Six years ago, when I joined the Novell team’s office in Cambridge, some of my cohorts in what used to be the Ximian Red Carpet team had an expression: “Red Hat 7.3 + Ximian Desktop” – they sometimes used it to indicate what had been a quantum leap in the Linux Desktop experience of the Gnome Lineage. Having been personally a vi+terminal kind of guy, and the Konsole being a great terminal multiplexer since times ancient, I had some precise idea of what KDE releases I had particularly appreciated as smoothly integrated (SuSE 6.2 comes to mind), so the expression stuck in my mind as the ultimate paragon of a Gnome setup. Sure, great things happened since, but the first time you did not have to grease the wheels of every detail for hours to have a smooth environment certainly sticks in your head in a certain indelible way.

openSUSE has been a pretty good Gnome distribution for a long...

As previously reported, the Open Hardware Community is fast moving to define more precise rules, naming, and even iconography to go with the term “Open Hardware”. This morning, the chairs of the Open Hardware Summit have announced the 10 candidate logos selected for Community vote from the nearly 200 submitted by contributors.

The voting will close in 2 weeks, on April 5th. Currently, the so-called “Copyleft Chip” design is leading by a wide margin.

Cross-posted to OpenSUSE Lizards.

Maik Schmidt is our guide in the Pragmatic Bookshelf’s venture into the world of electronics. This is a compact work, like all others in the series, it goes straight to applicable examples and makes you get your hands dirty with real work. The Arduino platform has been described in many ways, but the best I have heard so far insightfully labels it “The 555 of the future,” referring to the ubiquitous timer chip so many simple electronic projects make use of. If you haven’t been hiding under a rock for the past few years, you have doubtlessly seen the plethora of material on the subject that’s out there: even O'Reilly, which usually does not ship multiple titles on a single subject, has a variety of them. Most of these works are rather similar, the ones I prefer are Massimo Banzi’s Getting Started with Arduino (O'Reilly, 2008), by one of the original developers of the platform, and the...

F2 keeping an eye on Bruce Perens, who is keeping an eye on the keynote before his, at the New York Open Hardware Summit.

The Open Source Hardware Definition has reached a major milestone, hitting version 1.0 with this morning’s announcement by the Open Hardware Summit team. This is remarkable news for all involved in the development of Open Source Hardware (OSHW), as this really exciting community had been growing by leaps and bounds in the last couple of years, but had no single, unified symbol that different development shops could rally under.

Now, with the Definition having reached 1.0, and a logo soon to be announced to stamp hardware and project websites, the hardware crowd will be able to rally under flags similar to Tux the penguin and Beastie the daemon — not to mention the Open Source Definition and the GPL. As a Free/Open Source Software dude regularly cheerleading the...

We first released WebYaST in January this year, but while we did release it under Open Source licensing straight from the get-go, we were so busy working on the SUSE Appliance Program that we could not properly test it to also ship an openSUSE packaged version – yet.

That changed with our newest release, and those of you building openSUSE images in SUSE Studio can now add WebYaST to any build with just another click in the selections, as James Tan documented in exquisite snapshotting detail in his blog post.

Internally, we have been mostly focusing on Appliance use, albeit with increasingly frequent forays into the land of more general-purpose Enterprise system administration. While the current release is quite complete for its Appliance Toolkit use case, it still has a way to go to match the completeness provided by “classic YaST” to openSUSE users. While over time the array of...

John Calcote is a senior software engineer in Novell’s Linux business, who after slogging up the steep learning curve the Autotools triad poses to those packaging software according to the portable GNU conventions for the first time, very kindly decided to make the experience easier to newcomers by sharing his years of experience and carefully crafted bag of tricks. His book is a welcome update to a field that has not seen entries now for a full ten years, so long has been the time since GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool by Gary V. Vaughn, Ben Ellison, Tom Tromey, and Ian Lance Taylor hit the shelves. Unfortunately, the publishing industry is driven by the need to turn a profit to fund its endeavors, and specialist items like this book are not obvious candidates for volume selling - which is a credit to No Starch Press’ willingness to venture down this path.

The book opens with...

Dear Lizards,
This recent release from IT World on the best Linux distributions out there caught my eye last weekend, as it declares

“The package’s administration utility, YaST, is widely acknowledged as one of the best”

in its entry on openSUSE and SLE (the documentation also drew praise, distinguishing itself as “some of the best printed documentation you’ll find for any distro“), and reminded me I wanted to share some of the positive feedback I collected during our 11.x development and after final release. Ready? Here we go.

Some of the initial ‘Net commentary was all centered on performance and memory footprint, from Snorp’s “I don’t think it’s possible to overstate just how much of an improvement it really is” to Duncan’s benchmarks providing interesting numerical comparisons like “Yum uses about 9 times more memory” (and takes several times longer). This was refreshing given...

Maybe revolution is a bit strong, but at this hour in the night I can probably be excused for using a bit of hyperbole – besides, nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion as Hegel would have it, so I am on solid ground here.

I have been going over customer feedback from Novell’s Brainshare conference for my internal “Systems Management Zeitgeist” report, and there are a couple of points I just had to share with you all as they are plain simply inspirational.

Our update stack is, well, zippy. Like greased lightning, according to this happy SUSE Linux Enterprise customer:

Zypper updates a Linux system across major versions in 5 minutes, full
Oracle server update done in 15 minutes

We of course appreciate speed in of itself, as a technical achievement powered by enhancements like libsat and DeltaRPM, and Community users share this point of view with us...

Lizards, it is time to head to the polls for your favorite Linux distribution! Linux Journal is running a poll to gauge the popularity of major distributions today, and needless to say it is imperative for all Geekos out there to do their patriotic clicking duty.

That’s what the prehensile tail is for, in case you had wondered — efficient multi-tasking ?

Be advised that the Journal is going to run a feature on the results in the coming months, and that your comments may be quoted for inclusion – just be extra-witty and doubly insightful as always.

Note: I did take notice that SUSE is spelled in the old-school way (cool!), and that they are conglomerating our Community and Enterprise distros under the same entry, and have notified the editors over at LJ for future reference, but of course the entries of a running poll are no longer editable.

Cross-posted to OpenSUSE Lizards.

Here are a few resources for those among you thinking of writing proper documentation for your new project, or to contribute writings or translations to your favorite Community.

Man pages are written in Troff, the original UNIX typesetting system. Nowadays, few people (most notably man page writers and IETF RFC authors) regularly use this markup, but it is rather simple and elegant once you get to know it. For writing man pages, the learning curve is very good, as you only need to know a few macros and, just as if you were working on html and pilfering the sources of an existing page doing just what you need, you have a wealth of examples to teach you right there on your trusty *NIX box. As the Wikipedia points out:

Troff features commands to designate fonts, spacing, paragraphs, margins,
footnotes and more. Unlike many other text formatters, troff can position
characters...