SuSE. Co.in

Yes I'm heading over to NUE on Wednesday for just under a week of Geeko fun for the inaugural openSUSE Conference! I'm looking forward to meeting all the old faces from previous events, but also getting to see so many new faces and actually work out if all those IRC nicks are real people or just some wonderful trick by Beineri.

Originally when word about the conference came up, I was looking forward to just gooffing off with a load of fellow Geeko lovers maybe look at fixing my openSUSE on Symbian widget but nothing major. Oh how times have changed I am going into the conference with big aspirations - Get Goblin working/building and have an image ready for 11.2 M8!! Now some may think this is no big deal, maybe it isn't to you but to me and a few others it is a huge deal.

At present I and others have been running Goblin (openSUSE powered Moblin) on an 11.1 base. Which for the most part works great, the problem is we need to get current with the release schedule. One of the issues here is that predominantly all Moblin/Goblin work is done by Novell employees, and those poor buggers have been working their backsides off to some pretty stringent cut off lines based around the SLE builds with their OEM partners. I have been trying to give things as much focus as I can, but my work (the one that pays me) tends to get in the way. Now one of the beauties of Open Source and especially anything involving the Build Service is that you can easily chip in and help in almost any which way you can; regardless of time of day or location in the world. To see what I mean, have a look at the work-flow that is in place for Goblin.

Some of the tasks ahead of us is sorting out which packages need to be submitted up to Factory and then making sure that those packages' spec files meet openSUSE's high standards - some of the specs are pretty dirty. We also need to make sure that we can build an image based on Factory and make sure it runs/installs fine. Talking of images, we need to also look at the images - at present the image is based around an OEM recovery disk and not a standard live style image. Michael Meeks has started the ball rolling looking at a live image, and I have been trying to get an image built in SUSE Studio. Another item that needs some good old fashioned TLC is the Wiki, I put my hands up for neglecting this but it will get looked at - especially with your help

So when I'm in NUE at the Conference I am hoping to be able to sit down with the Novellians that are paid to deal with Moblin, but more importantly sit down with you the general community and try and wade through these tasks together so that come Milestone 8's release on 01 October 2009 we have a fully functioning Goblin release, with a variety of install options - I have pretty much sorted the 1Click side of things but still needs some work. So please come and join me along with those from Novell, Intel and pretty much everywhere and help make openSUSE the premier distribution for Moblin!

Oh and if I manage to find some spare time, I'm hoping to sit down with Thomas Schmidt and work through getting openSUSE on Symbian sorted, and also help out with some of the video recording and general lovefest.

BTW if you're not sure who I am, I'm the one in the kilt