Hello from San Francisco! LinuxWorld Expo is going pretty well so far — we ran out of DVDs at the booth yesterday, which was a pleasant problem to have — I hope all the folks who snagged a DVD went straight home and installed openSUSE 11.0 on their computer, their neighbor’s computer, and any other computers that happened to be lying around. The booth was busy most of the day, with a few lulls that I think coincided with keynotes.

We had a great booth staff — Martin Lasarsch, Adrian Schroeter, Duncan Mac-Vicar Prett, Ross Brunson, and volunteer Holden Aust were all fielding questions, tossing DVDs, and giving out some of the swag…

Today is the big day, though — we’ll be doing the openSUSE Day today in room 131 of the Moscone Center, which is just a short hop away from the exhibit floor. The schedule is on the wiki. We have quite a few really good talks. If you happen to be at LWE, be sure to stop by the openSUSE Day.

OK, “summer tour,” might be stretching it a bit, but it sounded nice in the headline. However, we’re going to be out and about this summer and the next two events are OSCON and LinuxWorld Expo in Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, California, respectively.

We’ll have booths at both shows, and we’ll be doing the openSUSE Day at LWE, with a ton of great talks and openSUSE 11.0 DVDs, some door prizes not to be missed, and lots of fun in general. We’d love to see an enormous crowd at LWE, so bring your friends, family, co-workers, ameniable strangers… you get the idea.

Just a brief note to mention that I’ll be on vacation the rest of this week, and won’t be checking email much Thursday and Friday. No big plans, just hanging out here in Florida and getting lots of personal errands tackled, and making sure we’re first in line to see Wall-E on Friday.

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?

The day has finally arrived! Fire up your torrents, your download managers, or whatever and head over to software.opensuse.org. openSUSE 11.0 final is now available for download!

Need something to do while you’re waiting for openSUSE to download? You can read the full announcement over on news.opensuse.org, and then make sure you check Digg regularly and help vote up stories about openSUSE 11.0’s release. Blog about it, tell your friends, and help let the world know about the release!

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!

I couldn’t help but notice that the Apple camp is having a big shindig today with some announcements that the press and fan blogs are salivating over. I’ve noted a number of times — Apple gets far more coverage in the mainstream and tech press than its market share alone warrants, which in turn seems to be helping drive interest in Apple and increasing the company’s market share. How do we learn from the Cupertino crowd and get the same effect?

Many people credit Apple’s success with creating a slick operating system, and sexy hardware — but they forget that Apple has always been a press darling, even before they unveiled OS X, the iPod, and even their first rebound success, the iMacs. Might be hard to remember, but the iPod has only been around since 2001, the fruit-colored iMacs launched in 1998, and OS X in 2001 as well.

So, what is it that Apple has that other tech companies don’t — and, more importantly, what could the Linux community do to capture the same kind of attention, or can we?

Part of Apple’s media savvy is its exclusiveness — Apple holds its cards close to the vest, and its playing “hard to get,” makes it more interesting.

Obviously, it’s hard to do that for a Linux distro — everything is out in the open, so there’s no real opportunity for a big unveil.

So, I’m curious — what could we do to build the same kind of excitement about Linux (in general) and openSUSE (specifically) with the press to push Linux in front of users who aren’t familiar with Linux, who haven’t yet tried Linux, but might be willing and/or interested?

I usually don’t need an excuse to get together with open source users and contributors, but I’ll happily accept one if it comes along… and the release of openSUSE 11.0 seems like a pretty good one!

I’m going to be in the Boston area the week of June 16th (through June 20th) and would like to see if we can get a mass of openSUSE users together for a few beverages and pizza to celebrate the launch. If any openSUSE folks have something planned already, let me know — otherwise, please leave a comment or send me an email if you’re interested in getting together.

It’d also be fun to meet up here in sunny Florida when I get back, so if you’re in the Tampa Bay area of Florida, drop me a note or leave a comment if you have something planned or would like to be involved.

Don’t forget, we’re tracking launch parties on the wiki here — sign up if you’re having a launch party! (And if you’re not, why not?)

I wanted to provide another update on the merged forums progress. As you might have noticed, we didn’t quite manage to launch the merged forums as we originally hoped to do in mid-May. Yes, I know, it’s the first time in the history of open source that a release date has slipped…

In case you’re wondering, the release date slipped because of problems with database imports from the various forums — as you might expect, this is a bit on the complex side, and the forum wizards have been working out the best way to import users and posts from the other forums.

We should be over that hurdle now and back on track. The current target date is now June 9. It’s particularly important to us to have working forums by the time openSUSE 11.0 is ready, so we’re not too far away now.

Once again, I want to thank the leaders of the individual forums (Keith Kastorff, Kim Groneman, and Wolfgang Koller) for all of the hard work they’ve put into this process, and I also want to thank Rupert Horstkötter for helping shepherd the process.

I installed beta 3 a few days ago, and have really been enjoying it — the only thing that’s bugged me so far is that patterns are missing right now, which was already a known bug  by the time I noticed it, and I think it’s already been fixed… so it looks like things are really shaping up well for the 11.0 release.

We’ve already had some good press coverage of 11.0 betas — such as this article on Ars.  I think that’s just the tip of the iceberg, though — I got an email over the weekend from Kristin Shoemaker, one of the bloggers over on Download Squad, and she’s really psyched about the 11.0 release already:

“Still doing some tweaking on my silly nvidia card, but I have got to say… Damn! about the whole install process now! (And yes, it’s a good Damn!)

It’s a nice plus to be able to install from a LiveCD, but the time it took to install the base system… What a huge improvement. I mean, night and day. I am so impressed. Partitioning was easy (actually, I never found it horribly *difficult* in the old version, either, but for some reason, finding the right “mode” to do my partitioning previously always led to my clicking the wrong option the first time…)

Also really had a nice chuckle at the point X was configured… The little “Don’t Panic!” message that comes up on the terminal is cute. My first run with SuSE (and Linux) I had purty graphics all through the installation, and then I was dumped to a command line when the disk restarted. So I had to laugh.

Anyway, tell everyone there they’re doing an awesome job.”

So, yeah — to all the folks working on openSUSE 11.0, you’re doing an awesome job. Not that it wasn’t obvious before, of course.