Just got a question via email (which I will respond to shortly) and the topic came up during one of my five or so meetings today: openSUSE 11.1 release parties.

Short answer: Yes, my friends, there will be release parties so you can get your Geeko on with other openSUSE enthusiasts.

Long answer: Short on details, but will be announcing more as we approach the release. Would like suggestions or thoughts on the topic, though — realizing that we do not have infinite funds to buy the world pizza and beer (sorry world!) we’ll be looking for realistic ways to support our community that wants to hold or attend release parties.

Suggestions and comments welcome. What have you done in the past for release parties? What’s been successful? What doesn’t work so well?

Particularly interested in hearing from LUGs and university groups. Comment here or send me email.

The GSoC Mentor’s Summit wrapped up as strongly as it started. The second day of sessions were also productive — although some last minute schedule changes kept cutting into the “mini distro summit” that Donnie Berkholz suggested for the second day.

Despite the changes, we managed to get some discussion in and plan to continue the discussion. Present at the summit within the summit were representatives from Debian, Fedora, Pardus, Gentoo, and (of course) openSUSE. We talked about common problems like the mirror situation (and had representation from OSUOSL to hear it from the mirror side too) and issues of cross-distro communication.

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A little past the mid-way point at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit in Mountain View, California. The summit has been great so far — lots of interesting topics (so far, discussions on how to work with students for “umbrella” projects, getting universities involved in open source projects — specifically ways for projects to work with instructors to get their projects into the curricula, and how to deal with disruptive people in projects).

I’ll type up some thoughts on the various topics later after I’ve had a little more time to digest and think about the topics. It looks like we’re going to have a hackfest tomorrow on the university topic, which is awesome. Ran into Pavol Rusnak this morning, but it looks like our tastes in topics differs, since we haven’t been in any of the same talks since.

Some good ideas for openSUSE’s participation in GSoC next year — I think we ought to start looking at recruiting students and getting projects ready much sooner this year — like, starting at the beginning of 2009. One of the common complaints / problems mentioned is that there’s not enough time to get students up to speed with projects even with the additional bonding period. This isn’t really a problem with GSoC per se, just a reflection of the fact that it takes more than a few weeks to really get immersed in the way that any given project works.

By the way, for the chorus of folks who usually ask “where are the pictures?” Google tends to frown on photography inside the buildings, so I’m not going to be making with the photos while in the buildings, unfortunately. Might take a few shots of Mountain View here and there, but nothing GSoC Mentor Summit specific, sorry.

Very pleased with the quality of the summit and the talks so far. Really productive, and I’m absorbing quite a lot…

In case you haven’t noticed, beta 3 is out and ready for download and testing. I can’t wait to get my hands on the new release, I think it’s going to be a lot of fun.

Just a quick reminder — for those of you who’d like to test openSUSE, but aren’t sure where to begin — we have a page with all the features specific to openSUSE 11.1 (that is, new to openSUSE, not features specific to projects like GNOME, KDE, etc.) here put together by Holger Sickenberg (holgi).

As the 11.1 release gets closer, it’s time to put on the crash helmets and start banging on the betas. I know there’s been a lot of interest in the 11.1 beta 3 release, so I hope that corresponds to lots of testing and reporting of issues and also — on holgi’s page — reports of whether specific features work or not.

Reading this post by Max Spevack, I’m more convinced than ever that the openSUSE Project made the right call on KDE 3.5 inclusion in openSUSE 11.1:

John is still using Fedora 8 in part because he’s not a big fan of KDE 4 — an interesting data point. When I mentioned that Fedora 10 would include KDE 4.1 (addressing a lot of the stability problems that people have disliked in Fedora 9), he indicated that it wasn’t KDE 4.0 versus 4.1 that was the problem, but more that he simply preferred the general KDE 3 architecture. This is not the first time we’ve heard about loyal KDE users who prefer KDE 3 to KDE 4, but it’s an anecdote that I thought our KDE team might want to hear. I wonder if there is sufficient demand for the older KDE as to warrant a Fedora Spin that is essentially “Fedora 10 but with the latest KDE 3.x code instead of KDE 4.x code”. I use GNOME, so I don’t presume to make suggestions. I’m just trying to offer some reporting, and let the KDE experts make the decisions that they think are best.

A reminder, KDE 3.5x and KDE 4.1x will both be available on openSUSE media for openSUSE 11.1 — meaning the DVD images and DVDs produced for shows and so forth — but KDE 3.5 will be listed as one of the “extra” desktop environments, rather than as a primary DE in the installer.

Robert Lihm posted the following to the openSUSE-marketing mailing list:

Today we started a openSUSE Build Service Webclient online survey.
We want to get more informations about the OBS-Webclient users, the
used hard and software and (potential) use cases.

If you use, used or want to use the OBS, please participate on the
survey and help us to make a solid Webclient 2.

If you’re a Webclient user, please help ‘em out! Take a few minutes to complete the survey and the results will help improve the openSUSE Build Service Webclient.

Thought this would be of interest to the openSUSE community, since the e1000e bug caused a bit of a headache all around. The cause of the recent e1000e bug seems to be problems with ftrace code:

The cause of the bug is due to the way the current code in mainline
handles dynamic ftrace.  When dynamic ftrace is turned on, it also
turns on CONFIG_FTRACE which enables the -pg config in gcc that places
a call to mcount at every function call. With just CONFIG_FTRACE this
causes a noticeable overhead.  CONFIG_DYNAMIC_FTRACE works to ease this
overhead by dynamically updating the mcount call sites into nops.

The problem arises when we trace functions and modules are unloaded.
The first time a function is called, it will call mcount and the mcount
call will call ftrace_record_ip. This records the calling site and
stores it in a preallocated hash table. Later on a daemon will
wake up and call kstop_machine and convert any mcount callers into
nops.

Once again, it’s time to write the announcement for a beta release, so I’m putting out the call for features / issues that should be in this announcement. Please leave a comment here or send me an email at zonker@opensuse.org. Thanks!

Just announced the Hack Week III winners over on news.opensuse.org. I think it turned out very well, but I think we could always do better. A couple of things I’d like to see happen next time around:

• More ways for community to collaborate online. We flew several people to Novell offices so they could work together with Novell employees. I think that’s great and hope to do it again — but, we just don’t have the budget (or large enough offices…) to bring everybody together locally. So, we have to find good ways to collaborate online.
• Expanded award categories. I like our categories now, but I hope we can add one or two next year.
• More communication during Hack Week. Ideally, developers or teams would blog about their progress daily or at least a few times during the week.
• Community voting on projects. Maybe next year we can enable community voting and have a “best of hack week” as chosen by the community.

Thanks again to everyone who participated, and congrats to all the winners.

So, I think it might have been mentioned that there’s this election thing going on… (Are you an eligible voter in the openSUSE Board election? Have you voted yet? If not — stop reading this post and go vote!)

My question for today — what suggestions would you have for the new board? If you were having a sit-down with the board, what advice would you give, what would you ask them to do in the next year?