Hello from San Francisco! LinuxWorld Expo is going pretty well so far — we ran out of DVDs at the booth yesterday, which was a pleasant problem to have — I hope all the folks who snagged a DVD went straight home and installed openSUSE 11.0 on their computer, their neighbor’s computer, and any other computers that happened to be lying around. The booth was busy most of the day, with a few lulls that I think coincided with keynotes.

We had a great booth staff — Martin Lasarsch, Adrian Schroeter, Duncan Mac-Vicar Prett, Ross Brunson, and volunteer Holden Aust were all fielding questions, tossing DVDs, and giving out some of the swag…

Today is the big day, though — we’ll be doing the openSUSE Day today in room 131 of the Moscone Center, which is just a short hop away from the exhibit floor. The schedule is on the wiki. We have quite a few really good talks. If you happen to be at LWE, be sure to stop by the openSUSE Day.

Calling all San Franciscans! The openSUSE Project (or at least selected members thereof) is hosting an openSUSE Day at LinuxWorld Expo next Wednesday, and we want to see you there.

We’re going to be giving out two Chumby’s (er, that’s two total — not two per attendee…) as door prizes at the openSUSE Day and we’ll also be handing out assorted openSUSE swag — such as t-shirts, Geekos, openSUSE DVDs, and other goodies that you won’t want to miss out on.

And, if all the swag wasn’t enough reason to drop by, you’ll also have a chance to hear some great talks about openSUSE and technologies in openSUSE. And be sure to head by the openSUSE booth and see openSUSE on display and ask whatever questions you might have about openSUSE 11.0 and the openSUSE Build Service.

Just a quick reminder that the kernel team is going to be holding a Bug Squashing Day tomorrow to reduce the number of kernel bugs in bugzilla, get rid of duplicates and invalid bugs, and to test and review fixes for kernel bugs. So, put your bug-stomping hat on and join the kernel bug massacre tomorrow!

The bug slaughter commences tomorrow, starting at 00:00 UTC and lasting all day. Join in on Freenode in the #opensuse-kernel channel.

Happy bug squashing!

I have some good news for folks who have been wanting a version of the Novell Client for Linux for openSUSE. I just put up the announcement over on news.opensuse.org:

We’re pleased to announce the public beta of the Novell Client for openSUSE 10.3. Novell released the packages for the Novell Client for Linux 2.0 SP1 public beta today.

A number of openSUSE users have expressed interest in having the client packaged for openSUSE, so our developers have been working on building the client against openSUSE. Please download the package and give it a try on your systems.

Novell is also working on a package for openSUSE 11.0, though we don’t have an official timeline for that package yet. We will also post an announcement when it’s available, and will post announcements for any further betas or the final release of the Novell Client for Linux.

Joe Harmon, the new product manager for the Novell Client for Linux, has been instrumental in driving this, and deserves a lot of thanks for his work to get this out the door. I know a lot of people have been looking for this, so please grab the RPM and get to testing!

As mentioned in the announcement, we don’t have a hard date for the 11.0 version, but it’s in the works and we’ll be sure to let the world know when it’s available.

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…

The day has finally arrived! Fire up your torrents, your download managers, or whatever and head over to software.opensuse.org. openSUSE 11.0 final is now available for download!

Need something to do while you’re waiting for openSUSE to download? You can read the full announcement over on news.opensuse.org, and then make sure you check Digg regularly and help vote up stories about openSUSE 11.0’s release. Blog about it, tell your friends, and help let the world know about the release!

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.

It took a little longer than expected, but the big day has finally arrived and the openSUSE merged forums are live! From the announcement:

The openSUSE Project is proud to announce the launch of forums.opensuse.org, a merger of the openSUSE Novell support forums, suseforums.net, and suselinuxsupport.de - the three largest English-language dedicated support forums for openSUSE. The merged forums at forums.opensuse.org will provide a single forum for the openSUSE community to find support and discuss openSUSE.

The forums went live on June 9th, a result of the combined effort between the staffs of the suseforums.net, suselinuxsupport.de, and the Novell forums. The project team has been working since early 2008 to merge the forums and provide a unified forum for all English-speaking openSUSE users. The openSUSE Project will be looking at adding other languages to the forums in the very near future.

You can read the full announcement over on news.opensuse.org, or just head over and start reading and posting on the forums. (OK, technically the forums went live yesterday but we opted for discretion as the better part of valor and held off the official announcement until we’d had a day or so to make sure everything was groovy.)

The forum merger is one of the first projects I was introduced to after starting in February. I’ve been participating in (most of) the planning calls and working with the forum staff doing real work for a few months on the tail end of this project, and I can’t say emphatically enough how much I appreciate all the hard work that has gone into this project.

From the outside, this project may seem unremarkable — a couple of groups that ran forums on a similar topic got together to do one big forum, where three existed, what’s the big deal? It is, of course, a big deal.

If I hadn’t been an inside observer, I wouldn’t have understood just how much work and merging of cultures was necessary to make this happen. It required a fair amount of technical work and coordination, which shouldn’t be underestimated, but it also required a lot of cooperation between the staff of the three forums. This project required a lot of trust between three different groups, and the willingness for each group to give up 100% control of a project in order to realize a new project that (we hope) will be more than the sum of its parts.

Looking back, I think everyone will agree that the effort was worth it — but it was a long road and everyone involved deserves a big Thank You from the community for making this happen. In particular, I want to thank Keith Kastorff, Kim Groneman, Wolfgang Koller, and Michael Loeffler for their leadership on the project. Also, a big thanks to Rupert Horstkötter, who continued to work as a project manager on this after he went back to school this semester.

Of course, the launch doesn’t mean that the forums are done. You’ll be seeing improvements and new features from the forums team — but the foundation is laid and we now have a home on the Web for openSUSE users to converse and support one another. And just in time for openSUSE 11.0, which is less than 10 days away!

As a side note, I’d like to mention that we did a short podcast a few days ago that’s being cleaned up for Open Audio — so we’ll have that up before too long, and you can listen to the forum leads in glorious stereo sound!

Have some free time on Wednesday, around 13:00 UTC? Go help the openSUSE GNOME team squash some bugs!

Just did one of the first (I hope of many!) interviews for openSUSE 11.0 coverage. Even though I’ve been with Novell since February, it’s still a bit odd to be on the other side of the interview. I’m so used to asking the questions…

It was a good interview, though — it’s obvious the reporter had done his homework, none of the questions were total stumpers (”So, can you tell me how many kernel header files have changed since 10.3?” “Uhhh….”) and I think the story will be a good one.

A couple of things I mentioned:

• What’s new in 11.0 from 10.3
• Improvements to the installer and packaging system
• Upcoming openSUSE Build Service 1.0 release and how that will affect openSUSE
• How we’ll measure success (metrics we use to see how openSUSE is growing)
• Hurdles to success (convincing new users to use openSUSE / something other than Windows)
• Roadmap for 11.1, etc.

So, my question to the audience — if you had a chance to talk to a reporter about openSUSE 11.0 (or just openSUSE in general), what would you want to say?