Summit, Con, Release...

The last weeks before my holiday have been quite crazy for me. SUSECon, openSUSE Summit and of course the openSUSE 13.1 release. Meanwhile, the openSUSE Board Elections have started... I decided to really try and stay away from things for two weeks. I'm not particularly good at that and I did a few thingies but I managed not too shoddy. Saw a museum, did pick up running again, watched some movies...

Now, back to SUSECon, the Summit and the release!

SUSECon,oS Summit

First things first, SUSECon and the openSUSE Summit were awesome. It is always wonderful how much energy these events give - so many enthusiastic people, ideas, plans...



On the press side during SUSECon, I kept myself busy with talking to 7 of the journalists, doing and arranging interviews or finding answers to their questions about openSUSE. And with Robert Schweikert I presented a session (twice) about the collaboration between SUSE and openSUSE. ITWire reported on this talk. We ran a booth at SUSECon as well and it was, as always, great to talk to people there.

On Wednesday was a Pirate Party, Thursday a visit to the Epcot park. I'm not a huge fan of such parks but it was entertaining enough to get food there... And I had great company!



At the Summit I presented two sessions, one about handling a booth and one about building local communities. In both cases, there was a lot of awesome feedback from the room and at the Orlando airport and further during the trip back I worked the suggestions in the presentations for further sharing. Thanks! I also really appreciated the private conversations about these topics which took place later on.



But the most important thing, for me, was meeting old friends again. Andi, Drew, the openSUSE Forms guys, the Greek delegation and many more. And bumping into new people like Navid and Christopher, two guys who run a media production company and want to help out openSUSE with web things. That's where the inspiring conversations happen. There were discussions about how to proceed with the Summit, how to handle community building in the Americas but also the great town hall meeting where I presented the 'Karmafication' idea for our infrastructure. This is something I might blog about later.

After the openSUSE Summit was over, Alex, Stella, Ludwig and myself went for a beach trip, video below. It was fun - although we drove an order of magnitude longer than that we actually spend on the beach ;-)

The release

Then the release, on the day I landed back from the US of A (and yes, they lost my luggage, luckily it is back). I think it went great, and seeing the response from the press I think others agree.

Now, we're debating changes to our development process on the mailing lists. Let's see how that goes!

Skype on openSUSE 13.1

Yes, openSUSE 13.1 isn't out yet, but people who've installed RC1 and upgraded via the repositories are very close... So let's call that 13.1_almost, for now. And 13.1_almost has a bit of an issue if you are a Skype user. When starting up Skype you might very well be greated with a very loud and unpleasant sound coming out of the speakers.

Solve it

This is fortunately not hard to solve: start skype from a commandline with the following command:
PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 skype

See this blog for some background information. I am hoping we can get an update in to fix this, but for now - if you suffer from it, use this as a work-around.

Make it permanent

You can change the menu item for Skype so you don't have to start it from the command line, as follows:
Left-click the menu button and choose  "Edit Applications..."

Then, locate the Skype application and add the "PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60" in front of the command.

Save, done. Easy-peasy, yes?

I'm going to be at SUSECon this week, ending in the awesomeness that will be the openSUSE Summit! If you're there, surprise-hug me if you can ;-)


Have a lot of fun!
(and think of the geekos)