Good news, more than 50 percent of eligible voters have cast their ballots for the openSUSE Board Election. The bad news? Almost 50 percent of eligible voters have not cast their ballots for the openSUSE Board Election.

Good news? There’s still time! Ballots close on October 23rd, which gives more than a week before the election.

Still not sure who you want to vote for? Read the platforms over on the wiki. I won’t give any suggestions as to which candidates you should vote for, but I absolutely will say that you should vote! (And yes, I’ve voted already, so it’s too late to campaign for my vote.) As I understand it from the election officials, it looks to be a close race (not surprising) so every vote will count.

I’ve been asked a few times to put up my slides from the Utah Open Source Conference, Indiana Linuxfest, and Ohio LinuxFest… so here they are. A few caveats: 1) The slides are of minimal value without the actual talk that goes with them. I have more text on the slides than I’d like, but less than is necessary to get the full gist of the talk. 2) This isn’t a generic openSUSE presentation, so it’s not freely reusable. (If you want to use some slides from the presentation or have questions, feel free to ask in the comments or send me an email.)

I’ve put the presentation (Bootstrapping Community) up as a PDF for now, I’ll HTMLize it eventually, but no time today. Note that this is the latest iteration, so if you saw the keynote in Indiana or Utah, it’s slightly different. If I give the talk again in the future, it’ll probably be different then, too.

Free airport wi-fi is so wonderful. I’m sitting in Sarasota airport (SRQ) getting ready to fly off to Indiana for the Indiana and Ohio Linuxfests. (The flight crews are starting to look familiar. You know you fly too much when the steward asks if you want “the usual” when they roll by with the beverage cart…)

I just got back from Tokyo, but how could I resist the opportunity to speak at these shows? Haven’t been to the Indiana show before, but I am confident it’ll be a good day. This will be my fourth year at OLF — 2005, I covered the event for Linux.com, 2006 I helped organize the event and ran PR, 2007 I helped organize PR and speakers, and this year I’m slacking off and just giving a presentation and working the openSUSE booth.

If you’re anywhere near OLF, you really do not want to miss it — it’s a huge gathering of Linux and FOSS enthusiasts, and it’s been going strong for years. I know gas prices are making some folks a bit iffy on the drive, but it’s well worth it.

See you in Indiana and/or Ohio!

The voting has begun! If you’re an openSUSE Member, or one of the delegates, it’s time to cast your vote. You should have received an email from “election-officials@opensuse.org” this morning. Click on the link included in the email and cast your votes.

If you’re not sure who you want to vote for, see the platforms on the wiki. Remember, you can vote for two Novell employees and two community members not employed by Novell, for a total of four board seats. The chairperson is appointed by Novell, and will be announced when the other candidates are announced. Andreas Jaeger, who has served as chairman for the last year, has decided to step down as chair and not run for a seat. He will continue to be involved with openSUSE and available to consult with the new board, so we won’t be losing his experience even though he won’t be involved with the board full-time.

Note that we’ve had a few problems with iChain – so, if you vote and are immediately signed out, you should log in to confirm that your vote has been cast. If you see a green checkmark, you should be good to go. If you see a red X, try again. Contact the election officials (election-officials@opensuse.org) if you have any questions. They can verify whether your vote has been cast, though not the actual results of your vote.

So far, in only a few hours, we have more than 27% participation, with 65 people voting. Let’s make it 100%, or as close as possible.

Good luck to all the candidates, I look forward to finding out who will be serving on the new board!

Getting ready to head back from Tokyo, but already looking forward to my next trip out — specifically, heading to Indiana for Linuxfest 2008, and then to Columbus, Ohio for Ohio Linuxfest 2008!

I’ll be doing a keynote at both events. I’m really looking forward to seeing the Indiana Linuxfest for the first time, and I always have an excellent time at OLF. Especially this year when I’m not responsible for organizing it!

By the way, if you’re interested in helping out at the OLF booth this year, please get in touch. We still have room.

Update: If you live near Bloomington, Indiana and were thinking about heading to OLF but didn’t want to splurge on gas — I might have room in my car for one or two passengers. I’ll be driving from Bloomington to Columbus Friday afternoon and then back Sunday morning. You’ll have to arrange your own room in Columbus, but I’m happy to help a few Linux enthusiasts get from point A to point B to support the cause.

Just three years ago today, the openSUSE Project announced its first release.

Andreas Jaeger sent the word out to the opensuse-announce list on October 6, 2005, announcing the release of SUSE Linux 10.0:

I’m glad to announce the final version (aka the Goldmaster) of SUSE Linux 10.0. Developing 10.0 as part of the openSUSE project with an open bugzilla was a new and great experience. Thanks a lot to everybody that contributed in testing, reporting and fixing bugs, discussions etc.

The 10.0 release featured the latest and greatest free and open source software: the 2.6.13 Linux kernel, Firefox 1.0.6, GNOME 2.12, OpenOffice.org 1.9, and more.

The project, which was announced at LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco in August of 2005, has achieved a lot in just three years:

• The formation of the first openSUSE Board
• Five stable releases in three years (10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, and 11.0)
• Introduction and complete re-write of Zypper/libzypp for better package management
• More than 200 members approved since the start of the project
• Release of the openSUSE Build Service 1.0, which allows complete and transparent participation in building openSUSE Linux
• First openSUSE Board elections begun
• Launch of News.opensuse.org
• Creation of the lizards.opensuse.org portal
• Launch of unified English-language openSUSE Forums

And much more I’m probably forgetting at the moment. The openSUSE Project has grown a lot since the first release in 2005, and the future is looking bright!

We celebrated the 3rd anniversary of the first release today in Tokyo at the Novell office and had a wonderful time. Thanks much to Ayako and Satoru and everyone who helped pull the event together.

The cake was fantastic! It was as good as it looks, and as you can see, it’s a beautiful cake.

One of the things I’ve been trying to do this trip is to take plenty of pictures. I’ve been uploading stuff to Flickr like crazy, haven’t had a chance to caption and comment on all the photos yet, but the images are there (from the trip so far).

This is Satoru Matsumoto, an openSUSE member and one of the people working hard on openSUSE in Japan.

That’s Ayako Kiryu, one of my colleagues from Novell, who helped organize much of this trip.

You can see the slideshow of OSC photos or just head to the set on Flickr. Sun’s Jim Grisanzio was kind enough to come to my talk on Saturday, he grabbed a few shots of my talk and also of the conference at large.

That would be me. Check out the rest of Jim’s slideshow from the conference, though, his pics are fantastic. You can debate the relative merits of OpenSolaris and openSUSE, but the fact that Jim’s camera skills outpace mine by a country mile are beyond debate.

I’ve also got a larger set of photos from Japan that may or may not be of interest. Usually, when I go somewhere new, I come away with a few photos that I really think capture the visit, but this time I haven’t succeeded yet in getting one really good picture. I should find the time for a photography class in the near future… definitely before I come back to Japan!

That’s a scene from the temple I visited on Sunday while sightseeing.

More on the trip to come, but I thought I’d put up some pics for those of you who always comment “where are the pictures!”

Just a quick post to say “Thanks!” to Dinar Valeev for working with the openSUSE Weekly News team to translate openSUSE Weekly News into Russian. (Еженедельные новости openSUSE)

I can’t overstate the importance of translated materials to help make participation in openSUSE easier. Thanks very much to Dinar for his efforts, and I hope to see many more translations of the weekly news. (Thanks also to Jan-Simon Möller for assisting Dinar with the process.)

Internationalization (I18n) is definitely going to be a repeating theme for openSUSE’s community growth over the next year.

It’s been a busy week, trying to adjust to the radical difference in time zone and attend meetings and juggle other things that need doing (like scraping together the release notes for the beta 2 announcement…). But, it’s been really fun and interesting so far as well.

I had the pleasure of meeting a number of colleagues from Novell Japan, who have been exceedingly gracious and kind enough to take me out for some wonderful food. And to overlook the fact that my chopstick skills are, shall we say, less than expert. However, by the time I get home, I will probably be able to manage just about any food with chopsticks. Also, there’s some measure of irony in the fact that I went to my first Korean barbecue restauarant in Japan, I think…

So far this week I’ve had the chance to meet with local representatives of the Linux Foundation, and also got a chance to meet our own Satoru Matsumoto (known on IRC as helios_reds). Several good ideas from these meetings, but the most pressing need for openSUSE to grow in Japan is obviously a better translation infrastructure. (And more contributors helping with translation and original content in Japanese.) The local community has created a site called Geeko.jp especially for rallying the Japanese-speaking community around openSUSE, and I’m looking forward to seeing it grow and flourish.

Yesterday, I participated in a meeting with Yukio Yoshida of the Linux Consortium and HitachiSystems to talk about openSUSE and solict some thoughts on building community in Japan. This was a new experience for me not only because it was the first time I had the pleasure of meeting Yoshida-san, but also because it was my first meeting with an interpreter.

And a few hours later, we had a press conference to discuss openSUSE with the local tech press, and I had the opportunity once again to work with an interpreter — while giving a presentation. This made me extremely conscious of my presentation skills, because I had to slow down greatly and had time to pause and reflect on the presentation one thought at a time.

Today is the first day of the Open Source Conference in Tokyo. I’m really looking forward to seeing the show and seeing the projects and companies that are participating. Tomorrow, I’ll be giving another presentation on openSUSE, and showing off some of the nifty features of openSUSE 11.0 and beyond. Looking forward to meeting more open source enthusiasts and getting the word out!