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DistributionsNews and Editorials An interview with the new openSUSE community managerJoe 'Zonker' Brockmeier has joined the openSUSE project as the openSUSE community manager. We were pleased to have the opportunity to ask Zonker a few questions about his new job.Many LWN readers will remember that you were a regular contributor to LWN. Any comments on what you have been up to between there and here?
Sure -- I stopped contributing to LWN when I took a full-time job with
OSTG/Linux.com (now the company known as SourceForge), and had to stop
freelancing. I was editorial director there for two years, and then
joined Linux Magazine as Editor-in-Chief. I've missed contributing to
LWN, but I still read LWN religiously.
As community manager will you be employed by Novell?
Yes.
Will you report to the openSUSE board?
I will be working with the board, but I report to Justin Steinman at
Novell. It's an unusual position, though, because my job is in large
part to be an advocate/ombudsman for the community.
openSUSE has adopted a Code of Conduct for mailing lists and IRC. As community manager, will policing this traffic be a part of your job?
No -- we don't plan to have anyone actively policing the lists looking
for violations. Instead, the board is working on a policy to allow
community members to bring violations of the Code to the board to
decide whether disciplinary action should be needed. I hope that it's
something that won't be needed often, or at all -- and I don't think
it will be needed often.
How much control does Novell hold over openSUSE development? Should there be more or less control? Is Novell allowing the community to make its own decisions?
Right now, I'd say Novell is still guiding development pretty closely,
but would like the community to have a more prominent voice in the
direction of the development of openSUSE. I think the Fedora Project
is a pretty good model here, and I really think Max Spevack did a
great job in terms of helping Fedora come into its own.
The openSUSE Board appointed last November is a step towards giving the community more control over governance of the project. This is a new position. How much latitude will you have to define what the community manager is/does?
Well, certain aspects of the job are already well-defined. For
example, a big part of the job will be traveling to conferences to
speak about openSUSE and also to organize an openSUSE conference. But
there's definitely some room to define the role as well.
OpenSUSE has a weekly news letter which has come out almost weekly since its inception last November. Do you have any plans to get involved with that? Is it useful?
Yes, I do plan to contribute and help out with that where needed. I
think it's very useful -- communication is vital to the health of a
project like openSUSE. There are a lot of people contributing to
openSUSE, and without something like the weekly news, it would be easy
for contributors to lose track of what their colleagues are doing.
It's also important to spreading the news outside of the openSUSE
community so that other open source projects know what we're up to and
possibly find ways to collaborate and help reduce duplication of
effort between projects. Finally, I think it's a good way to show what
various contributors are doing and help recognize the contributors
that are having an impact on openSUSE.
What are your plans for the openSUSE community?
Over the long term, I'd like to help foster increased adoption of
openSUSE by a significant amount -- which means doing a better job of
promoting the distro, as well as communicating with potential users
and finding out what it is they need/want from openSUSE and working on
delivering that. (I'd encourage LWN readers to check out the alpha
builds for openSUSE 11.0 and give us feedback as we're working on the
final 11.0 release that should be done in July.)
I also want to work on developing a recognition system so that contributors are acknowledged for their work, which we're doing more on already -- we just announced our membership program for contributors to be recognized. I also want to make sure we're providing a "roadmap" so that potential contributors have a clear path into the project and know where to get started -- whether that's development, artwork, documentation, quality assurance, advocating openSUSE, or supporting other users. Also, organize the first openSUSE conference, make sure openSUSE is better represented at other conferences, and help provide potential contributors with a roadmap to becoming contributors. I'd like to make it as easy as possible for people to participate. Finally, but not least -- I want to do what I can to help coordinate increased cooperation between Linux distros and reduce duplication of effort. While a lot of folks might like to portray the situation as openSUSE vs. Fedora, Ubuntu, or any other distro, I don't see it that way -- if someone is already happily using another distro, then I consider that a win. I want to focus on attracting people who aren't running Linux at all yet. There's plenty of work left to do, and I hope we can do a better job of pooling our resources to attract those people. Is there anything you would like to add?
Just that I'd like to encourage LWN readers to visit
zonker.opensuse.org and news.opensuse.org for updates on the openSUSE
project, and to feel free to contact me (zonker@opensuse.org) with any
questions, suggestions, and comments related to openSUSE.
Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions.
New Releases Terra Soft Releases YDL v6.0Terra Soft has released Yellow Dog Linux v6.0 for Sony PS3, Apple G4/G5, and IBM System p. YDL v6.0 is built on CentOS and includes select Fedora 7 components and the E17 desktop.
Announcing Fedora 9 AlphaThe first alpha release of Fedora 9 is available for testing. "The Alpha release provides the first opportunity for the wider community to become involved with the testing of Rawhide: representing a sanitised snapshot of Fedora's development branch, which sees rapid changes and will become the next major release, it should boot on the majority of systems, providing both an opportunity to get a look at what new features will be included in the next release and also an opportunity to provide feedback and bug reports to help ensure that the next release is as good as possible."
Hardy Alpha 4 releasedThe fourth alpha of the Hardy Heron, which will become Ubuntu 8.04, is available for testing. In addition to the Ubuntu flavor this alpha is also available in the form of Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu JeOS, Gobuntu and UbuntuStudio.
Indiana - test image for Preview 2Indiana is the codename for Sun's project aimed at turning OpenSolaris into a friendly desktop. An early preview ISO is available for testing.
Distribution News Debian GNU/Linux An update from the Debian release teamThe Debian release team has sent out an update with quite a bit of information about the upcoming "Lenny" release. Said release is planned for this September. "As we are progressing in our release preparations; we have reviewed the original schedule for lenny to check for any imminent problems, and at the moment are quite content with the current state. We are, as always, concerned about the large number of release critical issues still unfixed in testing, so please help do something about it."
Slackware Linux Slackware thanks the KDE teamThe January 30, 2008 Slackware current changelog entry has a thank you "to the KDE team, not only for their tremendous accomplishments over the years, but for the gracious reception they gave to the members of the Slackware team who traveled to the release event." The next Slackware release will contain KDE 3.5.9, but KDE 4.1.x is targeted for the one after that.
SUSE Linux and openSUSE OpenSUSE code of conduct adoptedThe openSUSE project has announced the adoption of a new code of conduct. "The idea is to follow some common-sense rules of politeness when communicating in the various openSUSE forums: mailing lists, IRC channels, web forums, Bugzilla, etc. These places have seen very rude behavior in the past; what we want to do is to make openSUSE actually a nice project in which to participate."
openSUSE Welcomes Zonker - The New Community ManagerThe openSUSE project welcomes Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier as the first openSUSE community manager.
Distribution Newsletters Debian Misc development news (#4)Raphael Hertzog has put together some Debian developer news with a look at Debian Enhancement Proposals, the packages that need some work, debcheckout, Bits from DEHS (Debian External Health Status), and several other topics.
Fedora Weekly News Issue 118The Fedora Weekly News for January 28, 2008 looks at Planet Fedora articles "Updates to anaconda", "linux.conf.au day 1", "Fedora win32 livecd-iso-to-usb tool" and "Video: Simple layer blending in Gimp"; Fedora Marketing articles "Tasks set by Marketing Meeting on IRC", "RPM Fusion interview", "2008 Readers' Choice Survey" and "FUDCon Video Torrent"; and more.
OpenSUSE Weekly News #7The openSUSE Weekly News for January 31, 2008 covers openSUSE Build Service Expands Support to Red Hat and CentOS, Sax2 ported to Qt4, Open Source Meets Business, with openSUSE attendees, kicks off, openSUSE 10.3 PromoDVDs Now Available for Order, and several other topics.
OpenSUSE Weekly News #8The OpenSUSE Weekly News for the week starting the January 28, 2008 looks at KDE 4.0.1, openSUSE Live CD, New KDE Repo Layout, openSUSE Welcomes Zonker, Applications for openSUSE Membership Now Open, Alpha 2 Released this Week, and several other topics.
Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #76The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for February 2, 2008 covers the release of Hardy Alpha 4, Server Team focuses on KVM, new Ubuntu banners for your website or blog, new MOTU and Council elections results, Hug Day 5 February 2008, a new Ubuntu based distro, and much more.
DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 238The DistroWatch Weekly for February 4, 2008 is out. "It's tough to be a developer of a desktop operating system these days. Not only are we seeing increasing usability and user-friendliness from the major Linux distributions, the BSD world now also wants its share of the market, while there are those who believe that even Solaris can be a viable desktop alternative to the more established operating systems. But how far has Sun Microsystems' flagship product progressed since the opening up of the source code in the form of OpenSolaris? Our featured story looks at Nexenta, Indiana, BeleniX and other OpenSolaris-based distribution and asks whether they can compete on the desktop. In the news section, Debian edges closer to "Lenny", Slackware announces plans to move to KDE 4, François Bancilhon defends the code-sharing agreement with Turbolinux, and Ars Technica investigates the latest release of NetBSD. Finally, we are proud to announce that the recipient of the DistroWatch January 2008 donation is the VideoLAN VLC project. Enjoy the read and happy Chinese New Year to all our readers!"
Distribution meetings DebConf8: registration and call for papersDebConf8 is open for registration. Proposals for papers, presentations, discussion sessions and tutorials will be accepted until March 31, 2008. DebConf8 will take place in Mar del Plata, Argentina from August 10 to August 16, 2008. As usual the conference will be preceded by DebCamp.
Distribution reviews A Tour Of Sun's Project Indiana Preview 2 (Phoronix)Phoronix has a review of Indiana Preview 2. "A week ago we reported that a second preview release of Project Indiana, Sun's attempt at creating an operating system for the desktop based upon OpenSolaris and led by Ian Murdock, was on track to be released in the near future. Thursday afternoon that became true with the test image surfacing for Developer Preview 2 of Project Indiana, or what will formally be called OpenSolaris. Officially, this new release is known as the OpenSolaris Developer Preview 1/08 edition. The general availability release of Project Indiana is expected in March, but today we have up a tour of this new Indiana release."
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol |
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