Next week’s openSUSE Project meeting should be fairly substantial. If you can make it, please do! The meeting will be at 17:00 UTC on #opensuse-project on Freenode. The agenda is here, feel free to add to it if there’s something we should discuss. (As if the topics on the agenda already weren’t enough!)

If you happen to be in the Los Angeles (or nearby) area, you don’t want to miss the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) this weekend.

SCALE goes three days — Friday is mini-conferences (including Open Software Source in Education, and Women in Open Source) and Saturday and Sunday are the main conference days.

Our own Michael Meeks will be doing a talk on “An open office suite” and I’ll be doing the keynote on Sunday morning, and there are lots of other interesting speakers on the schedule as well.

And, of course, we’ll have an openSUSE booth at the show and will be discussing openSUSE and other sundry topics there. If you’d like to help in the booth, feel free to drop me an email.

The Linux Foundation has announced the call for papers for the first annual LinuxCon, which will take place September 21-23, 2009 in Portland, Oregon.

If you’re interested in speaking, submit your papers by April 15th (yes, Tax Day for those of us in the States… interesting timing…). You can find the info over on the LF Website.

This should be a great conference, so sign up and I hope to see you in Portland!

If you weren’t at FOSDEM this weekend, you missed some great talks and the opportunity to meet lots of free software folks. And I do mean lots — not sure if they have an accurate headcount of attendees, but it’s in the thousands.

Gave a talk on openSUSE on Saturday (slides in previous post). Will work on generalizing those slides a bit so other folks in the community can go out and talk about openSUSE as well. The one point I really wanted to highlight in the talk was all of the great things we have going on in and around openSUSE — particularly around openSUSE.

Some of the great projects I mentioned during the talk: openSUSE Education, MirrorBrain, e5 Datasoft’s work on ARM in the openSUSE Build Service, Csync, Nomad, Helping Hands, working on Netbook support, KIWI-LTSP, openFATE, Kablink, and much more. (If you’re working on an openSUSE-related project, including projects using the build service, and don’t see the project listed there — let me know!)

Having an awesome Linux distro is just part of the fun. Seeing how people use and remix the distro, that’s when things get truly interesting.

Back to FOSDEM itself. I didn’t get to attend too many talks, but sat in on some in the openSUSE Dev room and also caught Ted T’so talking about Ext4. I was just watching, not taking notes, so all I can really say in detail is “cool” and “wow, we’ve come a long way since I started using Linux 13 years ago…” I remember having a limitation on file sizes of 2GB… we’re a long way from that now. (I think there probably is still some limitation on the size of files, but that’s probably way bigger than the dinky 120GB hard disk in my ThinkPad…)

Talk about your “hallway track,” by the way. One of the things that I think about a lot is whether a conference has a good “hallway track,” which is to say — not only the sessions, but do you get anything done talking to people in the (big surprise here) hallway?

All of the tables for projects are in the hallways of ULB, and you have to navigate some pretty crowded halls on the way to and from tables and talks. (Imagine a sort of low-key rugby game, with backpacks…)

Really good show, and it’s obvious why it continues to draw major crowds.

Copy of the presentation I used for FOSDEM on openSUSE — would need to be modified a bit by anyone else who gave it, but might be a good template for other openSUSE presentations.

FOSDEM Presentation here!

Getting all my gear together to head to the airport in a few minutes for FOSDEM! This year, I will not miss the world-famous Beer Event, and I’m looking forward to seeing all the openSUSE contributors and users in Brussels.

I’ll be doing the openSUSE talk on Saturday from 14:00 to 15:00 in the main room, please drop by and check it out!

Also, you’ll find the openSUSE Dev Room schedule on the wiki - lots of great stuff there, please come by and check out the talks and meet the openSUSE team!

I have the good fortune to be doing a talk on openSUSE at FOSDEM the weekend after next.

If you were in front of a room full of a few hundred FOSS folks, what would you want to say about openSUSE?

Or, if you were one of the few hundred people in the room, what would you want to know about openSUSE, the openSUSE Build Service, and so forth?

Will be posting some slides and ideas as I get closer to the talk. Suggestions welcome.

Heading off to Australia this morning to attend and speak at Linux.conf.au. If you send any mail my way, I’ll be offline through Sunday afternoon. Will try to catch up on email once I get settled in Hobart.

See you in Hobart!

Michael Lessard was kind enough to send me a link to photos from the openSUSE 11.1 Launch Party in Quebec City from December. Looks like a good time was had by all! If you had a launch party, and have some photos, please drop me a line — would love to link to them.

Martin already sent out an announcement about the upcoming hackfest for Monday, but I wanted to bring it up again.The details:

• We’ll meet in IRC on Freenode, in the #opensuse-project channel.
• Hours are 11:00 to 18:00 CET (that’s 05:00 to 12:00 EST)
• Everyone is welcome to participate!

We’ll be going through the wiki and organizing content for “beginners” to openSUSE so that on the launch day, we can point people to the best resources we have so new users can easily find what we have and benefit from the documentation that exists. Of course, people are welcome to contribute new info where we’re already missing info.