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.

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.

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.

Royal Pingdom has combed the Google data to see which distros are being searched for most offen, and how that breaks down by region.

Some interesting results here. Key findings:

• openSUSE is most popular in Russia and the Czech Republic.
• The United States doesn’t hit the top five for any distro. (That is, people in the U.S. don’t search by name for any of the distros that were studied as much as people in other countries.) The U.S. doesn’t even show up in the top ten for openSUSE or SUSE.
• Germany comes in third in terms of searches for openSUSE.
• If you change from “openSUSE” to “SUSE” the results are a bit different. Germany moves up to first, followed by Nicaragua, the Czech Republic, and Cuba. SUSE still gets a bit more love as a search term than openSUSE.
• Utah is the state that has the most searches for Linux, openSUSE, and SUSE.
• Ubuntu is getting a lot more search traffic on Google, and maxes out in Utah and California.

What do these stats tell us? Well, it’s hard to draw major conclusions from these. Really, it only shows that people are interested enough to plop a search term into a browser — and may not reflect reality in terms of people actually using Linux or any specific distro.

What would be interesting would be to see Google’s data on people searching Google from systems running Linux. How many people are browsing from Linux as opposed to browsing about Linux.

Still, every little bit of data helps. We, and I mean the “collective we” of all Linux enthusiasts hoping to spread Linux around the globe, have a lot of work ahead of us.

In case you missed the flurry of announcements last week and the weeks before, we’re doing Hack Week III this week (also known as “return of Hack Week,” “revenge of Hack Week,” or maybe “son of Hack Week”).

Skimming Planet SUSE I see we’re already off to a great start. Jakub Steiner (jimmac) is working on a free font replacement for Cholla, which is the non-free font used in marketing materials for openSUSE.

Robert Lihm has created some nice materials for us in the past, but because of the font issue, we’ve had a bit of a problem in terms of creating reusable materials that local groups can grab and edit to fit their own events and/or localize for non-English speakers. Obviously, that’s a problem, so I’m particularly pleased to see jimmac doing this for Hack Week.

I do hope we’ll have a healthy participation outside of Novell for Hack Week. I know we’ve got several community members who have been sponsored to travel to Novell offices and collaborate, and we’ve got Andrew Wafaa who’s been sponsored to go to Nuremberg to work on some video documentation of Hack Week and life in the Nuremberg office (”Geekos Gone Wild,” anyone?).

If you’d like to get involved this week, head over to ideas.opensuse.org and/or jump into IRC on the #opensuse-factory channel on Freenode.

And, as always, if this week doesn’t work for you, there’s no reason to feel constrained by an arbitrary set of dates. We have to pick a set of dates for Novell’s planning purposes, but there’s no reason at all that contributors in the larger community have to be bound by our timing. Since we have a three-day weekend coming up in the U.S., that’d be a perfect time for contributors to set aside and attack a project for openSUSE, or any time that’s convenient.

Tomorrow morning/afternoon/evening (depending on your time zone) we’ll be having an openSUSE Marketing meeting to discuss ways to promote openSUSE and projects within openSUSE.The meeting will be in the openSUSE-Project channel on Freenode at 15:00 UTC/17:00 CEST/11:00 EDT.

The agenda, so far, is over on the wiki — If you have anything to add, feel free to speak up on the openSUSE-marketing mailing list or just add a comment here. Right now, we have several things to discuss:

• openSUSE local groups
• Promote openSUSE in non-English-Speaking countries
• Helping Hands
• openSUSE TV
• openSUSE-tutorials.com
• Podcasts

Lots to do, but we’re always open to new good ideas.

In particular, would love some input on what everyone would like to hear in podcasts. For example – should we have an openSUSE Weekly News podcast in addition to the ever-popular text version?

One of my favorite Linux community shows ever was the Atlanta Linux Showcase. It was a fantastic, energetic show with just the right mix of commercial vendors (just a little bit) and community / hacker participation (a lot). (If you’ll pardon me for saying, while the business-focused and commercial shows are necessary and useful for the business side of the community, few people dispute that they’re less fun than community shows.)

Well, the Atlanta Linux Showcase is no more, but it looks like Atlanta’s Linux culture simply will not be held back! Got a note a bit ago from Nick Ali asking for volunteers to do a demo for the Atlanta Linux Fest. It’s taking place on Software Freedom Day, which is September 20th this year, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the IBM Hillside Conference Center.

Since I’m pretty sure Nick would prefer that his email address not be available for harvesting by the platoons of spambots that swarm the opensuse.org domain, please send me a note (zonker at opensuse.org — I already get metric tons of spam, what’s a little more?) find me on IM (xonker on Gtalk, jbrockmeier on IRC/Freenode.) or even send me a tweet (jzb) on Twitter.

Also, if you’re doing something for Software Freedom Day and want some openSUSE 11.0 DVDs to hand out, let me know.

This year, the Atlanta show is pretty small — they’re expecting about 100 people, but if I recall correctly, the Atlanta Linux Showcase grew from a small show as well. I’d love to see ALF (nice acronym…) grow into a mighty show like ALS.