday. Sorry…) The meeting will be held in #openSUSE-Project on Freenode. Grab your favorite IRC client and join us for an hour of fun, frolic, and open source marketing goodness.

I’ve put up an agenda on the wiki as is the standard operating procedure. If you have additions, suggestions, etc. please feel free to add them to the agenda.

And, of course, discussion is always welcome on the opensuse-marketing list. We try to keep the IRC meeting to an hour, so it helps to have most of the discussion before the meeting or right after.

Again, please join us for the marketing meeting next Tuesday. Linux isn’t going to dominate the world by itself!

Thanks to everyone that sent me notes on features for the 11.1 beta release announcement (and beyond). I got a slew of emails and suggestions, including some features I was unaware of. The 11.1 release is going to be very impressive.

Just a general note to all the contributors working on openSUSE 11.1 — if you are working on items that you think should be highlighted in release announcements for the betas and RCs, please drop me an email or leave a comment here.

This could be any of the following:

• Major feature change that users will find interesting (or alarming…)
• Major or minor change that you’d like to see tested extensively
• New hardware support (such as the EVDO/UMTS cards with NetworkManager in 11.0)
• New application
• Anything else extensively different from 11.0 that bears mentioning

Have you signed up to run for the openSUSE Board yet? If not, you have until Sept. 24, so don’t delay.

If you need inspiration, just check out this poster that Andreas Demmer put together. I need an Uncle Geeko t-shirt. Thanks Andreas!

Michael was kind enough to write about the openSUSE survey results over on openSUSE News. The survey results are fairly interesting, some of the responses are encouraging, some not so much.

The first thing that caught my eye is the gender response — less than 2% of respondents are women. The gender gap in FOSS has been a known problem for some time, but this is a problem we still need to address.

As for computer skills, only 5% of the respondents said their computer skills were basic. The encouraging part for this response is that nearly 38% of the respondents said that they were “experienced users without technical skills.” So slightly more than 42% of users consider themselves unskilled with computers, but still run openSUSE at least part of the time, which is a good thing. (Though it would be valuable if we could track those users in some way and see if they evaluate their skills differently after using openSUSE for a year — i.e., if they learn more about using computers and become interested in developing computing skills through using openSUSE, or if they are content to remain at their current technical level.)

No surprise here: developers and system admins make up more than 30% of the audience, and students are 25.2% of the audience. Something I see over and over again is that students make up a disproportionate percentage of the open source community. (Also, many open source developers tend to become involved with FOSS in college or late high school.)

Stability tops the list of choice when it comes to criteria for choosing software, followed by security, usability, and hardware support.

Here’s a somewhat contradictory result: about 34% of our respondents said that an OSS license was one of the most important features when choosing software, and about 39% said that multimedia support was a chief concern. I wonder how many people listed both multimedia support and OSS license as one of the most important criteria, seeing as those two criteria often conflict?

KDE3 topped the desktop list with 38.5%, and KDE4 clocked in with 29.8%, and GNOME with 26.9%. Xfce rules a modest 1.1% of users’ desktops. (Unfortunately, the survey didn’t have a “I use KDE, GNOME, and Xfce on different machines” option.)

About 25% of the respondents say that they’re involved in the project in one way or another — bug reporting being the most popular activity with about 13%, and forum participation also making up about 13%. Packaging is at less than 3% — I’d like to see that much higher by the time we do the next survey.

What should we do to improve future releases? A whopping 67.8% response rate for “improve hardware support.” This is, as always, a goal for the project — but it wouldn’t hurt to drop a note to your hardware manufacturers and mention that 1) you use Linux, and 2) you will consider a competitor of theirs in the future if they don’t support Linux.

Many thanks to all who participated. One last question — what should we ask next time we do a survey?