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.

If you happen to be a Python wizard, or can deliver a presentation as if you were, the PyOhio folks might like to hear from you:

PyOhio, the first annual Python programming mini-conference for Ohio and surrounding areas will take place Saturday, July 26, in Columbus, Ohio. The conference is free of change and will include scheduled presentations, Lighting Talks and unconference-style Open Spaces.

You can read more about the conference at http://pyohio.org

PyOhio invites all interested people to present scheduled talks. All presentations are expected to last 40 minutes with a 10 minute question-and-answer period. PyOhio will accept abstracts covering any area of Python programming. A classroom area with computers will also be available for possible hands-on sessions.

So, if Python is your thing, feel free to submit a proposal! Submission deadline is June 1 — so get cracking!

Barton George has posted the podcast we did at Sun CommunityOne just a short time ago. Has it really only been a few days? Wow. Time flies…

The podcast features Fedora’s Karsten Wade, Ubuntu’s Jono Bacon, Glynn Foster of OpenSolaris, Barton, and myself.. Like the panel (which wasn’t recorded, apparently), this was a good deal of fun to do — very laid back, and we all seem to agree on most topics with slight differences about the approaches that should be taken and so forth. Plus, Jono, Karsten, Glynn, and Barton are all good guys and fun to talk to.

It’s not so much a “smackdown,” really, as a lively conversation, but “lively conversation” does lack punch as a teaser…

It’s available in Ogg and MP3 format, so pick your favorite format and enjoy!

Duncan is blogging about the differences in speed and memory usage between Yum and ZYpp — it looks like openSUSE users are in for quite a treat with openSUSE 11.0. Lots of pretty charts and everything — definitely worth a read if you’re interested in the speed of package management on openSUSE.

One of the things I’ve been working on today is a reviewer’s guide for openSUSE 11.0 — something to send out to those who are reviewing openSUSE 11.0 for the press (as well as anyone else who might want to read it…)

So, I’ve been compiling a list of features we need to cover, from large (KDE4, GNOME 2.22, new installer) to small (RPM payload switched to lzma). Of course, two heads are better than one, so I thought it’d be worth polling the openSUSE community to see what new features or improvements in openSUSE 11.0 are making life better for users.

This post by Melissa Shapiro of Mozilla illustrates (one of the reasons) why Firefox and the Mozilla Foundation is doing so well at getting the word out about Firefox and other news from the foundation — because they’re not relying on the press release as a sole means of getting the word out.

It’s also because Mozilla views marketing as a conversation rather than as a one-way street that begins with a press release and ends with a “did you get our press release” call to a reporter in the hopes that they’ll do all the work in spreading Mozilla’s story.

How does this related to openSUSE? (Aside from the fact that most of us run Firefox and include it in the distro, of course…) I’m talking about the news that we’ve launched lizards.opensuse.org.

The lizards site is a multi-author WordPress blog to help encourage openSUSE members to blog about what they’re doing. Many members have stepped up already and are aggregated on Planet openSUSE, and our blogging Lizards will be as well, but we also recognized that we needed to give some of our community a little extra nudge to get blogging.

Note that lizards is a platform for openSUSE-related discussions only — let’s leave the lolcats to personal blogs and whatnot — but we should look forward to a lot more discussion of the great work that’s going into openSUSE.

(I couldn’t help whipping up a lolcat to go with the discussion…)

Getting back to the press release… as a project, we still need to put out announcements and the occasional press release — as a non-practicing journalist, I can attest to the importance of a press release for reference purposes when writing stories, but I’ve rarely been moved to write a story because of one.

However,  in conjunction with announcements and releases, we need to supplement that kind of communication heavily with discussion on our blogs and using other means to reach the openSUSE community and beyond with news and information that will help build our community and add to it.

So, I look forward to watching the lizard grow fat and happy with posts about what’s going on in openSUSE. Thanks much to the openSUSE contributors who have already started posting on the site!