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.

Wine gaming on Nouveau

In my previous blog, I mentioned that I was finally free of proprietary drivers. But that story wasn't completely over. While basic 3D acceleration and things like glxgears worked fine, wine did not run Windows games yet. So here's a report on the progress since then and some tips on how to get these things to work!

I'm not exactly a gamer. I play two games, each of them approximately 6-7 times a year. One is natively available for Linux and these days even Open Source: Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, an online 1st person shooter. The second game I have to play through wine: Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. And if I could, I would be playing a third game: Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour. Which, according to Wine's App DB should work fine. Doesn't for me, unfortunately - despite spending more hours on getting the game to work than I would play it this year...

Anyway, let's move to some (Wine) Proprietary-Gaming-on-Linux tips you'd need. Both with and without Nouveau, by the way.

RTCW and similar old, closed games

Return to Castle Wolfenstein on Linux. You want sound? And you have a modern Linux? Your game depends on an ancient sound driver system called oss... You need to install the alsa-oss layer and make sure you have the kernel stuff loaded for oss. Oh and you can forget about running both a music player and RTCW or another game which requires this compatibility, won't work. It is one or the other!

Now, the commands. Install whatever oss stuff you can find:

zypper in alsa-oss alsa-oss-32bit

then add to your /etc/rc.d/boot.local:

modprobe snd_seq_oss
modprobe snd_mixer_oss
modprobe snd_pcm_oss

That should give you all the auditory gore you need ;-)

update: I didn't know about aoss which provides an even better solution for the sound. It is simple: start et with "aoss et.x86" and that should already take care of it... It mixes now with other sound as well so you can play music while you frag away. Read more here.

Does the game work with Nouveau? Sure, but I experience occasional instability, as in - hard freezes of the system. I recommend enabling the sysrq keys and using REISUB to avoid data loss. I'll be waiting a bit until it is all more stable until I play that game more.

Gaming with Wine

I'm going to assume you managed to purge the proprietary NVidia driver from your system (yes, this can be quite hard actually) and have nouveau installed and working already. That gives you 3D effects with Compiz/GNOME Shell/KWin/etc and some other basic openGL stuff. Not enough for windows games in wine, however.

I wanted to play Warcraft III and it took me forever to get that working. Turns out error messages like "Can't load Data.dll" or Put the DVD in the drive have little to do with the actual problem. Most of the problems turned out to be related to missing openGL stuff. I had to install the experimental Mesa drivers developed & maintained by Johannes Obermayr in his home project. You should be able to download his Mesa here (although at the time of writing there was a problem with OBS and it gave an error). You will also need some other packages so I suggest to switch the systempackages to those from his repository (see screenshot).

Getting it to work

Once you've installed all new nouveau-stuff, reboot and configure wine by modifying user.reg (in ~/.wine) adding the following under the "Direct3D" header:

"OffscreenRenderingMode"="backbuffer"

like this:

[Software\\Wine\\Direct3D] 1331547889
"DirectDrawRenderer"="opengl"
"Multisampling"="enabled"
"OffscreenRenderingMode"="backbuffer"
"RenderTargetLockMode"="auto"
"StrictDrawOrdering"="enabled"
"UseGLSL"="enabled"
"VideoMemorySize"="256"

PlayOnLinux and winetricks both have this as options you can enable via their GUI's.

For sound to not block your soundcard, use pulse-audio and its alsa plugin:

zypper in alsa-plugins-pulse alsa-plugins-pulse-32bit

Conclusion

It is all rather painful but in the end it's possible to get nouveau to work with Wine (and other) games. But I don't recommend moving over to nouveau if you play games and if you're not desperate to get rid of proprietary drivers (and you usually only are if you want a newer kernel for its hardware support or greatly care about that Freedom stuff). It's not completely ready yet and will give you some issues.

On the other hand, we're getting there. I'm quite happy to see progress in the area of free drivers for both NVIDIA and AMD graphics hardware. If only NVIDIA would be helping the efforts to create open drivers...

Finally NVIDIA Free!

In the Prague office 2 weeks ago I saw our big touch schreen computers. These have NVIDIA video cards, and no proprietary drivers - yet they run composited desktops just fine. As my last attempt at having a composited desktop with nouveau failed I was afraid to try again and I must admit that it took me until 3 at night. I messed up my install quite a bit, it seems. But once done - it works! I can even play RTCW, but Warcraft III refuses to work with an error ("could not open Game.dll") which according to the interwebs is most likely graphics related. I hope I can fix that one day - but for now, I can live without games (almost never play 'em anyway) and I'm quite happy with my proprietary-driver-free system!

whoeps!

Sorry for the old blog posts flooding the planets - was not intentional... Not sure why that happened.

But at least I've got good news: If you're in or around Prague it is time to hurry to the SUSE offices - SuSE LINUX, s.r.o. Lihovarska 1060/12 Prague 190 00 Czech Republicn - for the KDE 4.8 release party!!!

I'll be showing what's new in the latest release and there are a few more talks. On the right proof that the CAKE IS REAL!

Remember - have a lot of fun!

GSOC 2012 for openSUSE

While writing this, the openSUSE Project meeting takes place on IRC and Manu Gupta is telling us about GSOC 2012. Yup, yup - openSUSE wants to join GSOC again! For that we need mentors and ideas - anyone who has not put any ideas up yet should do so asap at this page.

Other cool stuff going on is the organization of oSC 2012 - we hope to have a location soon and from then on we need help to make it happen. It will take place somewhere in October in Prague, that much is known. But finding a good place for 300-500 people, with proper BOF rooms, reasonably priced and preferably allowing us to do our own food (me loves cooking) is not easy at all.

The openSUSE Summit in the USA already has a location and place - check the awesome poster design on the right, done by andi. We're getting ready for a CfP and the other things needed to really make it happen. Anyone interested - let us know!

/me now goes for food with a bunch of crazies

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.

Almost done!

Jay. More C&J house news, feel free to skip :D

So we're almost there. I have my work space set up:

Yes, I like Club Mate... *click*

The only thing still coming is a couch to replace these two:

Two bean bags in the work room *click*

Once that's in, we have everything and just have to do the hanging up of the last things and clean up in the guest room. Need a guest to make us do that - anyone care to visit Berlin?

Bloody mess! *click*

The couch in the living room is rather awesome imho - a good relaxing space.

The clean side of the living room *click*

More pics starting here...

The other nice piece of news is that I've got my N9. And a German mobile phone number. I'm very happy with my new gadget... and can recommend the N9 to anyone, it's a great device!

And Bruno send me an awesome hat:

Silly faces rock! *don't click*