Want to become an expert on Evolution? (The mail client, that is…) Join the Helping Hands project on Friday, July 18th for “Things You Didn’t Know About Evolution,” which is being presented by the Go-Evo Developer Team.

It’ll be held in the opensuse-gnome IRC channel on Freenode at 14:30 UTC. (That’s 16:30 for those of you in Germany, 10:30 for folks on the East coast of the U.S. like me, and a slightly early 7:30 for folks on the West coast. Click the link for the time in your timezone…)

If you know anyone who’s just started using openSUSE, how about spreading the word? I’m sure lots of openSUSE users would find this session helpful. I might just have to join this one myself, actually… I am sure there’s plenty I don’t know about Evolution.

Also, I know the Helping Hands team is looking for people to present on topics outside of GNOME (so far all the HH activity has been GNOME-specific, but that’s not the long-term goal) so if you’re a KDE fan or YaST guru, step up and share the knowledge.

LugRadio Live UK is coming up next weekend, and the openSUSE project will be in attendance. Roger Whittaker and Andrew Wafaa are going to be representing the green at LRL, and (assuming the shipping gods are kind to us) handing out openSUSE 11.0 DVDs to all and sundry.

If you’d like to assist at the booth, get in touch with Roger. A big thanks to both Roger and Andrew for taking the initiative at LRL!

OK, “summer tour,” might be stretching it a bit, but it sounded nice in the headline. However, we’re going to be out and about this summer and the next two events are OSCON and LinuxWorld Expo in Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, California, respectively.

We’ll have booths at both shows, and we’ll be doing the openSUSE Day at LWE, with a ton of great talks and openSUSE 11.0 DVDs, some door prizes not to be missed, and lots of fun in general. We’d love to see an enormous crowd at LWE, so bring your friends, family, co-workers, ameniable strangers… you get the idea.

Mozilla’s Christopher Blizzard has whipped up something pretty cool — Whoisi, a search engine/tracker to follow your friends’ feeds and other online output.

So, for instance, if you want to follow Blizzard’s online trail, just go to his Whoisi page and you can see his most recent updates on Flickr, Twitter, Identi.ca, LinkedIn, etc. (Or you could check out my page, or just hit up a random user.)

I’d encourage everybody in the openSUSE community to set up a page for themselves if they have a blog or other online presence that Whoisi can track.

This is a bit of a coincidence… I’m prepping to do a presentation over the phone/Web in a few minutes and ran across this post by Ross Brunson on the SUSE Linux Enterprise in the Americas blog about “12 tools for kick-ass Web meetings.”

The only problem is, most if not all of the tools are not open source or even necessarily compatible with Linux.

I’d like to be able to do more multimedia presentations for groups that I can’t meet in person, or at least can’t meet at a given date — and I think it’d be a good thing to have a list of online meeting tools for the openSUSE community in general.

I’m not just talking about IRC or IM — though those are very effective as well, and conference calls tend to be a bit lacking without some visual components.

So, I’m throwing this out to the lazyweb: What kind of online conference/collaboration tools do we have available for Linux users that might make it easy to meet and collaborate online? I’m thinking of tools that are useful for one-to-many conversations (presenations) and many-to-many collaboration sessions. Bonus points for tools that are located in the openSUSE repos…

It’s still early after the launch, but I think we’ve been pretty successful in getting the word out about openSUSE. Here’s what I’m seeing on the Internet the Monday after the launch:

• LinuxPlanet’s Dan Lynch takes a look at KDE4 in openSUSE 11.0 and finds it “a good improvement on openSUSE 10.3.”
• An interview over on InternetNews with Sean Michael Kerner.
• Another over on BetaNews.
• Coverage on The Inquirer, noting that the server was “borked” when they tried to reach it. (Try again, guys!) Not surprising, we had huge server load immediately after the official release. (And before, actually — people really wanted a shot at the download…)
• Another write-up on ZDNet.co.uk.
• Builder.au announces the release.
• DistroWatch has some kind words and statistics about 11.0:
  It is illustrated in the table below, which ranks the major distribution releases according to the number of unique hits their respective pages received during the first three days after the release. As can be seen, with over 16,500 unique hits, openSUSE 11.0 is second only to Ubuntu in terms of post-release interest in the distribution among the DistroWatch visitors.
• openSUSE 11.0 also got a glowing review from DownloadSquad:
  OpenSUSE has always been a strong option for new Linux users, and users who wanted a distribution they could grow with. We always had a few reservations about recommending it, mainly because of speed and package handling issues. OpenSUSE has made monstrous strides in these areas between the 10.3 release and today.
• Also a nice review on Linux.com:
  openSUSE 11.0 is a fabulous release. The pretty new graphics set the stage for significant improvements under the surface. All the time and energy put into the package management system has paid off. Including KDE 4 is not as big of a risk for openSUSE as it might be for other major distributions because of the conservative and intuitive way KDE 4 is set up. openSUSE has given me hope that I could actually like KDE 4.

There’s quite a lot more out there — I’ll be posting more comprehensive roundups shortly.Feel free to leave links to coverage in the comments — I don’t want to miss anything!

Today is the big day. The world will get to take a look at openSUSE 11.0 in its full glory — and I think it’s going to go over very well. The openSUSE team has really done an amazing job with 11.0.

I’ve had the good fortune to be using the final release for several days, and though there are no major surprises between the betas/RCs and final, I thought I’d mention some of my favorite things in the 11.0 release…

Banshee 1.0 has much love from me. It’s doing a really good job of managing music off of my iPod, and I can’t wait to get back to a decent (non-hotel) connection to play with the Last.fm features.

The package managment improvements, of course, are going a long way towards making me love, love, love this release — When I want to do something and realize I need to install a package to get it done, I don’t like a long wait time between point A and B.

As I’ve mentioned previously, NetworkManager in 11.0 rocks. I didn’t always have the best experience with NetworkManager in 10.3, but it’s been rock solid in 11.0 and super-convenient with my EV-DO card.

My favorite thing about 11.0, though? It’s released! The anticipation has been astounding — we’re getting tons of feedback from the press (which I will post about later tonight) which is really positive. I’m also hearing lots of love from community members and others who have given it a shot.

The openSUSE team has put tons of work into 11.0 and it shows. I hope all of the folks involved are feeling good today (not to mention taking a little time to relax) because it’s well-deserved. I can’t even begin to tell you how much fun the last few months have been!

Enough about me, though — what’s your favorite thing about openSUSE 11.0? What should we be looking at for 11.1?

This week I’m working off an EVDO connection while I wait for Verizon to get FIOS set up in the townhome I’m moving to. (Just moving across town.) Now, a few weeks ago I blogged about setting up EVDO using wvdial on openSUSE 10.3, so I thought I would mention the process for 11.0.

I hadn’t used the EVDO card in a few weeks, so I plugged it in on my big green laptop that I’m running openSUSE 11.0 RC 1 on. Under GNOME, when I plugged in my EVDO card and went to NetworkManager, it had already recognized the card and all I had to do is click “connect.” No need to give any information (I guess the card stores it all?) — just plug it in and go.

This isn’t just “user friendly,” this is significantly easier than using the same card under Mac OS X or Windows. No (extra) software to install (the management software is a PITA on OS X), it just dials up and goes. Beautiful!

It’s unbelievable how far Linux has come since I went to using a Linux desktop full-time in 1999. From “stable but hard to use,” to “stable and easier than other OSes,” in just nine years.

Update: Should point out that NetworkManager works the same way for users with UMTS, so the network goodness is not limited to EVDO. Anyone have a UMTS card that they’d like to lend me next time I’m in Europe? I think I should test this extensively… (and having a convenient network connection while I travel would just be an added bonus…)

The forums announcement went out yesterday, and within a day (give or take), we’ve gotten more than 700 people signed up for the new merged forums. That’s not bad at all, and I can’t wait to see how the forums grow over time and in sync with the openSUSE 11.0 release that is just a bit more than one week away.

Since the forums launched we’ve already been covered by Download Squad, Desktop Linux, and a slew of blogs. (I think a few more pieces are in the works as well…) And, as promised, we have a shiny new podcast up on Novell Open Audio.I had a lot of fun doing the podcast (not as much fun scheduling it — getting five people from different timezones all on the phone at once is a bit of a challenge) so download it and give it a listen when you have some time. It’s great to listen to Keith, Rupert, Kim, and Wolfi talk about their roles in the project and where they want the forums to go.

I couldn’t help but notice that the Apple camp is having a big shindig today with some announcements that the press and fan blogs are salivating over. I’ve noted a number of times — Apple gets far more coverage in the mainstream and tech press than its market share alone warrants, which in turn seems to be helping drive interest in Apple and increasing the company’s market share. How do we learn from the Cupertino crowd and get the same effect?

Many people credit Apple’s success with creating a slick operating system, and sexy hardware — but they forget that Apple has always been a press darling, even before they unveiled OS X, the iPod, and even their first rebound success, the iMacs. Might be hard to remember, but the iPod has only been around since 2001, the fruit-colored iMacs launched in 1998, and OS X in 2001 as well.

So, what is it that Apple has that other tech companies don’t — and, more importantly, what could the Linux community do to capture the same kind of attention, or can we?

Part of Apple’s media savvy is its exclusiveness — Apple holds its cards close to the vest, and its playing “hard to get,” makes it more interesting.

Obviously, it’s hard to do that for a Linux distro — everything is out in the open, so there’s no real opportunity for a big unveil.

So, I’m curious — what could we do to build the same kind of excitement about Linux (in general) and openSUSE (specifically) with the press to push Linux in front of users who aren’t familiar with Linux, who haven’t yet tried Linux, but might be willing and/or interested?