One quick reminder for folks installing/upgrading openSUSE 11.1 in the days to come — we’d like as many users as possible to participate in using Smolt.

You should see a dialog about Smolt after system install with 11.1. But if not, you can run Smolt manually — just run “smoltGui,” and you’ll see a window with your hardware information and a green arrow at the top that says “Send.” Just click the green button and your system will be counted!

The information gathered by Smolt not only gives us one way of seeing how many openSUSE users there are, it also gives a picture of what kind of hardware is in use. The more we know, the better. (But not too much — Smolt is anonymous, so it doesn’t tie any of your personal data to the hardware ID or anything like that.)

Martin already sent out an announcement about the upcoming hackfest for Monday, but I wanted to bring it up again.The details:

• We’ll meet in IRC on Freenode, in the #opensuse-project channel.
• Hours are 11:00 to 18:00 CET (that’s 05:00 to 12:00 EST)
• Everyone is welcome to participate!

We’ll be going through the wiki and organizing content for “beginners” to openSUSE so that on the launch day, we can point people to the best resources we have so new users can easily find what we have and benefit from the documentation that exists. Of course, people are welcome to contribute new info where we’re already missing info.

Public speaking is something most people do not look forward to. It seems like giving a good presentation or talk is very difficult, because few people do it well — but that’s simply because most people don’t do it often enough to learn how to prepare well and be comfortable doing it.

If you’re interested in giving presentations or talks (about openSUSE, Linux in general, FOSS projects, or anything else in your life that you feel passionate about) I’d recommend reading Aaron Seigo’s post on audience management. I’ve seen Aaron give presentations before, and he’s a confident and engaging speaker — so I’d recommend his advice highly. Especially this:

Doing this requires practice. Try your licks out in front of the mirror, imaging yourself doing it in your mind before going to sleep, subject a friend to the horror of being an audience-of-one. Whatever it takes, go through the motions at least in your mind’s eyes if not in actual practice. Concentrate on natural, relaxed looking gestures, eye contact, avoiding those ‘uh’s and ‘um’s and smiling (again, in a style that looks natural). You can be an absolute wreck inside when you get up to give your presentation, but if you project calmness through your body language for the first 60 seconds (confidence is a bonus, but calmness is usually enough), you can win over the people in the audience, and that will make your presentation soooo much smoother.

Practice, practice, practice — it will make giving a presentation so much more comfortable.

As we’re getting closer to 11.1 final release, it’s time to start giving the wider openSUSE audience (and, very importantly, potential new users) a sneak peek at what’s going to be in the new release.

So, we could use a few good openSUSE users to step up and write a “sneak peek” for their favorite new features — whether that’s the latest release of GNOME in openSUSE, Banshee, KDE 4.1, or whatever. There’s a list of ideas over on the wiki, but don’t feel constrained! If you have a passion for YaST and want to write about the new modules, knock it out and submit it. (Thanks to Kevin Dupuy for getting the ball rolling.)

Sneak peeks are published on openSUSE News, but if you don’t have an account — don’t worry. Someone with posting privileges will be happy to put it up.

If you have questions or aren’t sure where to start, feel free to ping the openSUSE marketing list with questions. (If you’re not subscribed, sign up!) We have a very friendly bunch of people on the -marketing list, everyone is welcome to join and pitch in.

Let’s get those sneak peeks rolling! We have a slew of interesting new features in 11.1, and it’s time to start telling the world about them.

Getting ready to head to Nuremberg this morning, and wanted to copy some files over to my USB key so I could work on the plane. (Florida to Germany is a bit of a commute, so I might as well have something to do while I’m in a tin can over the Atlantic Ocean, right?)

I’ve got an account with rsync.net (highly recommend) and wanted to copy some files to a fresh system with openSUSE 11.1 RC 1 to transfer to USB. (11.1 looks very good, by the way…)

I didn’t have my rsync scripts handy, so I decided to see about mounting the remote system using FUSE. You can also connect using Webdav in Nautilus and the “fish” protocol in Konqueror, but this method is good if you’re not a desktop user. (For instance, if you have a server running openSUSE and want to mount a filesystem on another server while working over an SSH connection.)

You should have FUSE installed already, but I didn’t have sshfs, so I popped open a terminal and ran this command:

zypper in sshfs

I’d created a directory called “rsync” (not very original, I know) and mounted the remote filesystem using the SSH Filesystem:

sshfs user@host.rsync.net: rsync/

Once that’s done, the remote filesystem is mounted as the directory “rsync” and I can copy and move files just like they’re local. (With, of course, the exception of the fact that they’re being transferred over an Internet connection rather than on local disk — so copying and moving may not be quite as snappy.)

I know a lot of experienced openSUSE users already know this, but I’m guessing a lot of other folks don’t so I thought I’d slap up the instructions since it might be useful for others.