Quick reminder — we’re having a Packaging Days event tomorrow and Saturday. A number of openSUSE contributors will be holding an online workshop all day April 4 and April 5 on Freenode in #opensuse-buildservice.

Anyone is welcome to join, but it is helpful if you have some experience compiling software.

What will you learn? The event is designed to teach you how to create packages using the openSUSE Build Service. If you have any favorite applications that you’d like to see packaged for openSUSE — or if you’re a developer of any packages that you’d like to see packged for openSUSE — this is for you.

If you’ve been meaning to learn to package, this is definitely for you. Lots of openSUSE contributors with tons of packaging and build service experience will be standing by to answer questions. (OK, sitting by, more likely, but still…)

You’ll probably want to have an account in the build service, and look over the docs linked on the wiki about creating packages.

See the wiki page for more info, we’d love to have you! (Thanks to Dirk for pinging me to put out the reminder.)

Just grabbed Firefox 3.0 beta 5 — it’s looking real good so far, so I thought I’d post a few notes about the release. I spend far more time than is healthy at the computer, and Firefox is probably the application I use the most (next to Vim) so expect more commentary on this throughout the week.

Nothing jumps out at me as a huge change from Firefox 2.x, but I see lots of little improvements here and there, and it feels faster, even though I don’t have any hard data to support that.

This may be the release that causes me to break up with del.icio.us for good. Not because I don’t like the site/service, but because I always have to choose between using Firefox development versions or using the del.icio.us extension for Firefox. I strongly prefer using del.icio.us to using Firefox’s own bookmarks, particularly since I use multiple machines and trying to sync bookmarks between browsers is usually a pain.

But, it never seems like the del.icio.us extension supports the development releases. Since I like to hop on the development releases of Firefox with the last round of alphas or the first round of betas, I have to decide between my bookmarks or the browser for several months.

The good news is that I’m able to import the del.icio.us bookmarks with no problem. The bad news is that all of the tagging is lost, so all I have is an uncategorized lump of nearly 700 bookmarks that isn’t terribly useful in that form.

What is useful is that I can create a tag and then a smart folder from the tag and put that in my toolbar. So, I can have a smart folder of all bookmarks tagged with something like “openSUSE” and have them show up in one folder on my bookmark toolbar. This is how I was using del.icio.us, and it’s very convenient.

Back to work, more to come on the beta soon. If you’re using the Firefox 3.0beta builds, feel free to comment on your experience or any new features you find useful. I’d be curious to hear what others are finding.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while… I have an Eee PC, but want to go ahead and put openSUSE on it — which isn’t quite as straightforward as putting openSUSE on a standard laptop or PC.

Lucky for me, Sonja Krause-Harder took the time to figure things out and document the experience of putting openSUSE on the Eee PC. Now all I need to do is follow the instructions and slap openSUSE on the machine. I’ll give a report on Monday about it, and the openSUSE on Eee PC experience, after I’ve had a chance to do the installation.

Also, I’d love to hear from openSUSE users who have installed openSUSE on “unusual” hardware — especially if you have some documentation for other users to follow.

Polishlinux.org has a great preview of KDE 4.1 by Korneliusz Jarzebski, which has tons of screenshots and info on KDE 4.1 applications and new features. Spiffy!

Hello from Salt Lake City! Today was the first full day of BrainShare sessions at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, Utah.

First thing this morning I went to the General Session (a.k.a. “keynote”) with Ron Hovsepian, Jeff Jaffe, John Dragoon, and Jim Ebzery. (If you couldn’t make it, or just want to relive the experience, the vids are already up on the BrainShare site here.) The room was packed — not sure how many people were at the general session, but it was a huge room, and looked quite full from where I was sitting.

Jeff talked about Novell’s Fossa project, which is about “computing and collaborating with agility.” (The fossa is a particularly agile animal that’s native to Madagascar.) Jeff spent a fair amount of time talking about Linux and the importance of open source to Novell’s strategy.

Even though I knew that already, it’s good to hear it articulated during a major keynote like this — and, of course, it’s important to talk about with Novell’s partners and customers. One of the things I’m enjoying at BrainShare is the opportunity to talk with people who’ve been using Novell stuff for years and years, and who are getting excited about Linux and open source. It’s also fun to get to talk about openSUSE with BrainShare attendees.

I had a chance to wander backstage after the keynote… I don’t mind saying that Novell really has some grade A showmanship going on. Seriously — I’ve spent quite a lot of time attending trade shows as a journalist, and I don’t think that I’ve been to any other shows that are quite so well-produced. (The Salt Palace, by the way, is huge — I wonder if I can rent a bike for getting from the Technology Lab to the Press Room…) After the session I spent a fair amount of time catching up with fellow Novell employees that I typically only interact with over the phone, or via email and IM, and spending some time at the openSUSE counter in the Technology Lab.

Tomorrow Adrian and I will be giving a presentation on KDE4 at 4 p.m. We went over it this afternoon, and I think it’s going to be a good session — many thanks to Will Stephenson who put the presentation together originally, but was unable to be at BrainShare to do the presentation himself.

If you’re at BrainShare, be sure to stop by the openSUSE booth in the Novell Technology Lab. We’re showing off openSUSE Factory and answering questions about openSUSE development and the build service.

I got a nice surprise this morning when I woke up — a note in my inbox that Banshee 1.0 alpha is available. Our own Aaron Bockover has a lot to say about the new release over on his blog:

This is the first release that shows off the hard work we’ve done on rewriting the core of Banshee. There were a number of critical flaws in previous releases due primarily to the fact that writing custom data models for the GtkTreeView was not possible until very recently in Gtk#.

We took some much needed time to redesign the database layer of Banshee to be able to deliver powerful model/query/cache level features and provide a framework to build on for years to come.

I decided to ditch the GtkTreeView and it has paid off. On top of this model sits a slick new list view rendered using Cairo. We control 100% of the drawing, so we can take this thing anywhere we want in the future - things you can only dream of with the GtkTreeView. You’ll already notice some nice GUI “bling” when using the view - try reordering columns.

With all of these core architecture changes, what we have now is a truly flexible framework for developing our prized Banshee.

Even though I’ve been a diehard fan of Amarok for some time, I’ve been playing with Banshee on my laptop for some time — and was happy, except that it had a serious glitch in organizing my music. For some reason, the version of Banshee shipped with 10.3 wouldn’t sort tracks in the right order.

I took advantage of the one-click install this morning first thing, and I’m glad to see that little problem has been sorted out nicely. So far, the 1.0 release looks like it’s shaping up nicely. As Aaron points out, 1.0 alpha is not yet at feature parity with previous releases — but they’re working on it.

Speaking of one-click install — all you happy 10.3 users can grab it right away too:

Also note, if you install it with one-click, it will be installed in conjunction with the previous Banshee. It will show up with a different icon under the Multimedia menu in GNOME, or run from the command line as banshee-1.

Big thanks to Aaron and all the rest of the Banshee team!

Just a quick reminder — there’s a KDE team IRC meeting tomorrow (Wednesday, March 12) at 19:00 GMT/UTC.

The meeting happens on Freenode at #opensuse-kde and the following topics are on the agenda for tomorrow:

• openSUSE-KDE Easter egg painting
• talks at LinuxTag and Akademy
• kdepim testing results
• KDE 4 blocker list revisited, topics for 11.0
• potential SoC projects
• old action items

Also, the following standing items:

• We should think about our future work (see KDE/Challenges)
• KDE4 packages and development environment on openSUSE
• Identifying SUSE specific issues vs upstream issues more closely
• Bug reports against KDE component

Barring emergencies (it’s the week before BrainShare… lots going on in Novell-land this week!) I will be there. Hope to “see” you there as well.

In case you missed the news, a new minor release of KDE is out — KDE 4.0.2 was released on Wednesday.

This release includes improvements for Plasma — the panel can be resized and options have been streamlined a bit to make it easier to use, and there have been some improvements to KHTML. A full list of the changes is available on the KDE Web site.

KDE 4 will be part of openSUSE 11, but you don’t need to wait until the openSUSE 11 release to get KDE4 goodness right now, though. As with 4.0 and 4.0.1, we have packages available for one-click install on openSUSE 10.3 and Factory right now, and instructions to install KDE 4.0.2 are available as well.

If you haven’t test driven KDE 4 yet, I strongly recommend taking a look.

Just trolling Planet SUSE and I see that Andreas Schneider has released source code for csync, “a user level file synchronizer to provide roaming home directories for Linux.” This might be something very interesting…

I use several Linux boxen, a laptop and a couple of desktop machines. I’m always interested in better ways to sync my info and data between them.

I’ve been hanging out in #openSUSE-project for a few days now, and the question posed to me most frequently is what desktop are you running? I guess this is usually a straightforward question — pick a desktop you like and stick with it, right?

Right now, I’m using KDE on my main desktop. Let me show you it:

I’ve got a dual-head video card, and two 20″ Dell widescreen monitors — which openSUSE 10.3 had no problem detecting and putting to work. (I like a LOT of screen space…)

But I’m also running GNOME, on my spiffy new work ThinkPad. And I use Xfce on my desktop from time to time, too. Why? A couple of reasons — one, it’s a habit from my days as a freelance writer to run multiple desktops. Being familiar with more software meant being able to pitch and write more articles.

Two, I want to kick the tires, so to speak. When a new release of GNOME, Xfce, or KDE is out, I can’t wait to get my hands on it. (Kudos to the openSUSE team for having KDE 4.0 and 4.0.1 packages out fast, fast, fast!)

Also, over the years, I have gotten to know a number of GNOME and KDE developers and contributors, and I want to be able to see what they’ve been working on and give an honest opinion if I’m asked. But, mostly? It’s the fun. I enjoy using KDE and GNOME, but for different reasons.

So, what’s on your desktop, and why?