openSUSE 13.2 out: PARTY time!

It's the 5th of November, a date the Brits are told to remember - for me, it is the day after openSUSE 13.2 was released! It's a kickin' release, good reason for a release party tonight at the Belug in Berlin.

13.2

End users will probably notice the revamped YaST most during installation, but the integration of functionality like snapper, Dracut and Wicked is also quite significant. With Snapper, you can roll back upgrades of your system, configuration changes and so on - and if an upgrade made the system unbootable, you just boot from an older version. I haven't seen it in action yet, as unfortunately my btrfs filesystem broke just a week ago - which is of course the one thing snapper can't fix. Yes, bug is fixed, but annoying.

Dracut 'just' leads to faster booting, I've been playing with it on my laptop for a while and it is cool that it made it in now. And yes, 5 second boot is realistic, my new desktop at work does that easily. It also reduces the huge scripted mess that the old mkinitrd system was with something distributions can work together on - that is a good thing in itself, I like collaboration.

I can't say anything smart about Wicked, to be honest. It's network management, but where it fits and what it does exactly somebody else would have to explain in normal-human-terms ;-)

Of course there's much more, including the latest kernel, GNOME, KDE and 5 more desktops (including a preview of Plasma 5.1!), the best selection of what Free Software has to offer and so on. Find a nice overview of openSUSE 13.2 on the info page.

party time

The Party part is easy to explain. The Berlin LUG (BeLUG) has offered their place as party space tonight, I'll give a quick intro into what is new in this release, we'll have some time for debate and then it's all up for grabs. The BeLUGgers promised there would be beer, so what can go wrong?

See you at:
Belug e.V.
Lehrter Straße 53
10557 Berlin
Be there at 18:00 for some informative fun and a beer!

If you aren't in Berlin, check if there is a release party close to you or organize one yourself!

ownCloud meetup in Berlin!

Wednesday this week (May 21), we'll have the first ownCloud Hacktisch meetup at C-base in Berlin. It is planned to meet every third Wednesday of the month to spend time on improving ownCloud: hacking, translating, finding bugs and so on.

The meeting is open for everybody and of course you should bring your laptop! It starts at 19:00 at C-Base, Rungestraße 20 in Berlin. You can RSVP at meetup.com/owncloud-berlin.

Besides a laptop, I suggest you bring a good mood and a few euro's to buy a bottle of club Mate.

See you there!

openSUSE at LinuxTag 2013

As I wrote last week, openSUSE was at Linuxtag. We didn't have a huge team like last year, nor did we bring all the beer - but we had some fun nonetheless.

Awesomeness

For me, the most awesome thing was the openSUSE Jeopardy done by Christan Boltz, it was SUPER cool. Of course, part of that was because I won, mainly due to the quotes section - my fellow participants had no idea who wrote them. I even recognized my own quote and it looks like I still can agree with myself. Must say that the Jeopardy thing was really, really fun.

For those wondering what the heck I'm talking about: we have small booth talks at our booth at LinuxTag. I believe Henne Vogelsang once started doing this (even before I joined openSUSE), teaching people how to fold paper Geekos and stuff like that. I'm not that creative, so I only gave KDE tips and Tricks on Wednesday and Saturday. Strange enough, nobody even seemed to have noticed that I gave that session in my favorite GNOME shirt... Luckily Christian had a way better idea for these booth talks: Jeopardy!

He has a cool html web thingy for it, complete with tracking scores and all that and I had arranged Club Mate for the winners (and, often, for the losers too). There were questions in areas like security, coding and development languages. Some worked with pictures, others had text but they were all quite ingenious. The '/etc/firstline' was cool although I didn't know any of them: it shows you the first non-comment line of a random file in /etc and you have to say what file it's from. Many of the questions were rather not openSUSE-specific, only the quotes from the Factory mailinglist (quote, you guess who said it) and the openSUSE Releases (screenshots of openSUSE login screens, you guess the version) were. I even learned a thing or two ;-)

Bernhard Wiedemann also joined the booth team, I even have to say he formed the core of it, being the most steady force as Christian didn't make it on Wednesday and I wasn't there on Thursday and Friday. He talked about OBS packaging which also attracted people interested in packaging.

The booth

Meanwhile, I've been working on the new openSUSE Merchandising program and that includes making a 'list of stuff to bring'. I decided to try and use LinuxTag to test out a few things! The booth pictures you see include some (but not all) of the goodies we plan on including in booth boxes. We learned some valuable lessons about the materials at the event. Our booth was at the entry of the event, for good or bad. The area was a bit small (although we shared some space with the ownCloud team next to us) but mostly people simply walked by to the main hall with booths and I'm not sure if they ever came back...

We had no beer this year but openSUSE Conference flyers and posters as well as a batch of 500 openSUSE flyers based on a design we've been working on in the last 2 years (until now they were only printed in the US). It seems not too many are interested in going to Greece (can't imagine why) but it was still good to point the existence of the conference out to people.

For the openSUSE flyer I had the explicit goal of seeing if it could help kickstart a conversation. I am not sure if that really works, but of course our booth team was so experienced they don't really need talking points.

The 'we believe' poster got some very valid criticism from the ownCloud team which was next to our booth: it has too much text on it and people simply won't read it. Having that design as small (a6 or so) hand out might work far better, or as a slide in a presentation. And having a big one with images or somehow else more, hum, easily (lazily) processed might be a good combination. Anybody has any ideas on how to put our philosophy as expressed on this poster in the form of a more graphical image? I'd love to see some ideas ;-)

Also, if you visited our booth and are reading this - I would love feedback, both good and bad. On the looks of it, the posters, flyers, DVD, people - all of it!

Talks

We also had a few 'big' (as in, not at the booth) talks. Bernhard and Sascha spoke about OpenStack / SUSE Cloud / crowbar in the main track and I myself talked for about 30 min on what happened to openSUSE in the last year and gave a 2 minute lightning talk about our booth as well. All talks went well but LinuxTag isn't the most crowded event and seems to be getting smaller - talking for 20 people is perhaps more fun as you get to have more close contact to the audience but it's hardly worth traveling for.

The booth talks I gave about 'advanced KDE usage' where big fun. They usually had just a handful of visitors which meant we all sat together around my laptop and could discuss things quite nicely. Fun!

Edit: and I forgot to mention the talk Bernhard gave on "openSUSE on ARM" including our cross-compilation tricks with qemu-linux-user. And sorry for the appearance of some old blogs on planet.KDE, I have no idea how to convince blogger not to do that stupid thing - I only updated the tags. The dates are correct :(

Presenting openSUSE 12.2?

Note: I've updated the links below as we did a restructuring of our github repository. In case any of the links below don't work at some point in the future: the root of the repository is here, from there you can navigate to the slides. Currently they are under Marketing Materials > openSUSE introduction slides.

If you're going to promote openSUSE somewhere - know that we've got your back. There is an openSUSE 12.2 slide template courtesy of Richard on our github repo, click here for download.

Also, I've created a introduction to the new stuff in openSUSE 12.2 and updated our other standard slide decks about OBS, openQA, Studio and more. Find them on this page.

There's also separate openSUSE 12.2 artwork for presentations available in svg and other easy-to-work-with formats.

Remember, we believe in Doing, Sharing and Merging (see the image on the side, more posters on this page, also almost all in SVG). So if you have any improvements for the slides, translated versions or any other cool artwork or translations, mail me or create a merge request on github!

Have a lot of fun and let us know if you use the slides,

Jos

This weekend: pizza and beta at my place!

Hi all!

In the spirit of a delayed release and extremely interesting discussions on where openSUSE is going, I'm organizing a BetaPizzaParty at our place in Berlin. It'll be all about eating pizza while testing openSUSE 12.2 Beta 2 and gossiping about what openSUSE is up to lately.

If you want to be there, just say so in the comments ;-)

We'll order pizza (or might make some of our own, I haven't decided yet). And I have some Old Toad left, if you're interested - or we can get some more beer in my walk-in fridge downstairs.

If you don't live close enough by Berlin but want a BetaPizzaParty, see if there is one close to you or organize your own.

And remember - even if you haven't completely understood yet that openSUSE is the coolest Linux distro, you're welcome to join in the celebration, pizza-eating and drinking.

Looking forward to some fun, cu there!

Edit: oh, on a related note, in my enthusiasm I forgot to mention place and date. So let me fix that:

• where: Eldenaerstr 28A, Friedrichshain
• When: Saturday, from 17:00 until we're wasted and pass out.

Edit 2: those at QtContributorSummit are more than welcome to come by earlier on Saturday - check out the place, give us a hug, see popcorn, all that ;-)

edit 3: see here: there's a party BEFORE the party at OstKreuz!

COSCUP - KDE and openSUSE

COSCUP is Taiwan's biggest FOSS tech event, full of exciting technology and great people. As you might know, this year COSCUP will feature a special track dedicated to KDE and openSUSE!

Call for Papers closing!

The call for papers for this Feature track at COSCUP will close in just a few days - June 15 to be exact. So you have to hurry up sending in your proposal - there's a huge audience waiting for your input!

We're still very much looking for subjects including localization and local FOSS community work, packaging and distribution technology, desktop technologies and development, cross-project collaboration and cloud computing tech.

Note that despite the long tradition of close collaboration between KDE and openSUSE, both communities welcome talks not directly related to either of those. KDE on other Linux distributions or non-KDE desktop technologies on openSUSE are very much encouraged to send in proposals too!

Again, the call for papers ends on June 15. Please email a proposal of about 200 words, accompanied by a ~50 word biography, in either English or Chinese, to the Program Committee before that date.

Program Committee

The Program Committee for the KDE/openSUSE track at COSCUP consists of the following people:

• Franklin Weng (KDE)
• Aaron J. Seigo (KDE)
• Sakana (openSUSE)
• Al Cho (openSUSE)
• Bryen Yunashko (openSUSE)
• Greg Kroah-Hartman (the Linux Foundation)

Improved Support for Events

The openSUSE community introduced the Travel Support Program to support travelers to represent openSUSE at conferences and events. A few days ago the team announced a minor change in policy: besides travel costs, the team will also help with costs related to booths, entry tickets and marketing materials.

Entry tickets and booths

While most Free Software events have Free entry - either for everyone or at least for those staffing a booth or giving a talk, this is not always true. Also, some events charge even volunteer organizations for a booth. While we're not too fond of that, reality is one of those things you have to live with and thus this decision - we pay, but up to a reasonable limit.

Marketing materials

Another thing is marketing materials. While we ship tens of thousands of DVD's, flyers, posters and other things around the world each year, sometimes it just doesn't make sense. Sending 100 DVD's with some posters and flyers (worth about 10 bucks) to some countries can easily cost many times the value of what we send. Sometimes, customs give us an extremely hard time and try to charge for the 'value of the software'. In short - we need to be able to produce things locally. And now we can!



The openSUSE ambassadors can pick materials from our well stocked github repo or, of course, modify something there or even create their own.

Now go and spread the word!

Find a little more info in the announcement by the Travel Support Team and of course on the wiki page!

Yup, the travel support program is currently just sponsored by SUSE - we haven't figured out (still, I know) how to take donations from others - yet. But if you want to help out financially, talk to me or the travel support team, I'm sure we can work something out!

openSUSE at LinuxTag Berlin 2012, SUSE Hiring!

Heya!

It's almost that time: in one week LinuxTag opens its doors! Courtesy of your friends at Fedora and openSUSE, there will be 'Beefy Miracle' hotdogs and 'Old Toad' beer. And together with the numerous other projects we bring you talks about Linux and new Free/Open Source technologies, interesting people to talk to and lots of fun and party!

Cool stuff in the booth area, BEER AND HOTDOGS!

This year, openSUSE & Fedora gang up to both support you, the visitors, and LinuxTag, our gracious hosts. We'll hand out 'Old Toad' beer and 'Beefy Miracle' hotdogs for a small donation (€1 per item) to the LinuxTag e.V.! So there you have it:

Come, buy and eat hotdogs and drink beer in support of LinuxTag!

(the openSUSE beer is actually free as the catering didn't like us asking for donations to LinuxTag. However, we strongly suggest to give a donation anyway)

Sessions at openSUSE booth

At the openSUSE booth we'll also have short hands-on tech sessions every day. The schedule:

• Wednesday-Saturday
  13:00 your ownCloud by yours truly
• Thursday
  15:00 Colour Management by Kai-Uwe Behrman
• Friday and Saturday
  15:00 AppArmor Crashkurs by Christian Boltz

Work work! Looking for a job?

I've also heard that two HR people from SUSE will be at or around the booth during most of Friday and Saturday. We're 20 years old, still going strong and have plenty of opportunities so if you're interested in an exciting job at the greenest company in the FOSS world, ask for Johanna Grau or Nadine Pieper!

I'm greatly looking forward to seeing all the friends from various Free Software projects again, like GNOME, KDE, LibreOffice, Fedora, TuxRadio, FreeBSD and many others. And you of course, dear reader!

(yes, the posters are all mine. Didn't know I had it in me. Honestly, they're all rip-offs of real art of course, the first two based on the official LinuxTag poster and the 'we believe' is something which fuzzily came to me this morning after a way-to-short night. The art is inspired by suse.com/careers - I really like that. It is, of course, all in github (I really DO believe) and merge requests or suggestions are very welcome. But before tomorrow, it has to be printed for LinuxTag!)

LFNW and other event awesomeness

Just had a look at the events openSUSE ambassadors have been visiting lately. From March 1 to April 30 we're talking about over 20 conferences and meetings! That's quite impressive. I myself have only visited a few in that time - most notably LinuxFest NorthWest (in Bellingham, Washington, USA), Chemnitzer Linux Tage (my blog) and I went to Re:Publica in Berlin. And later this month there'll be LinuxTag in Berlin. I'm organizing the openSUSE booth there so if it's a mess, you know who to blame ;-)

LinuxFest NorthWest

Let's talk about LFNW now. It was Carl Symons (your most dedicated dot editor) who bugged me for roughly a year about the event, including mentally preparing me by giving a LFNW t-shirt at the last Desktop Summit. And there was going to be an openSUSE booth, with Bryen, Brandon, James and even Michael attending. At that point, there was no going back - I had to come.

ownCloud talks

I submitted a talk about ownCloud - Carl told me I had to talk to the other ownCloud presenter who turned out to be Michael Gapczynski, ownCloud hacker and fresh employee of the new ownCloud Inc. We ended up giving two successive talks, me introducing ownCloud and walking through installation, setup and basic usage followed by Michael going into the development of ownCLoud Apps. The room was loaded, quite cool. Oh and I debuted pictures of Popcorn, our dog.

If you want to see the presentation, come to LinuxTag - I'll give a talk together with ownCloud founder Frank Karlitschek and we'll most likely follow the same schedule of me introducing oC & going over installation, then Frank going into a bit more detail.

13 yo Moe Jackson in action at LinuxFestNorthwest. She had never touched a tablet before but Krita had her tied to the screen for 3 hours creating awesome things!

Booth

The openSUSE booth at LFNW was well visited. We had one of those big "what's cool about openSUSE" posters, people took pictures of it or wrote down the links. A clear hint that we need flyers with that info! We also promoted the openSUSE Summit quite a bit but for some reason folks considered it a bit far away ;-)

Other stuff

The organization organized a party with food & drinks in a museum of electronic stuff - truly interesting. Some of the visitors spend hours zapping themselves with static electricity, others admired the weirdest devices from the onset of the electrical age. Hundreds of vacuum tubes, old radio's (even a bunch of mechanic music devices), lamps, early telegraph systems and more than you can see in a mere few hours. Awesome. Oh, and good beer - if you like Ale that is (I don't).

There was good food outside, daily, a large booth area with interesting projects and lots of talks. And probably most important, a really relaxed atmosphere with many technical people. It was all about the cool stuff, not about politics or corporate things. All in all, I can say - LFNW is an awesome event and if you can manage, you HAVE to go!

I made a video of the Museum we went too, see this Youtube video:

(or click)

(thanks to KDENlive inspiring me to make this, that app is just too cool. And oh, when I say "SUSE who paid" - that's of course for ME and my time, not for LFNW (SUSE was a sponsor, but not the only one by far).

Re:Publica, LinuxTag

I'll blog about Re:Publica tomorrow and LinuxTag about a week before it starts.

Hugs!vacuum

Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2012

Konqi on the CLT artwork

Am at Chemnitzer Linuxtage this weekend. It is quite a nice event - they take very good care of the booth people with free food and a party on Saturday night and the event has a pretty big number of visitors. Funny artwork, too - it feels very well organized.

The openSUSE booth had about 8 people and was in front of the Oyranos booth where Kai explained the usage and usefulness of Oyranos and Color Management in general to visitors. We were joined by Klaas Freitag who brought some ownCLoud materials including stickers and flyers (but no poster! booohoo!).

Wicked Geeko, found in Chemnitz on a wall!

I worked a bit on some artwork to tell people we've got free beer (for a small 1 Euro donation to Chemnitzer Linuxtage) and otherwise hung out with various people and talked to visitors at the booth.

Lessons learned:

• Lots of people still don't know about SUSE Studio! Or cool openSUSE things like OBS, YaST, ARM, Tumbleweed...
• Lots of people like the geeko and want t-shirts, posters, stickers and more.
• We need new t-shirts, including children- and girly ones. And new (laptop) stickers and the like...

• The brochures with the "what's cool about openSUSE" information works, good way to start a conversation.
• Quite a few people don't speak English. My German is ok-ish for basic things but breaks down on complicated matters :(
• And we need to translate the brochures, also in German, and print those :D
• The beer poster is still crazy popular.
• And so is the beer, we brought 6 crates or so and were out half the day... Need to make more!

Edit: And we sold for about 250-300 euro and gave this to CLT. Cool :D

Edit2: Another thing - quite a number o the translations of the Brochure were done by a number of helpful translators, but they now need to be inserted in the Brochure. Unfortunately that is extremely hard to do if you don't speak the language... If you want to help, see this mail!.

What's going on in openSUSE marketing

Just wanted to update whoever's interested in some of the things going on in openSUSE marketing and how you can help!

Ambassador activity

The openSUSE ambassadors visit events around the world. We've got better support from the international team and are becoming more and more active:

• In the last 6 months, we've really gotten our DVD program up and running like clockwork (thanks, AJ and Iwona (Europe), Jeff (USA), Sankar (Bangalore), Andrea and Priscila (Brazil), Al (Taiwan) and all the other heroes involved!
• We've got the Ambassador Travel support program (thanks, Izabel and Kostas!)
• We're creating lots of conference and promo artwork (Thanks, Andi, Shayon, Victor, and others!). See our github repo for the cool stuff!
• And I'm struggling to get some of that artwork turned into actual paper ;-)
• Thanks to the efforts of the USA team, we'll be visiting more conferences in the USA this year than we did in the last 5 in total... Thanks esp to Bryen for coordinating this but also to Clint, Mike, Shayon, Matt, Don, Andi and the many others who are making this possible!)
• But not only the USA is going strong. In Taiwan we're setting up a really cool thing: COSCUP, Taiwan's biggest FOSS event, will have a track dedicated to KDE and openSUSE! Thanks go to Sakana, Al Cho, Max, Armijn and Aaron for making this possible!
• As you might have read on news.opensuse.org we'll be active in FLISOL in the South and Central Americas.
• And of course we're visiting loads of other events, see our ambassador event page. If you want to help out, sign up there!

ConferenceS

Yeah, this year we'll have two conferences. For the global openSUSE conference in Prague we're close to deciding on a location. It wasn't easy to find something as we need quite a bit of room and don't want a typical corporate setting. But we're down to two locations and the locals are checkin' them out so we can pick one. Thanks to Michael, Alan, Pavol, Michal and the rest of the team who signed up to help: Michal, Michal, Michal, Petr, Petr, Petr, Martin, Vitezslav, Ondrej and Tomas. Yes, we'll have a 4-michal-3-petr conference team there... If you want to help out as well, email opensuse-conference@opensuse.org. We're especially looking for Geeko's living in or close to Prague!!!

In the USA, things are going much faster. We're readying the website, finishing artwork, preparing a CfP, working on the sponsorship brochure etc - wow. Andi has been blogging about the artwork and Shayon has been working like crazy on the website. Besides them, we have Bryen, Alan, Drew, Carlos, Robert, Rouzi, Will, Jamileth and Michael. If you want to help out too, sign up by sending a mail to: opensuse-summit@opensuse.org.

Help out!

As I already wrote, you can spread the word on openSUSE, if you like, at conferences. There's info on the Ambassador events page and you can order promo DVD's here.

Sorry for all the names I missed, it's impossible to find all of you who are active in the areas I've mentioned. And worse, I haven't spoken about many things which are going on, I know.

openSUSE Travel Support Program

Heya all!

There is an exciting piece of last night... There is now a community-led openSUSE Travel Support Program!

This is something I've wanted to do since the day I became community manager for openSUSE. I've always believed that the budget I had in SUSE should be used for the openSUSE community. Initially, that meant that I moved money from the sponsoring of conferences to supporting openSUSE people going to conferences as well as providing them with goodies like DVD's, openSUSE beer, flyers and t-shirts.

But one thing never felt entirely right: who am I to decide on sponsorship for travel? I think that that is something the community should decide. So for a long time I have been discussing how to do this with a number of people including Bryen in his former role of Marketing team lead, the openSUSE Board, Andreas Jaeger and a number of other community members.

Now, finally, we have secured funds, and two community members have stepped forward to run this: Izabel Valverde from Brazil and Kostas Koudaras from Greece. I'm very happy with them doing this as the many events they have organized and the roles they play in their respective local communities has proven them to be more than capable. Over the last few months they have already been working closely with AJ and myself to decide upon and handle sponsorship requests and I'm sure they will do an excellent job going forward.

The travel program

So what will this mean for openSUSE? Well, the goal of this program is unfortunately not to give you all a nice holiday on a beautiful beach - SUSE has been rather reluctant when it came to funding beach parties and the like. I tried, really!

So the goal is to support those who would otherwise not be able to go to an event to (re)present openSUSE. If you're a student or want to make sure openSUSE has a presence at an event which is rather far away but has nobody else able to visit it - we want to help you. Just to give an idea - we'd pick poor students over rich working class, events which would otherwise have nobody over events which are well visited by Geekos already (like FOSDEM or LinuxTag...); we'd rather not always support the same person although we do prefer to support someone who's been active in openSUSE for a while and has proven to do a good job. I know it's impossible to make clear rules over who and when to support and we're always open for feedback but the final decision lies with the Support Program team.

Of course, as funds are limited, so is reimbursement. To support as many people as possible we reimburse only hotel and travel and both up to 80% of the total travel- and hotel costs. Also, those supported to go to an event are expected to send in a nice report afterwards (we really prefer a blog if possible!) and of course uphold the openSUSE Guiding Principles.

You can find more information about the travel program on the wiki page.

So go forth and spread the word!

So, if you were planning on going to an event but had to decide not to go due to a lack of funds - let us know! We can and really want to help you. Some of you put in an extraordinary amount of time and money to spread the word on openSUSE and you really deserve some help with that!

If you have any questions or concerns about the program, you can bring them up at the next openSUSE Project meeting (Wednesday 22) or email me or the team directly.

FOSDEM: Green Beer, Open Advice and more Cool Stuff™

Last weekend was FOSDEM and it was a blast! Camila's first and I get that she didn't look forward to it that much - we had some trouble on the way there. As I'm now just on the way to the airport to pick her up (she had a meet-up with some KolabSys people) I dunno if she changed her mind but I bet she did. If only because she got some Brazilian beans from Izabel Valverde ;-)

For me it was the usual - there was little visiting of talks for me. Seriously, 200 hours of talks in 2 days? Attempting to visit the interesting ones just leads to frustration so I've given up on that. There are just too many people to talk to, too much beer to drink and sell and little catch-ups to have. FOSDEM needs to become a week-long event. Seriously.

A cool highlight of FOSDEM was of course the release of Lydia's awesome Open Advice project. It's a book for people who want to participate and make a difference in Free Software, explaining our culture and drawing upon some bright minds for real-world experiences. It is quite a read - I only got as far as the introduction by ex-FSFE Dude Georg Greve and some first paragraphs of a few chapters. But it's worth it if what I've read is any indication. Of course, in true Free fashion, it's open and even ready to edit and improve if you want!

There was a lot of fun around the openSUSE crowd as usual. The crew did a great job selling t-shirts, hats, beer and other stuff all for the benefit of FOSDEM (we donated the proceeds of the sales as usual). The awesome 'Old Toad' beer was as popular as ever - it is indeed a great beer and a good way to keep the fun alive. The Greek(o)s really drove this part as they must've drunk at least half our supply ;-)

Oh and after being pressed Frank promised that he'll ensure ownCloud has a good booth next year. So, ownCloudies (can't think of a better name atm) - you guys & girls really have to take that dive in 2013!!! Don't let Frank pull it alone. Not that His Baldiness can't do that, it's just that he'd look lonely. We can't have that.

And at night the usual great dinners - Thai food one night, Japanese Tepan Yaki or something (fiery, dang) another. Finishing it off properly with a few beers.

By the way, I've set up the LinuxTag wiki page for the openSUSE gang, sign up!

hugs,
Jos

Being in the know

'being in the know' means something like being one of those people who knows what is going on. When it comes to Free Software events around the world where openSUSE is involved that means being on the opensuse-ambassador mailing list. That's where we discuss events and where you can send invites you receive for openSUSE attendance. Like, for example, this one:

Hello,

My name is Erin Tyler and I am with the Palmetto Open Source Software Conference (POSSCON), one of the largest open source software conferences on the east coast. We would like to invite OpenSuse to participate in POSSCON 2012, scheduled for March 28 and 29 in Columbia, SC, USA.

Thank you for any consideration,
Erin Tyler
Coordinator, POSSCON 2012

If you want to be there or at any other event to represent openSUSE, let us know - mail the ambassador list!

Promoting openSUSE at a conference

openSUSE has many ambassadors who go out to conferences to talk about openSUSE like last week at LinuxTag. The marketing team provides them with a number of resources:

• The openSUSE talking points
• The openSUSE artwork repository
• The openSUSE ambassador wiki

Each of those is frequently undergoing changes and improvements. The latest change to the talking points, for example, introduces three elevator pitches to help you quickly explain openSUSE to people. Input (preferably in the form of fixes to the linked wiki page!) is of course welcome.

The artwork repository offers lots of poster- and flyer artwork as well as a number of ready-made presentations. Unfortunately git, which is where this is all hosted, is not super-nice as a way to distribute content. The presentations are up to 25 mb, which you can't download from gitorious directly... Luckily, Bruno "Tigerfoot" Friedman has set up a nice mirror where you can download the presentations.

However, for input, git merge requests are certainly preferred :D

The Ambassador portal on the wiki leads you to lots of good resources, like how to organize an event.

So, ambassadors, use what we have - and let us know if it works for you or even better - just improve it!