So the free (to all testers) openSUSE 11.0 box came today, and it’s looking pretty stylish and even comes with a couple of stickers:

So far I’ve been really impressed with the latest release. Not only have the reviews been pretty much consistently positive because of some of the shiny new features (like installer and fast [...]

Worth a read is the recently published Sneak Peeks at openSUSE 11.0: KDE article (digg), which also features a good interview with openSUSE/KDE developer Stephan Binner. It goes over the media changes, the versions of KDE available, and the work done over the last 9 months in the upcoming openSUSE 11.0 release, coming in just [...]

Two short announcements:
Amarok Neon

Amarok Neon packages are now being built for openSUSE in the openSUSE Build Service. Join #amarok.neon to help join the testing!

Since openSUSE 11.0 has just gone gold, Stefan Dirsch has created NVIDIA RPMs for openSUSE 11.0, so they are now all available via 1-Click-Install. See the wiki page for the link and details (it’s the same YMP for openSUSE 10.3).
The repository also appears in the community repository list, so you can add it by going [...]

With the exams (and University!) having come to an end, I managed to create an updated version of the 1-click-installation for codecs in the latest openSUSE 11.0 RC1. This will be at the exact same place at the old link, as 1-click-install gives you the possibility for different preferences for different distributions. So here are [...]

Digg.com can receive an awful lot of submissions, so subscribing to the feed of all its stories (or even just stories from one particular section) can be pretty undesirable. Fortunately you can subscribe to feeds from digg based on keywords; the openSUSE one being:
http://digg.com/rss_search?search=opensuse
So subscribe to the feed and help digg openSUSE stories!

There are two very nice events happening on IRC over the next few days:
Packaging With the openSUSE Build Service II
When: Friday, April 4th, 2008 through Saturday, April 5th, 2008 in every timezone.
Where: #opensuse-buildservice
Another good opportunity to get to grips with the openSUSE Build Service, the easiest way to package your applications for many distributions, in [...]

So the greatest FOSS event of the year has come to an end. Thousands of geeks, hundreds of talks, and just a really wonderful atmosphere everywhere (see the pictures flowing in). I caught up with my backlog of emails and feeds from Friday and the weekend in only 15 minutes, which pretty much sums up [...]

Apart from the openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 2 release coming this Thursday, there are a couple of exciting things happening in the openSUSE world:
openSUSE Membership
For a long time the openSUSE project had no fully defined way of distinguishing active and continuously helpful people in the openSUSE project. If you’re in the project then it becomes quite [...]

KGet, KDE’s download manager, was ok in KDE 3 but lacking in many areas.
KGet in KDE3
Below you can see a screenshot of KGet in KDE3 (taken from Wikipedia):

..and it had some nice things about it:

Easy to track multiple downloads and their speeds in one window
Integrates well with KDE

But it had a lot of [...]

I’ve now updated to the latest openSUSE KDE4 Packages and got another video (first one being: KDE 4.0 RC1+ Video Tour) to add, and it’s one all about the new KDE 4.0 KWin composite; that is, the new desktop effects that will be available with KDE 4.0.
The desktop effects are coming along nicely, with [...]

I got the chance to play a little more with KDE4 since the first release candidate was announced, so I made a brief video tour of a few things that particularly interest me. You can easily get going with the openSUSE KDE Packages, KDE 4 Live CD, or the new KDE4Daily QEMU image.
KWIN Composite (the [...]

Lately I’ve been playing a little more with KIWI — our amazing Image Creator — this time experimenting more with USB images. I made a nice 10.3 customised image (with codecs etc.), and a KDE Four Live USB image (believe or not, you only need to alter one line in the kiwi config.xml). Maybe the [...]

With a little bit of extra time, I thought I would try out KDE4 to see how it’s progressing; if you’re on openSUSE, all you need to do is install the latest KDE4 packages which are always available. Alternatively, you could always try the openSUSE-based (which can be easily created with KIWI) live CD: KDE [...]

The openSUSE team finally announced a quite highly anticipated release: openSUSE 10.3 :-). Aside from the distribution itself being technically great, the release itself also went really well and appears to have hit nearly all the major Linux News-related websites, as you would expect.
The torrents have many thousand seeders, the news story has had over [...]

Today I published the last in the Sneak Peeks at openSUSE 10.3 series, and I think it’s gone really great. A lot more people have discovered and commented on the various new features, and there’s a nicely documented place to point to when people ask the inevitable question of “What’s new in openSUSE 10.3?” Our [...]

A discussion on #kde-devel reminded me of Bullet-Proof-X. As usual, there’s been a lot of hype from our friends in the Ubuntu camp over the Bullet-Proof-X feature which really, as Benji notes, utilises an existing feature in GDM; basically a failsafe mode, should X fail to start.
There must, however, be some light irony in [...]

Since we now have the nice new 1-Click Install technology, over at openSUSE-Community.org we’re making full use of it. You can help test it right away. The Restricted_Formats/10.3 page is now up and it gives you the appropriate links to the YMPs that you can use for installation of all codecs and restricted formats.
Presuming that [...]

openSUSE-Community.org, in order to stay beautiful and integrate more closely with openSUSE.org, has now been ported over to the new site layout:

All the credit really goes to Robert Lihm, who conceived the site/template layout, and Frank Sundermeyer, who implemented it all. It only needed a small amount of changes to go straight onto the [...]

I’ve been interested in the way different distributions handle boot time lately, and with openSUSE’s recent and very impressive boot time improvements I thought I’d make a few extra comparative statistics using bootchart.
Rules
To ensure that these results are reasonably fair, I’m posing a few restrictions, most of which are pretty obvious:

Use the same setup, my [...]