Looking around, I’m seeing a lot of great stuff going on in the openSUSE community — watching the openSUSE-marketing list, I’m seeing a lot of work being done on Sneak Peeks and publishing and translating openSUSE Weekly News.

And there’s more! The Contrib repo is moving forward, which should be a major step forward in terms of getting new packages in and maintained by community members and making those easy to access for openSUSE users.

There’s work being done to support ARM in the openSUSE Build Service. I had a chance to sit down with Martin Mohring in Munich to talk about ARM and openSUSE on new platforms while I was in Germany last week, and I’m really impressed and excited by all the work that’s going into supporting ARM with openSUSE, and the possibilities.

Oh, and I keep hearing something about a release next week, too… If you haven’t, make sure you grab one of the countdown banners and display them proudly on your Website! Like so:

I guess this is why Ars says that openSUSE is one of the best distros of the year:

OpenSUSE is one of the oldest Linux distributions, but it has gone through some significant changes since its original launch in 1994. Under Novell’s stewardship, OpenSUSE has become significantly more inclusive and community-driven. The distro announced its first community-elected board this year and has grown its base of contributors considerably. The distro has also made major technical advancements, including major improvements to its package management system and support for installation from a Live CD.

OpenSUSE delivers a powerful user experience and is one of the few distros that provides equally outstanding support for both GNOME and KDE. Its KDE 4 environment is the best out there, which is why OpenSUSE has become the reference distro for all of our KDE reviews. Its GNOME environment is also top-notch and provides the perfect selection of applications in the default installation.

I’m continually impressed and inspired by all the work that goes into openSUSE. As always, there’s always more work ahead. But, if you step back and look at the state of the project today compared to a year ago, or two years ago, there’s been clear progress on every front — and no signs of slowing down.

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.

OK, I know a lot of openSUSE users are outside the U.S., but I couldn’t help the Thanksgiving reference. No matter where you are, I hope you’re having a great day — and 11.1 RC 1 ought to spice it up a bit. I just pushed the button on the openSUSE 11.1 RC 1 announcement on openSUSE News so tell your friends, family, neighbors, and everybody else who might want to help test the release.

If you have a few minutes, check out the interview with openSUSE Board member Bryen Yunashko here. Bryen talks about A11y, his work with Linux, and career choices for deaf and hard of hearing students.

Bryen was recently elected to the openSUSE Community Board and is probably the first ever Deaf-Blind member of a Linux-based board. “I started using Linux some years ago after I got frustrated with some of the restrictions and limitations I faced on Windows. I also ran for board because I wanted to ensure that accessibility users also have a strong voice in the open source world.”

Bryen is actively involved in working with developers and packagers in making sure that all Linux-based software is accessible for people with disabilities. “I’m an active member and leader of the GNOME A11y Team,” Bryen said. “GNOME is a desktop environment in Linux and ‘A11y’ (A plus 11 letters plus y spells accessibility) stands for accessibility in computing. By getting into A11y, I’m taking charge of my own destiny. I want to be able to be sure I can continue to work with computers as long as I live.”

Good stuff — head over and see what Bryen has to say.

Just in time for openSUSE 11.1 RC 1, we’ve finished the new and improved license for openSUSE 11.1. The days of agreeing to a click-through EULA for openSUSE are over!

The text of the new license is included on the wiki, but the highlights are:

• Users no longer need to agree to the click-through EULA. This is not a EULA, it’s a license notice. We want you to be aware of your rights as provided by the FOSS licenses, so we’ll display this notice but not require a click-through EULA.
• openSUSE is an aggregate work including many open source and free software packages. The aggregate work is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2, individual packages are governed by their respective licenses.
• The main DVD now includes only the software that we can redistribute freely and that you can redistribute freely.

We want to make sure that openSUSE is the easiest Linux to obtain and use — and a big chunk of that is licensing. We now have a license that presents no obstacle to redistribution, and no obstacle for modification.

We are also working on trademark guidelines that clarify how and when the openSUSE marks can be used, and we’ll be releasing those shortly.

The work we’ve done on the openSUSE Build Service and the openSUSE license is all about making it easy to redistribute openSUSE: Either as-is, or modified to suit your needs. Want to ship an Xfce or KDE 3.5 live CD? We want to make that easy. Want to use openSUSE for another project that we haven’t thought of? Again – we want you to, and we want to make it easy! (And, of course, we want you to have a lot of fun while you’re doing this — though our lawyers tell us that’s not legally enforceable.)

You may notice similarities between our license and Fedora’s. We have based our license on the license notice that is being used by the Fedora Project. We did this for a few reasons, primarily because we didn’t see any point in reinventing the wheel — Fedora’s license has worked for them, and there’s no reason it wouldn’t work for us. Reuse is one of the strengths of our community, after all.

We also “borrowed” Fedora’s license because they freely offered it, and because it also meets our needs. I’d like to thank Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields for providing assistance while we were working on this process.

We also want to thank Novell’s crack legal team for putting in the time on this. While we wound up working with an existing license, we took the long way to get there — trying to modify the previous EULA to be more friendly, coming up with ideas to create a license from scratch. As a suggestion to other projects — we’d recommend looking at existing license notices as well, rather than trying to come up with a brand new one.

We’re happy to say that you’ll be able to enjoy openSUSE 11.1’s final release without clicking through a EULA at all. The EULA is dead, long live the new and improved license notice!

(Update: Made a few minor edits to clarify.)

Because openSUSE ships a lot of the same software as other Linux distros, I was wondering what openSUSE users see as the unique and interesting features of openSUSE. Obviously, shipping GNOME, KDE, Firefox, and other software is pretty standard, so where does openSUSE stand apart? I asked the marketing list and got some interesting responses — some I’d anticipated (YaST) and some others that I hadn’t thought of:

• YaST
• Zypper
• openSUSE Build Service
• The “Slab” menu — now upstream in KDE, but still unique to openSUSE / SLED on GNOME
• Default install “full of useful software”
• Forums (I was thinking of the distro itself, but it makes sense that the support and such from the forums is a good reason to use openSUSE.)
• Direct participation in upstream development of GNOME and KDE, and the choice of both in openSUSE
• “Polished” desktops — I do think we ship very well-polished versions of GNOME and KDE
• One-click install
• Retail box – Our retail box is a great way for beginners to get started with openSUSE
• Security features (AppArmor, SUSE Firewall)
• Mono integration – done very well in openSUSE
• Software Repos in the openSUSE Build Service (I’m a Gwibber fan, which lives in the “FunkyPenguin” repo…)
• Some people like the DVD image with lots of software vs. live CDs with a minimal selection
• Several people mentioned stability, though this is hard to quantify and in my experience, stability is usually a benefit of Linux in general
• Dual-arch x86_64 implementation — so you can easily run 32-bit apps on 64-bit openSUSE
• Two-year lifespan — a reasonably long lifecycle for a release, not too short, but not aimed at mission-critical areas where a system will just run until it dies on the same OS version…
• Server support — openSUSE makes a very good server distro
• An awesome mascot (really, Geeko wins that one hands down…)

I’d be curious what other areas the community finds unique and impressive about openSUSE.

We have a lot of areas where openSUSE really shines — but, of course, there’s always room for improvement as well.

11.1 is on the way, but we’ll be planning for 11.2 soon — what should we improve? What kinds of features should we be thinking about?

Thought this would be of interest to the openSUSE community, since the e1000e bug caused a bit of a headache all around. The cause of the recent e1000e bug seems to be problems with ftrace code:

The cause of the bug is due to the way the current code in mainline
handles dynamic ftrace.  When dynamic ftrace is turned on, it also
turns on CONFIG_FTRACE which enables the -pg config in gcc that places
a call to mcount at every function call. With just CONFIG_FTRACE this
causes a noticeable overhead.  CONFIG_DYNAMIC_FTRACE works to ease this
overhead by dynamically updating the mcount call sites into nops.

The problem arises when we trace functions and modules are unloaded.
The first time a function is called, it will call mcount and the mcount
call will call ftrace_record_ip. This records the calling site and
stores it in a preallocated hash table. Later on a daemon will
wake up and call kstop_machine and convert any mcount callers into
nops.

I’ve been asked a few times to put up my slides from the Utah Open Source Conference, Indiana Linuxfest, and Ohio LinuxFest… so here they are. A few caveats: 1) The slides are of minimal value without the actual talk that goes with them. I have more text on the slides than I’d like, but less than is necessary to get the full gist of the talk. 2) This isn’t a generic openSUSE presentation, so it’s not freely reusable. (If you want to use some slides from the presentation or have questions, feel free to ask in the comments or send me an email.)

I’ve put the presentation (Bootstrapping Community) up as a PDF for now, I’ll HTMLize it eventually, but no time today. Note that this is the latest iteration, so if you saw the keynote in Indiana or Utah, it’s slightly different. If I give the talk again in the future, it’ll probably be different then, too.

Getting ready to head back from Tokyo, but already looking forward to my next trip out — specifically, heading to Indiana for Linuxfest 2008, and then to Columbus, Ohio for Ohio Linuxfest 2008!

I’ll be doing a keynote at both events. I’m really looking forward to seeing the Indiana Linuxfest for the first time, and I always have an excellent time at OLF. Especially this year when I’m not responsible for organizing it!

By the way, if you’re interested in helping out at the OLF booth this year, please get in touch. We still have room.

Update: If you live near Bloomington, Indiana and were thinking about heading to OLF but didn’t want to splurge on gas — I might have room in my car for one or two passengers. I’ll be driving from Bloomington to Columbus Friday afternoon and then back Sunday morning. You’ll have to arrange your own room in Columbus, but I’m happy to help a few Linux enthusiasts get from point A to point B to support the cause.

I’m in Tokyo to attend the Open Source Conference (OSC) this weekend, and to meet with the local openSUSE community. I am very excited to be here and have the chance to meet with openSUSE users and contributors (and potential users and contributors), and other members of the open source community.

My flight got in mid-afternoon yesterday, so I haven’t been around Tokyo very much, but I’m looking forward to seeing more of the city and meeting colleagues and open source enthusiasts here. If you happen to be in Tokyo, I hope to see you at the OSC. Please get in touch, or just stop by the openSUSE booth at the OSC if you’d like to talk about openSUSE and open source. I’ll be here through next week.

Also — I’d welcome any tips about things to see and do in Tokyo! I don’t have a lot of free time, but I do have some free time built in to my schedule at the moment and want to make the most of it!