OK, I know a lot of openSUSE users are outside the U.S., but I couldn’t help the Thanksgiving reference. No matter where you are, I hope you’re having a great day — and 11.1 RC 1 ought to spice it up a bit. I just pushed the button on the openSUSE 11.1 RC 1 announcement on openSUSE News so tell your friends, family, neighbors, and everybody else who might want to help test the release.

If you have a few minutes, check out the interview with openSUSE Board member Bryen Yunashko here. Bryen talks about A11y, his work with Linux, and career choices for deaf and hard of hearing students.

Bryen was recently elected to the openSUSE Community Board and is probably the first ever Deaf-Blind member of a Linux-based board. “I started using Linux some years ago after I got frustrated with some of the restrictions and limitations I faced on Windows. I also ran for board because I wanted to ensure that accessibility users also have a strong voice in the open source world.”

Bryen is actively involved in working with developers and packagers in making sure that all Linux-based software is accessible for people with disabilities. “I’m an active member and leader of the GNOME A11y Team,” Bryen said. “GNOME is a desktop environment in Linux and ‘A11y’ (A plus 11 letters plus y spells accessibility) stands for accessibility in computing. By getting into A11y, I’m taking charge of my own destiny. I want to be able to be sure I can continue to work with computers as long as I live.”

Good stuff — head over and see what Bryen has to say.

Just in time for openSUSE 11.1 RC 1, we’ve finished the new and improved license for openSUSE 11.1. The days of agreeing to a click-through EULA for openSUSE are over!

The text of the new license is included on the wiki, but the highlights are:

• Users no longer need to agree to the click-through EULA. This is not a EULA, it’s a license notice. We want you to be aware of your rights as provided by the FOSS licenses, so we’ll display this notice but not require a click-through EULA.
• openSUSE is an aggregate work including many open source and free software packages. The aggregate work is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2, individual packages are governed by their respective licenses.
• The main DVD now includes only the software that we can redistribute freely and that you can redistribute freely.

We want to make sure that openSUSE is the easiest Linux to obtain and use — and a big chunk of that is licensing. We now have a license that presents no obstacle to redistribution, and no obstacle for modification.

We are also working on trademark guidelines that clarify how and when the openSUSE marks can be used, and we’ll be releasing those shortly.

The work we’ve done on the openSUSE Build Service and the openSUSE license is all about making it easy to redistribute openSUSE: Either as-is, or modified to suit your needs. Want to ship an Xfce or KDE 3.5 live CD? We want to make that easy. Want to use openSUSE for another project that we haven’t thought of? Again – we want you to, and we want to make it easy! (And, of course, we want you to have a lot of fun while you’re doing this — though our lawyers tell us that’s not legally enforceable.)

You may notice similarities between our license and Fedora’s. We have based our license on the license notice that is being used by the Fedora Project. We did this for a few reasons, primarily because we didn’t see any point in reinventing the wheel — Fedora’s license has worked for them, and there’s no reason it wouldn’t work for us. Reuse is one of the strengths of our community, after all.

We also “borrowed” Fedora’s license because they freely offered it, and because it also meets our needs. I’d like to thank Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields for providing assistance while we were working on this process.

We also want to thank Novell’s crack legal team for putting in the time on this. While we wound up working with an existing license, we took the long way to get there — trying to modify the previous EULA to be more friendly, coming up with ideas to create a license from scratch. As a suggestion to other projects — we’d recommend looking at existing license notices as well, rather than trying to come up with a brand new one.

We’re happy to say that you’ll be able to enjoy openSUSE 11.1’s final release without clicking through a EULA at all. The EULA is dead, long live the new and improved license notice!

(Update: Made a few minor edits to clarify.)

Nice interview with our own Lars Marowsky-Brée about telecommuting over on the Linux Lancers blog. I was really interested in reading about Lars experience working from home, since I’ve also worked outside the office for a number of employers since 2000. I totally agree with his comments about self-discipline:

Discipline is needed, I think; but not just in the way most reluctant managers think of: it is actually quite difficult to stop working, or make a clear cut between work and personal spaces. The “just one more mail”-syndrome. And accommodating conference calls in the middle of the night is another downside of the deal.

Finding the balance can be hard, and there are those days where one can’t get into work or can’t seem to stop. I think it evens out in the end, with a tendency towards working more than intended.

Good stuff – take a few minutes to check it out if you have time.

Got my ThinkGeek fix Friday, which included a Vantec NexStar SATA drive dock. I had a spare 320GB SATA drive sitting around and slapped it on my test system running 11.1 beta 4 (was backing up for the 11.1 beta 5 install…) and everything just worked.

I’ve tried various removable drive products over the years, but they always seemed to require some drive case that was a pain to hook up. This, on the other hand, is easy as pie — insert SATA drive, power on, use, unmount, remove, repeat as needed. According to the product specs, it handles up to 1TB drives, though I’m not sure what would limit it to 1TB if you can find a SATA drive with higher capacity.

You have the option of connecting via eSATA or USB — I’m using it over USB, but would like to test out eSATA when/if I upgrade to a machine with an eSATA connection. Very handy, especially if you’re doing anything that makes sense to back up off site. I was moved to buy this after realizing the last real data backup I’d managed was from February. Not good.

If all goes as planned, we’ll be releasing openSUSE 11.1 beta 5 tomorrow. (We were expecting to release 11.1 RC1, but it was decided there were too many blocker and P1 bugs to call it RC1.)

I’ve put up a draft of the release announcement on GitHub here:  http://gist.github.com/24232 Any feedback or additions would be welcome. If you don’t have a GitHub account (and don’t feel like signing up for one…) feel free to send me a diff or just send me an email with comments. Thanks!

Because openSUSE ships a lot of the same software as other Linux distros, I was wondering what openSUSE users see as the unique and interesting features of openSUSE. Obviously, shipping GNOME, KDE, Firefox, and other software is pretty standard, so where does openSUSE stand apart? I asked the marketing list and got some interesting responses — some I’d anticipated (YaST) and some others that I hadn’t thought of:

• YaST
• Zypper
• openSUSE Build Service
• The “Slab” menu — now upstream in KDE, but still unique to openSUSE / SLED on GNOME
• Default install “full of useful software”
• Forums (I was thinking of the distro itself, but it makes sense that the support and such from the forums is a good reason to use openSUSE.)
• Direct participation in upstream development of GNOME and KDE, and the choice of both in openSUSE
• “Polished” desktops — I do think we ship very well-polished versions of GNOME and KDE
• One-click install
• Retail box – Our retail box is a great way for beginners to get started with openSUSE
• Security features (AppArmor, SUSE Firewall)
• Mono integration – done very well in openSUSE
• Software Repos in the openSUSE Build Service (I’m a Gwibber fan, which lives in the “FunkyPenguin” repo…)
• Some people like the DVD image with lots of software vs. live CDs with a minimal selection
• Several people mentioned stability, though this is hard to quantify and in my experience, stability is usually a benefit of Linux in general
• Dual-arch x86_64 implementation — so you can easily run 32-bit apps on 64-bit openSUSE
• Two-year lifespan — a reasonably long lifecycle for a release, not too short, but not aimed at mission-critical areas where a system will just run until it dies on the same OS version…
• Server support — openSUSE makes a very good server distro
• An awesome mascot (really, Geeko wins that one hands down…)

I’d be curious what other areas the community finds unique and impressive about openSUSE.

We have a lot of areas where openSUSE really shines — but, of course, there’s always room for improvement as well.

11.1 is on the way, but we’ll be planning for 11.2 soon — what should we improve? What kinds of features should we be thinking about?

Nice little piece over on ComputerWorld by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols about the (unfortunately persistent) myth that software installation is more difficult on Linux than Windows…

Personally, I find the Linux method easier because not only do package managers install the programs, they also enable you to search for a program. Say you want a program to display Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format) files. In Windows, you need to find out what program you’ll need-Adobe Acrobat Reader, then download it, and then install it. Easy enough, but it could be easier.

With openSUSE, for example, I select Install Software from my main KDE menu. Install Software is part of openSUSE’s YaST administration program. I’m then presented with a menu where one of my options is to search for software. I put in ‘PDF,’ you see I don’t even need to know the name of the program that can handle PDF, and it shows me a listing of programs and their descriptions. At the top of the list is AcroRead from Adobe. I click on it and YaST takes care of downloading and installing it.

So, in short, with Linux I don’t need to even know the name of a program, I just search for what I need with the package manager and once I find something I like I just give it one click and that’s it. With Windows, searching, downloading and installing software is three separate operations. Advantage: Linux.

Advantage Linux, indeed. This is an area where openSUSE (and other Linux distros) shine — and it’d be good to get the word out about that.

openSUSE 11.1 isn’t even out, but YaST is already getting some positive reviews over on OStatic. Imagine what kind of reviews YaST would get if it were released separately from openSUSE? Which brings me to the topic at hand… Stanislav Visnovsky is asking the question: Should YaST be released independently from openSUSE?

But in principle, YaST is a tool that can be used across distributions and there are people interested in this to happen. There are technical barriers to do releases independent of openSUSE (e.g. a lot of openSUSE-specific knowledge and behavior coded in YaST) as well as procedural. During past years, a lot of these non-technical issues has been addressed as we opened up the YaST development (re-licensing the code under GPL, opening up source control system and mailing lists, etc).

But still, there is one big thing left: YaST packages are released in concert with openSUSE. Yes, it is very convenient for openSUSE, but it makes it almost impossible to track the development during for people outside of our great distribution.

YaST is, for me, one of openSUSE’s major strengths, and I think it’d be beneficial for other distros and projects to use and extend.

Linux, after all these years, still lacks a good, comprehensive, and cross-distro system management tool that’s suitable for use at the console or from the desktop. (YaST qualifies as good and comprehensive, in my book, but falls down on the “cross-distro” part.)

I’d really like to see YaST development visible to the community at large as a separate process, for several reasons:

• Provide more attention to YaST releases — currently, YaST releases are announced concurrently with openSUSE releases and I don’t think they get the same attention they would separately.
• Provide more visibility into YaST development — which might help involve more projects with YaST.
• Assuming there’s more adoption of YaST outside of openSUSE, it would help provide additional testing and (presumably) improve YaST all around. Not that YaST isn’t perfect already, of course…

If you have thoughts around this, I’d encourage discussion over on Stano’s blog.

Ars Technica has a useful little piece on paste services for geeks, with a special focus on GitHub’s Gist.

For years, I’ve been using several old standbys, namely the pastebin and pastie implementations, which are hosted at numerous websites. My favorite pastebin site is pastebin.ca, which adds numerous features on top of the standard pastebin.com distribution. Recently, though, irc friends have been pointing me towards github. So I finally bit the bullet and checked out github’s “Gist” pasting system. Sure enough, Gist takes pasting into the next generation.

I’m convinced. Signed up for a GitHub account a few minutes ago, and seriously thinking about signing up for a paid account to sync some of my documents and config files in my home directory…

Gobby has also been useful for collaborative editing in the past, but I don’t hear too much about it these days. It’d be nice if OO.org had that sort of functionality as well. (Or maybe it does, but I missed it in the feature list. But I don’t think so…)

What do you use for sharing code/text?