And what has that dude been doing lately...

Hi all!

Just an update on what I've been up to.

First of all, thanks for the great welcome to the community! I've received many constructive and nice comments which made me very happy. I really look forward to working with you all over the next months/years/centuries/eons/etc.

As I don't yet have much insight in our community, I am spending the first month on getting to know you all, getting input on what is needed, what is going on etcetera. Besides of course reading up on mail, following discussions on IRC and playing with openSUSE myself I went to the Novell headquarters for a week and spoke with my colleagues there. It was an interesting week - Novell has a deep commitment to openSUSE but there is still a lot to learn from both sides. I hope to be able to bring the parts of Novell which work on and with openSUSE technology a bit closer to the community and will start with the marketing. The marketing team at Novell has a lot of experience talking to corporate partners and I hope we can use their experience for openSUSE. The other way around I think we can help them a lot in spreading the word about the work Novell is doing in the free software area.

The second week I spend in Nurnberg among the German openSUSE team. That was interesting - first of all because I had no idea Nurnberg is such a pretty city; and second because the people at the office were very inspiring. Again a lot of ideas and if I want to do 10% of what came up there I'd need to clone myself 4 or 5 times. Any hints on how to do that would be appreciated!

Currently I am in Prague to get to know the colleagues there. When arriving, I found out the office had come down. Ok, not that bad, it's just that the air conditioning felt inspired by the rain and started to leak water. Which had resulted in a little disaster. I also found out the peeps here are healthy. I couldn't find anyone to join me for a smoke despite forensic evidence (smoked cigarettes) downstairs suggesting there must be other nicotine addicts. Pavol claims there are less than 5 smokers in the SUSE offices, amazing... Might have something to do with the fruit they have here, up for grabbing. Sometimes there are even slices of melon on a plate. Scary. But good, I esp like bananas, makes the monkey in me happy.

Next up - I hope to finally see my own office in Utrecht next week. I also hope to have time there to consolidate a bit of what has been said to me over the weeks, catch up with mail and such and get back to people I promised to get back to. And get the administrative things done. Like planning for conferences and such...

But before that I already hope to become more involved with the strategy discussion soon. I blogged about that before - I have some opinions on the matter and I think it is important (the discussion, not my opinions). I know many of you feel kind-of left out, not connected to the current discussion - the strategy team is committed to fixing that. I will give them a helping hand where I can, but you all might also have to put in some thinking ;-)

Last, after installing openSUSE on my laptop, I ran into a few instability issues with Xorg. About as bad as on my previous distro, to be exact, apparently the latest Xorg ain't that stable with Intel drivers. If you have regular crashes and have intel hardware, check the bugs below, the suggestions in there fixed my problems.

bug 623245 (install newer xorg packages)
bug 617530 (install newer kernel)

Let me end with wishing you all a good day ;-)