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!

Today is the big day. The world will get to take a look at openSUSE 11.0 in its full glory — and I think it’s going to go over very well. The openSUSE team has really done an amazing job with 11.0.

I’ve had the good fortune to be using the final release for several days, and though there are no major surprises between the betas/RCs and final, I thought I’d mention some of my favorite things in the 11.0 release…

Banshee 1.0 has much love from me. It’s doing a really good job of managing music off of my iPod, and I can’t wait to get back to a decent (non-hotel) connection to play with the Last.fm features.

The package managment improvements, of course, are going a long way towards making me love, love, love this release — When I want to do something and realize I need to install a package to get it done, I don’t like a long wait time between point A and B.

As I’ve mentioned previously, NetworkManager in 11.0 rocks. I didn’t always have the best experience with NetworkManager in 10.3, but it’s been rock solid in 11.0 and super-convenient with my EV-DO card.

My favorite thing about 11.0, though? It’s released! The anticipation has been astounding — we’re getting tons of feedback from the press (which I will post about later tonight) which is really positive. I’m also hearing lots of love from community members and others who have given it a shot.

The openSUSE team has put tons of work into 11.0 and it shows. I hope all of the folks involved are feeling good today (not to mention taking a little time to relax) because it’s well-deserved. I can’t even begin to tell you how much fun the last few months have been!

Enough about me, though — what’s your favorite thing about openSUSE 11.0? What should we be looking at for 11.1?

Looks like the openSUSE GNOME team had a very successful bug day yesterday. I was chatting with Christopher Hobbs about it while it was going on, and he said he’d write up a Bug Day Guide — which is already up on his blog. Good stuff, if you’re interested in running bug days, he’s got a few good tips for doing so.

Oh, and I fully support this sentiment: “Gobby has considerably sped the process up, my only complaint is that it doesn’t have vi keys.”

All text editors should support vi keybindings, just as nature intended.

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!

Do you have a passion for Linux and a desire to promote openSUSE? Would you like to paint the world’s desktops openSUSE green? If so, the openSUSE marketing team wants you!

Some of the things I’d like the marketing team to address:

• Ensure we publicize community events and meetings to maximize turnout and participation
• Create presentations and materials that can be reused to promote openSUSE
• Create artwork, banners, logos, etc. for openSUSE
• Help organize launch parties, local events, installfests, and talks at LUGs
• Support the openSUSE booth at shows
• Give presentations about openSUSE, the openSUSE Build Service, Linux, and other related topics to interested groups

In short, I’m looking for openSUSE contributors (and potential contributors) to help publicize community events more effectively, so anyone who’s interested in contributing to openSUSE knows how they can do so and when meetings are being held, etc — and also to help promote openSUSE to the rest of the world, so everyone has a chance to experience Linux.

I’ve spoken with a number of people in the past few months who have expressed an interest in being part of a marketing team, so here’s your chance to get involved! This is a particularly good opportunity for non-developers who want to find a way to contribute to openSUSE. If you can write, have artistic skills, want to create and/or deliver presentations, staff a booth, or have a knack for organizing, we’d love to have you on the team.

I’d like to start off with a discussion on the newly minted mailing list (thanks, Henne!) and then find a suitable time to hold meetings on IRC to get coordinated.

With openSUSE 11.0 rapidly approaching, there’s plenty to do, so if you’d like to help spread Linux, start your favorite email client and send a subscribe request to opensuse-marketing+subscribe@opensuse.org.

If you’re a Twitter user, and you’re “tweeting” about openSUSE, here’s a way to add some additional context to your tweets and help get the word out about openSUSE. While I was at Sun’s CommunityOne, I started noticing other users adding a hash tag in their posts — i.e., posting about #communityone instead of just “communityone.”

While Twitter doesn’t do anything special with hash tags, you can track hash tags on (of course) hashtags.org. As you can see, there’s not a lot of activity under #openSUSE just yet, but I’d like to see that change. I’ve been using #openSUSE a lot on Twitter lately, but I just realized this morning that your tweets are only indexed by hashtags.org if you follow the @hashtags bot, but (at least for now) the bot doesn’t post often (last post was about 3 months ago) so it’s not going to be a major pain to follow.

I’ve wondered whether it’d be reasonable to suggest following Twitter accounts on Planet SUSE, but it might be better if interested users could follow the #openSUSE RSS feed instead.

It’s still important for openSUSE contributors to blog about their work, I think, but Twitter might be a good supplement for blogging when you have something short and sweet to say. (You’d be surprised what you can pack into 140 characters, if you try.)

On an unrelated note — I think the 140 character limit might be a good one for slides in presentations: If you can’t fit an idea into a 140 character tweet, it’s too complicated to go on a single side.

Maybe we should have some real-time Twitter presentations about openSUSE for new users when 11.0 is released? Is that a good idea, or do I need more coffee? I’ll have some more coffee just in case, but any ideas about how to to use Twitter (and other methods…) to promote openSUSE are welcome in the comments.

A few weeks ago we announced that we’d be merging suseforums.net, suselinuxsupport.de, and the openSUSE support forums at forums.novell.com into one central forum under forums.opensuse.org. (You can visit the URL right now if you like, but there’s little there aside from the initial announcement…)

I just thought I’d provide a brief update on where that’s at, because I know things have been quite since then. (I got a question about the forums yesterday at LinuxFest Northwest.)

In this case, “quiet” only means that things are moving along quite well. The current thought is that we’ll be ready to launch the merged forums in mid-May.

We’ll be putting out a more formal announcement near the launch date, but I wanted to note that the forum merger is moving ahead as planned and all of the folks involved are working hard to provide a unified forum for openSUSE users and contributors.

I’m really looking forward to the unified forum and I want to thank everyone working on the project. In particular, I’d like to thank Rupert Horstkötter, Keith Kastorff, Kim Groneman,  Michael Loeffler, and Wolfgang Koller for leading this effort.  There’s been a lot of hard work put into this project, and it’s going to be really beneficial for the project once it’s completed.

Just a reminder, LinuxFest Northwest is this weekend in Bellingham, Washington. It should be a great fest, and I’m really looking forward to finally getting to check it out.

I’ll be speaking at the ‘fest, and so will fellow Novell employee Frank Rego. I’ll be talking about KDE4, Frank will be talking about the state of Mono. We’ll also have an openSUSE booth, manned by several local volunteers, myself, and Frank.

See you in Bellingham!

Now that the first beta is out for openSUSE 11.0, it’s time to dig in and really start banging on the release to catch bugs before the release candidates and final release. If you’re wondering where to start, Holger Sickenberg has put together an excellent resouce to help guide testing.

Holger has compiled a list of new features in openSUSE 11.0 that it would be a good idea to test to ensure that each and every feature works as planned and is as bug-free as possible. Holger has also included directions for testers, so it’s as easy as loading up openSUSE 11.0 and following the steps.

Any test that’s marked “idle” is fair game — so feel free to jump in and start beating up on the new features.

A big thanks to Holger for coming up with this page. This is exactly the sort of guide that users need to be able to use their time effectively when testing betas.

If you do find any bugs, be sure to check the Bug reporting FAQ and report the bug in Bugzilla. Also, don’t forget that we have a Operation YaST Smash on Friday from 09:00 to 18:00 CEST.