Thanks to everyone that sent me notes on features for the 11.1 beta release announcement (and beyond). I got a slew of emails and suggestions, including some features I was unaware of. The 11.1 release is going to be very impressive.

Have you signed up to run for the openSUSE Board yet? If not, you have until Sept. 24, so don’t delay.

If you need inspiration, just check out this poster that Andreas Demmer put together. I need an Uncle Geeko t-shirt. Thanks Andreas!

Well, here we are, it’s September, and everybody’s talking about the election… the openSUSE board election, that is.

Marko Jung, who’s serving on the election committee, sent out a reminder today that the time is running short to declare the intent to run for a board seat, or to stake your claim to openSUSE membership so you can make your voice heard in the election. (Or both) The deadline is September 24th at 12:00 UTC.

The board is still in the formative stages, so I hope we’ll get several motivated and energetic openSUSE contributors to step up and run for the board. I’d also like to see more contributors (in and out of Novell) stepping up to claim membership in the project. We have a number of contributors who do great things for the project, but haven’t taken the time to go ahead and apply for membership.

If you have consistently:

• Worked on code or packaging
• Helped maintain the openSUSE wiki
• Worked on translations for openSUSE
• Provided user support on the mailing lists, IRC, and/or forums
• Promote openSUSE through talks/presentations and other methods

Then you’re member material. See the wiki for the perks involved with openSUSE membership.

KDE is hugely important to the openSUSE project, and openSUSE’s users. According to our most recent survey, a total of 68.3% of respondents are using KDE, so when it’s time to decide how to support KDE as it moves through its transition period, it’s not something that is taken lightly.

It’s been a major topic of debate over the past few weeks on the factory list and in other arenas. I’m sorry to say that not all of the discussion has been productive or positive — but we have gotten a huge amount of feedback, and the KDE team has decided on a course of action.

The long and short of it is that KDE 3.5x and KDE 4.1x will both be available on openSUSE media for openSUSE 11.1 — meaning the DVD images and DVDs produced for shows and so forth — but KDE 3.5 will be listed as one of the “extra” desktop environments, rather than as a primary DE in the installer.

There’s been a great deal of grumbling about the state of KDE and whether or not KDE 4.x is a suitable replacement for KDE 3.x. Some of it has been constructive and valid, some of it has been less so — but I’d like to remind people that the openSUSE developers are working with what the upstream project is producing. If you’re unhappy with KDE 4 and want to use KDE 3 indefinitely, then that’s possible — but community members are going to have to step up and start maintaining those packages.

That is the beauty of open source, of course — the source is available, and the licensing gives you every right to maintain any project like KDE as long as you want to keep using it.

From a downstream standpoint, the transition has been a bit of a challenge, to put it mildly, and I think our KDE team deserves major kudos for the work they’ve put in polishing KDE 4 while also maintaining the 3.x branch.

Just an update — a few months ago I created an openSUSE group on LinkedIn, even though there wasn’t all that much functionality to it at the time. A lot of folks have signed up (thanks!) but so far, it was basically just a placeholder (and it let LinkedIn users display a nifty openSUSE icon on their profiles…)

It looks like LinkedIn has added some discussion features and new hotness to the LinkedIn groups, so if you’re interested in trying it out, the group is here.

Out of curiosity - I’d be interested in hearing from community members if LinkedIn is at all useful (not just related to use of openSUSE) and what sort of “social networking” functions might be useful for openSUSE’s community that aren’t already fulfilled by the mailing lists, forums and other discussion mechanisms we already have. I think the openSUSE community is already pretty darn social, but I would like to know what kind of features we should have that we don’t.

Congratulations to the openSUSE Forums team! The merged forums were officially launched on June 10th of this year. In less than three months, the forums have pulled in 10,000 members. (Actually at 10,092 as of this writing, thanks to Kim for the 10K post.)

The forums team really put in a lot of time and effort to make the unified forums happen, and I think the numbers prove that their work was well-worth it.

If you haven’t signed up for the forums, please do so — and if you’d like to contribute to openSUSE in a non-developing capacity, might I suggest that helping other users on the forums is an excellent way to contribute. If you have a question about openSUSE - I would strongly recommend perusing the forums, and posting questions there if your question hasn’t been addressed previously, thus preserving the collective openSUSE wisdom for posterity.

Now that Hack Week III is over with, we’re ready to judge the entries. If you’d like to be considered for the judging, make sure your idea has been registered on idea.opensuse.org (or updated if you registered it, but would like to update the info since you registered.)

The categories for this Hack Week include:

• Best cross-pollination team: Awards the team that really wouldn’t have been working together if it weren’t for hack week.  People from different groups coming together.
• Top 3 award: Instead of picking a “best overall project” we’ll pick the best 3.
• Funniest project: Goes to the one that makes us smile.
• First Penguin award: This goes to a project that tries something risky… and probably fails, though that’s not a requirement. In honor of the first penguin that jumps into the water when there may be predators below.

The judges are:

Andrew Wafaa, Brady Anderson, Hendrik Vogelsang, Andreas Jaeger, Lars Marowsky-Brée, and myself.

Prizes are to be announced, but the fame and glory will be unsurpassed.

The deadline for updating idea.opensuse.org is Friday night.

If you want piping hot stable KDE 4 goodness, check out Stephan Binner’s openSUSE-based Live CDs for KDE 4.1.1. He’s whipped up some CDs that include the most recent stable KDE packages using upstream artwork instead of the openSUSE KDE artwork, so you can see if you prefer the stock KDE artwork or the openSUSE goodness.

Do I sound biased? Oops! What can I say? I love the openSUSE green….

If you’re running openSUSE 11.0 or 10.3 already and want the 4.1.1 packages, you can grab those as well. Check out the wiki and pick the right one-click installer for you. (Also linked off the official KDE 4.1.1 announcement.)

If you’re following openSUSE community news much, you already know we have elections for the board coming soon. No one can tell the full story like an insider, and Pascal Bleser has done a fantastic job with this blog post discussing the upcoming elections and what the board does and doesn’t do (at least so far).

I think the current board has done a really good job, but I think the next year is going to be even more important for the openSUSE board. As Pascal says, rightly, it’s not strictly up to the board to define itself — it’s also up to the community to define the board to some extent. I’ve gone to the board a few times for advice since I started in February and will continue to do so because I think that 1) the board should be involved in any major decisions related to the project and 2) the board has a lot of collective wisdom/knowledge that can help.

Anyone thinking of running for the board this coming year should know that it’s probably going to be a very busy year for the openSUSE community, and board.

If you weren’t in Salt Lake City last week for the Utah Open Source Conference (UTOSC), you missed out big time! UTOSC was one heck of a community show, and it seemed like all who attended had a really good time.

I had a really good time at the conference. It drew, I’m guessing, about 500 people. Lots of students, and also a number of IT professionals that wanted to check out some of the talks. The traffic to the booth was steady, but because of the location of the exhibits (which was not chosen by the organizers, as I understand it, but by the school) it wasn’t heavy. However, we gave out hundreds of openSUSE DVDs, t-shirts, and some penguins as well.

The final day of the conference was “family day” — I think that was a great idea, and I saw a lot of people bringing their kids to the conference and handed out a lot of penguins to youngsters. Start ‘em on Linux young, that’s my motto. Or one of them, anyway.

On Friday afternoon, I had the opportunity to deliver the Friday keynote. It was my first time out with a new talk, “How to bootstrap a community,” which fit well with their theme of “HOWTO” for 2008.The video will be online at some point, but the gist of the talk can be boiled down into the following:

• Why a company might (or might not) want to attempt to build community around a project.
• Despite lots of enthralled attention paid to community management in IT, the concept of community is old as dirt — and we should remember that the idea of community is not new. It’s just new to businesses…
• It’s crucial for commercial interests and open source communities to work together for widespread adoption of open source.
• A well-functioning community takes a lot of work, and doesn’t happen quickly.
• Some of the things community managers do as part of the job. (Not just my experience, also some of the work done by other people I know that wear the community manager hat.)

I had a really good time doing the keynote, surprisingly enough. One of the organizers told me we had more than 200 people in the room, but less than 300. (I didn’t take the time to count…but I believe the room capacity was 300.) The audience was great — some terrific questions after the talk, and it went by (for me) in the blink of an eye. I finished with the talk and questions pretty much right at the one hour mark, which surprised me — it only felt like about 20 minutes.

Update: I meant to mention the first time around — spent quite a lot of time re-working my slides and decided to use the sexy Rochade transition that’s in OpenOffice.org 2.4… very, very nice. Got some oohs and aahs from the audience on that one, so a hat tip to the OO.org folks!

The UTOSC organizers were awesome — they worked their tails off to make UTOSC the best conference it could be. In particular, I’d like to thank Stephen Shaw for all his assistance with the openSUSE booth and our participation in UTOSC, Trevor Sharp, Clint Savage, and everyone else who helped put it together. I had some really good conversations with Clint and Trevor, albeit too short. Also had a chance to talk to fellow Novellites and openSUSE contributors, like Andrew Jorgensen and “crazy French” Hubert Figuere. Hub’s a really fun guy to talk to, even more fun than his blog.

I also spent some quality time talking to Paul Frields while at UTOSC. I think there’s a lot of room for Fedora and openSUSE to work together, not just on the “Dairy Council” idea I’ve had, but also with RPM and other shared infrastructure areas. (I’ll be blogging about the “Dairy Council” idea separately.)

I have a few pictures under my UTOSC set on Flickr. There’s also a UTOSC set on Flickr for the attendees at large. In particular, I love the one of Fedora’s Paul Frields in the Banshee t-shirt. (And somewhere in the blogosphere, there is no doubt a picture of me and Paul together, with me wearing a Fedora polo… I loved the puzzled looks and wide grins I got walking around UTOSC with that!)

So very glad I went to UTOSC. I’m really looking forward to UTOSC 2009. With the experience of two successful conferences under their belts, I think 2009 is going to be even better.