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.

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.

I know I’m already looking forward to 11.2, but that’s not a surprise. The good news is, we’ve also made the list of “25 highly anticipated open source releases” for 2009 on ComputerWorld.  Moonlight and Moonshine also get a shout-out.

It’s going to be a long wait until November, but it’ll be worth it…

Time is slipping away: If you’re interested in applying for the Google Summer of Code as a student (for openSUSE or any other project) you have a bit more than 73 hours — time runs out on Friday, April 3rd at 19:00 UTC.

Announcement for openSUSE here. If you have questions, please ask on the opensuse-project mailing list, or in IRC in the #opensuse-project or #opensuse-gsoc channels on Freenode. If you have general SoC questions, you can also ask in the #gsoc channel. Email me if you have additional questions, but asking on -project is probably the best way to go.

Another nice shout-out for the openSUSE community here: The USENIX association magazine, ;login, has recognized openSUSE as having the same level of protection against some of the recently discovered package management vulnerabilities as enterprise-class distros. Says Federico Lucifredi:

What’s more, the openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise distros not only secure packages and package metadata with cryptographic signatures, but have addressed the more exotic attacks described by the paper as well, with the slow-data fix currently in Factory completing the picture. The upshot of this is that users can deploy updates safely whether they’re obtaining updates from a centralized network or through a decentralized system of community maintained mirrors.

The full article is available as a PDF. Definitely worth a read!

Good stuff here: The openSUSE Education project gets a shout out in this post on ZDNet.

Cost will certainly give people a reason to switch, but I don’t think a crappy economy or poverty in a developing country is the only reason to use Linux and open source software. I won’t even get into the argument of exposing kids to a variety of computing environments. I think the biggest reason to use Linux (aside from potential cost savings if you can develop some in-house *nix expertise) is simply the giant body of software that is freely available.

The OpenSUSE Education project is a great example. Desktop software included with this project ranges from computer science applications for kids to the R statistical programming interface. Server software ranges from OpenSIS to Joomla.

Go show Chris some love in the comments if you have a moment, and do read the full article. (And he’s right — openSUSE Education project is a great example…)

I have some good news for people who are interested in the iFolder Project: Novell will resume open development of iFolder in the next two weeks.

What does this mean? We’ll be re-launching the iFolder site, and providing access to the source code starting with 3.7.2. We also want to get iFolder into the openSUSE Build Service and start releasing iFolder with openSUSE.

This has been in the works for some time, and we’re planning to make a more formal announcement towards the end of this month — which will include source code for the most recent version of iFolder.

I’m not sure yet if we’re going to hit March 31st or April 2nd for the announcement and release. For obvious reasons, it’s not a good idea to send the note out on April 1st… But, our plan is to formally announce the release of code in less than two weeks.

In addition to the code release, we’ve been developing our strategy for coordinating and communicating with the community going forward. Brent McConnell will be taking the role of community manager for iFolder (as well as Kablink) and the iFolder developers will be more actively working directly with the community.

Why isn’t this happening immediately? We need to get the site infrastructure in place to support the project going forward, and due to the gap in releases, there was a decision to do a legal review of the iFolder code and plan of action for further community development before releasing the 3.7.x branch. I’m happy to say that this is a one-time situation, and further releases will happen in sync with iFolder development.

If you have comments or questions about iFolder as an open source project, please drop me or Brent an email.

Thanks for your patience.

Quick note – will post a longer announcement on news.opensuse.org shortly – but wanted to spread the good news: openSUSE is once again participating in the Google Summer of Code!

If you’re interested in being a mentor, sign up this week (sooner is better) if you’re interested in participating as a student, the student application period begins on March 23.

Thanks to everyone who’s already submitted ideas and signed up to be a mentor. Thanks to Lukas Ocilka, Stanislav Visnovsky, and Jiri Srain for starting the wiki page, too!

I’m seeing a bit more interest in sending things to opensuse-announce lately, which is a good thing (in my opinion) but I’d like some feedback from other community members on what does and doesn’t belong on the -announce mailing list.

The description of the announce mailing list here says that announce is for “announcements concerning the openSUSE Project” which is good, if a bit vague.

Obviously, meeting announcements and reminders should go to the announcement mailing list. Things like downtime announcements and news that affects the entire project seems like a no-brainer as well.

But what about announcements that are specific to sub-projects or things like meeting minutes, requests for testing of beta packages (like, say OpenOffice.org)?

The goal is to make sure that important project news is seen by anyone who would be interested and/or affected by something will see it — not trivial, given the size of our overall community and the amount of things going on at any given time.

At the same time, sending too many announcements means that some percentage of people will leave announce because the traffic is too high. Something I’m very wary of – we need to increase the number of subscribers to -announce anyway, not lose subscribers.  It’s not uncommon that I hear someone say “I didn’t know about that!” when it was sent to -announce fairly recently…

Posting to opensuse-announce:

If you’re doing something of interest to the large openSUSE community, feel free to send an announcement to the -announce mailing list: The list is moderated, so if it’s not appropriate for the list, it shouldn’t go through. (Though there have been a few things that have slipped through moderation…)

What should an announcement look like?

Check over the archives if you’d like to see things that have gone before. Generally – you want to have a descriptive headline that makes it clear why the announcement is relevant/interesting.

If possible, the first line or two of the email should give the most important details (the “who, where, when, what, why and how” of the announcement) and then fill in detail in subsequent paragraphs.

• Announcements don’t need to be long: They can be a couple of sentences if that’s all that’s necessary.
• Announcements don’t need to be formal or great prose: Conversational tone is fine, and the announcement doesn’t have to sound like it was written by a professional copywriter. (Avoiding spelling and basic grammatical errors is a good thing, though.)
• Announcements should have all the relevant details and/or a link to a wiki page with everything that the reader needs.
• It’s a good idea to include contact info for follow-up questions.

If you’re unsure about whether your news is “worthy” of -announce, feel free to email me or ask on the opensuse-marketing list.

Finally – note that you need to be subscribed to opensuse-announce in order to post to the list.

Subscribing to opensuse-announce:

If you’re not already subscribed to opensuse-announce, it’s easy to do and just takes a few seconds. (The whole process can be completed in under a minute, usually.)

Just send an email to opensuse-announce+subscribe@opensuse.org. (You don’t need a subject or body for the mail.) Then look for a note in your inbox that asks you to reply to confirm the subscription.

If you want to unsubscribe, it’s just as easy: send an email to opensuse-announce+unsubscribe.