A friend of mine sent me a note about Jeff Shantz’s post on his initial impression of the openSUSE Project thanks to a couple of helpful responses:

it certainly struck me that these replies that I received were illustrative of a working, functional open source community — the end goal is to improve the product, and if one person doesn’t have time to continue working on a particular piece, then maybe someone else can. No territorial markings or egotism. Just one common goal to get it done.

So thanks to both Daniel and Jan (and my mentor, Marek Stopka, of course!) for a good initial experience in the openSUSE community! I look forward to making many future contributions.

Of course, for every person who is willing to put their neck out and blog about a good (or bad) experience, there are hundreds or thousands who don’t bother.

But please keep this in mind when interacting on the mailing lists. A positive, helpful response can make all the difference. We need to be doing our best to help new users and contributors, rather than spraying (as Karsten Wade often says) “community repellent” on potential contributors and users.

So, as Jeff says – thanks to Jan Weber and J. Daniel Schmidt. Glad to see this sort of attention being focused on openSUSE contributors.

In case you missed it, we’ve put out the openSUSE Summit Call for Participation here.

This is the chance for contributors to get up and lead on the topics that are near and dear to their hearts. Note that’s contributors and not only developers (though, of course, developers are very welcome!). Whether you contribute as a translator, wiki editor, packager, developer, member of the marketing team, etc., this is for all openSUSE contributors.

The summit is not going to be composed exclusively of presentations and such. Much of the summit will consist of workshops, birds of a feather, hack sessions, and other hands-on participatory sessions. So come prepared to give a lot of input and have a lot of fun!

Deadline is May 20th. Get those proposals in!

I typically don’t post about Novell enterprise products, but I’m making an exception here because this really affects the larger community and not just the corporate customers.

A few weeks ago, Novell released some videos to demo SUSE Linux Enterprise. The only problem was, they were released without captioning for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. This was due to the rush to finish the videos and release them in time for the launch.

I’m glad to say that this has now been made right, and the videos are available with captioning. Furthermore, in the future I know that Novell will be trying to make sure that videos are released with captioning right away, without any delay.

This is also something that the larger community should take into consideration. If possible, when making tutorials and videos, consider adding closed captioning.

Looking for captioning tools? Jon ‘maddog’ Hall has written a nice piece that discusses this issue over on Linux Pro Magazine:

What finally convinced me was the ease of doing the closed captions. Joner showed me a site where you can easily link to the existing video on various “video” sites, then use overstream to create a file that has the timing marks and the text for your native language. This file is called an “SRT” file. Once you have the marks and closed captioning correct, you can download the file and upload it to places like YouTube by editing your video’s information, clicking on “Captions and Subtitles” and uploading the SRT file.

You can also create another copy of the file, and either you (or a friend) can substitute another language for your native language. Then you have a foreign language subtitle!

Captioning and translation capability in one fell swoop! Can’t beat that.

Most people never have to think about captioning, so it’s one of those things too often overlooked. However, captioning makes a major difference for those who do need it. By going a few extra steps, your message reaches a larger, and grateful, audience.

It’s hard to believe that some Linux conferences have been going on for 10 (*or more) years. But it’s true – a handful of Linux events have been going on yearly for upwards of a decade. This year, LFNW is celebrating its 10th anniversary in Bellingham, Washingon from April 25th to 26th.

Lots of great speakers this year – Jon ‘maddog’ Hall will be there, Monty Widenius, Allison Randall, and many more. I’m also giving a talk, and looking forward to that.

I had the chance to attend last year, and it was a great time. LFNW is organized by a really fun group of people, it draws a great crowd that’s pretty diverse — some experienced Linux users, some new users, some contributors, and all-around enthusiastic and great to talk to.

Meet  new and interesting people: We’ll also have an openSUSE Booth at the event. If you’re interested in helping with the booth, would love to have you there. If you’re interested meeting people and talking about openSUSE, drop me a line and we’ll get you on the schedule for a few hours!

Rideshare: Also – I’m arriving in Seattle Friday night around 9 p.m. — if you need a ride to Bellingham from Seattle, let me know!

I’d like to produce some openSUSE reference cards (like these, but a bit more colorful in general).

It’s a no-brainer to include Zypper commands on the card. What else should we find room for on a two-sided reference card? Thoughts:

• YaST Command Line
• openSUSE Build Service commands / interface
• Specific YaST Modules
• General Linux commands

Thoughts? Would like to produce something useful for new openSUSE users as well as openSUSE experts.

Today we announced (officially) that iFolder code has been pushed out and we have a new iFolder Web site.

So, you can grab the source code from SourceForge immediately. We’re working on packages for openSUSE 11.0 and 11.1, and there’s work being done to put iFolder into the openSUSE Build Service as well.

Of course, there’s lots to be done. The new iFolder site needs some love, and we’re working on getting iFolder into the openSUSE Build Service, packaged for openSUSE 11.0 and 11.1 (and later) and generally turning it into a kick-ass project.

I’ve already seen quite a bit of enthusiasm about the code release and the #ifolder channel on Freenode has been relatively lively.

This time around, we really want to make sure iFolder is a collaborative, community effort. Brent McConnell will be heading up the community efforts with iFolder, so he’s a good person to get to know. If you run into roadblocks, email me and Brent and let us know.