• People of openSUSE: An Interview with Ish Sookun

  I joined the “Ambassador” program in 2009, which later was renamed to openSUSE Advocate, and finally the program was dropped. In 2013, I joined the openSUSE Local Coordinators to help coordinating activities in the region. It was my way of contributing back. During those years, I would also test openSUSE RCs and report bugs, organize local meetups about Linux in general (some times openSUSE in particular) and blog about those activities. Then, in 2018 after an inspiring conversation with Richard Brown, while he was the openSUSE Chairman, I stepped up and joined the openSUSE Elections Committee, to volunteer in election tasks. It was a nice and enriching learning experience along with my fellow election officials back then, Gerry Makaro and Edwin Zakaria. I attended my first openSUSE Conference in May 2019 in Nuremberg. I did a presentation on how we’re using Podman in production in my workplace. I was extremely nervous to give this first talk in front of the openSUSE community but I met folks who cheered me up. I can’t forget the encouragement from Richard, Gertjan, Harris, Doug, Marina and the countless friends I made at the conference. Later during the conference, I was back on the stage, during the Lightning Talks, and I spoke while holding the openSUSE beer in one hand and the microphone in the other. Nervousness was all gone thanks to the magic of the community.

  Edwin and Ary told me about their activities in Indonesia, particularly about the openSUSE Asia Summit. When the CfP for oSAS 2019 was opened, I did not hesitate to submit a talk, which was accepted, and months later I stood among some awesome openSUSE contributors in Bali, Indonesia. It was a great Summit where I discovered more of the openSUSE community. I met Gerald Pfeifer, the new chairman of openSUSE, and we talked about yoga, surrounded by all of the geeko fun, talks and workshops happening.

• SUSE Hack Week Spotlight: Xabier Arbulu

  My name is Xabier Arbulu and I’m from Spain (Basque country), even though I live in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria enjoying a better weather. I have been working as a Software engineer around 6 years now, and I joined SUSE a bit more than a year ago. One of the major motivations was that I wanted to feel and explore how is to work in an organization where Open Source is more than just business. I really think that collaboration and transparency are the way to go. I work in the SLES4SAP and HA team where we provide solutions to the customers with critical mission applications.

  One of my hobbies is to enjoy the nature (and the sports around this like hiking, surfing…), so it’s totally aligned with the path that SUSE started against the climate change and our planet conservation.

• SUSE Hack Week Spotlight: William Brown

  My name is William Brown, I’m a senior software engineer at SUSE. I’m from Brisbane Australia, and have been a software engineer for 5 years. Previously I was a system administrator at a major Australian university for 7 years. I am a photographer and also participate in judo and pole dance in my free time.

• How SUSE builds its Enterprise Linux distribution – PART 3

  As for the “Minor Versions” of SLE, we decided (more than 14 years ago) to use a “Service Pack” Model for our SLE releases. The goal is to offer a predictable release cadence allowing our users to plan accordingly for their updates, but also to schedule our release with collections of maintenance updates and new features alike for a given major version. Back in the old days we promised to release a Service Pack every 12 to 18 months, but since SLE 12 GA (more than 5 years ago) we have decided to simplify and increase the regularity of our cadence by settling on a 12-month release cycle and supports previous service packs for 6 months after the release of the new service pack.

  Why? Well, this decision was made based on our customers’ and partners’ feedback and also because of the general increase in the cadence of open source development. For example, just to name a few other open source projects, did you know that there is a upstream Linux Kernel minor version every two months, Mozilla is releasing a new Firefox version every 6 weeks, and GNOME creates a full stable release every 6 months?

  Having two major SLE versions available with an annual release cadence for every “Minor Version”, which would normally be called a “Service Pack”, is part of our solution to solving the challenge of keeping up with the pace of open source projects, while at the same time offering choice and clarity to all our enterprise users.
  We will discuss the SLE Release Schedule in a dedicated blog post, but before getting too technical, we would like to give you a deeper insight into our Release Management Team, i.e. the people and team behind these release processes.

It’s a long documented fact that I am a big proponent of Rolling Releases and use them as my main operating system for Work & Play on my Desktops/Laptops.
However in the 4 years since writing that last blog post I always a number of Leap machines in my life, mostly running as servers.

As of today, my last Leap machine is no more, and I do not foresee ever going back to Leap or any Linux distribution like it.

This post seeks to answer why I have fallen out of love with the Regular Release approach to developing & using Operating Systems and provide an introduction to how you too could rely on Rolling Releases (specifically Tumbleweed & MicroOS) for everything.

The common understanding is that an Operating System is composed by a “kernel” and some basic tools around it. This apply to all Operating Systems out there, not just Linux/Unix based ones.
Speaking about “Linux”, you might not be aware of the “GNU/Linux naming controversy“, where the name “Linux” refers precisely to the “Linux Kernel” and “GNU” refers to the basic components like GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), the GNU C library (glibc), and GNU Core Utilities (coreutils), GNU Bash shell and more. At this point, come to realise that the Linux Kernel and the GNU tools are in a “symbiosis“, and one cannot be used independently of the other. So it is technically more correct to refer to “GNU/Linux Operating System” than a “Linux Operating System”.
However when the words “Linux system or Linux server” is used, it often includes far more that just “GNU/Linux”. For instance, your preferred web server, database, programming language librairies or Graphical Environment (like GNOME) is not part of the “GNU/Linux” group, and this is where the name “Linux Distribution” makes sense.

• Running for openSUSE Board #2: Getting new people aboard

  I’d like to illustrate my view on it with a simple example:
  When you visit opensuse.org there’s a menu item top right named “contribute”. Clicking it brings you to the contribution bit of the page. There you have choice between two things: Code and Hardware. Now if we’re lucky a potential contributor will click on “Code” and gets presented four slightly unmotivated lines of text and a button to “find out more”. That’s not how to be friendly and inviting. Let’s hope not too much people are turned down by that.

  But what I see as a way bigger problem – and some kind of basic pattern in oS – is that behind the “find out…” button in fact there would be really good and detailed information on how to contribute. Documentation, testing, translations and so on is all there. But it’s not communicated in any reasonable way! It’s hidden in different places, buried deeply in the wiki. The wiki is a good place for extensively written explanations but not for getting a first step into the pool.

  So my idea is part of a whole to-be-defined restructuring of opensuse.org. I proposed a few thoughts a while ago but got curbed due to the renaming/rebranding discussion back then. Yet I still have these things on my list to discuss and tackle. [1]

  Of course the website is just one puzzle part. The whole getting fresh blood (as you called it) thing needs further pushing. Hence the initiative of the marketing team to get special t-shirts for Leap 15.2. Beta testers. [2]
  This is something easily to be communicated to the outside and can be a door opener for new people. Though it is not a board member’s job there. But I think it’s good to have a board taking part in this whole communication
  initiative.

• Instant Fresh openSUSE Tumbleweed with Docker and Vagrant Images

  On my machines I run openSUSE Leap (download), a stable distribution that follows the SUSE Linux Enterprise service packs. But frequently my task is to reproduce or fix a bug in openSUSE Tumbleweed (download), the hottest rolling distribution.

  In the past, I would take an ISO image of the installation DVD and install a virtual machine from scratch. (To say nothing about burning a CD, copying a boot floppy, and reinstalling a physical machine. I've been doing this for too long.)

  Fortunately, things got easier with ready-made disk images for containers (Docker/Podman) and virtual machines (Vagrant).

• Klaas Freitag: Public Money – Public Code [Ed: in German]

  Genau dafür setzt sich die Kampagne Public Money for Public Code der Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) ein.

• FSFE is hiring: interns and trainees for legal, policy and technical areas

  FSFE is hiring: interns and trainees for legal, policy and technical areas
  We are looking for interns and trainees experienced in legal, policy or technical fields. The persons will work 35 hours per week with our team in the FSFE's Berlin office. There will be coordination with remote staff and volunteers, and depending on the work area opportunity to participate in events and meetings throughout Europe.