People often ask me why they should use openSUSE Tumbleweed and how it compares to other distributions like Fedora or Ubuntu. The fact is Tumbleweed is actually rather hard, if not impossible to compare to Linux distributions like Fedora or Ubuntu.

Both are ‘traditional’, released-based distributions. They build it carefully over a few months, they ship it, and they then cautiously patch things (often keeping those changes as small as possible, backports, etc) to keep it secure/usable for their users over their chosen lifespan.

If you’re interested in an openSUSE like that, we have Leap, and I believe Leap to be better than Fedora and Ubuntu for a whole bunch of reasons, starting with the fact that Leap has an Enterprise codebase (SUSE Linux Enterprise to be exact) at its heart with the openSUSE Project building a fully-fledged community distribution ontop of it.

But today I want to talk about Tumbleweed.
While Leap aims to be rock-solid, Tumbleweed rolls.

It’s more like Arch and Gentoo in that regard. Tumbleweed today contains the latest packages of every software stack that has been packaged by the openSUSE Project. Latest kernel, libraries, desktop environments, everything in Tumbleweed can and does change regularly.

But, unlike other rolling distributions, Tumbleweed does it smarter.

Built Correctly

Tumbleweed is built like a ‘traditional’ distribution. All packages in Tumbleweed are built together as a cohesive distribution, and shipped together as a cohesive distribution. If a new package is checked in that potentially can invalidate another package (eg. new glibc, new libraries, new kernel, etc) then the dependant packages are rebuilt, just like traditional distributions.

But where as traditional distributions take days, sometimes weeks to do such, we do it in hours, because we have the Open Build Service.

• You can learn more about Open Build Service HERE.
• You can see, and use the openSUSE Build Service for free, today.

This produces a ‘snapshot’. At this point a traditional distribution would probably call this a ‘release candidate’, an ISO and a set of repositories with all the software built and ready for testing.

Most distributions take weeks to produce coherently built and tested disk images & repositories. Tumbleweed does it about 5 times a week.

Tested Well

But building is only half the story. A good distribution needs to be tested. A good rolling distribution needs to be tested quickly. Arch and Gentoo rely on manual testers and purposefully delaying the inclusion of packages in their main repos in order to give people time to test stuff. openSUSE has openQA.

Before any human being is allowed anywhere near a snapshot, openQA tests that snapshot over 100 times across four different hardware architectures (i586, x86_64, ppc64, and aarch64).

These are not artificial ‘some developer writing some code to poke around some APIs’ kind of tests.

openQA actually does proper real-world scenarios. Installations, upgrades, dual booting, encrypted LVM, kde, gnome, xfce, live CD’s, network installs.
You name it, we test it. And if we don’t test it well enough, we most certainly want to, and you can help contribute tests as everything in openQA is 100% open source.

Just take a look at the openQA results for a recent Tumbleweed snapshot for example, just to give you an idea

Again, these aren’t some kind of artificial ‘some fancy coder wrote a robot that can mash buttons in the right order’ tests. openQA can actually see the screens it is testing.

It uses openCV and a library of reference screenshots (with areas of interest selected to allow openQA to ignore things we don’t care about) which we call ‘needles’.

So every test checks that every screen looks the way we want it to look for users. Every function that is tested presses the same keys and clicks on the same mouse buttons that a user would, and then openQA confirms that piece of software behaves in the way it has been taught to expect.

openQA does this for every step in installations & upgrades.
openQA checks all the core console commands, systemd, zypper, YaST in ncurses mode, curl, vim, firewall, ssh, etc, etc.
openQA then logs into the desktop environment of choice (GNOME, KDE, lxde, xfce, etc) and checks graphical applications. Is gedit working? firefox? thunderbird? libreoffice? inkscape? gimp? etc, etc.

And it does this all in dozens of different scenarios, over and over again, in parallel across many VMs and machines.

We even do extra testing on incoming package submissions, so many cases we catch things before they get anywhere near a snapshot, and our developers get nice fast feedback about their otherwise potentially destructive change. Yes, we have implimented Continuous Integration for distributions, and if you were using OBS and openQA you could be doing it too.

Delivered Quickly

1000’s of tests, over 100 scenarios…and with our current hardware (thanks SUSE!) a full snapshot gets tested in about 3 hours.

And if it passes, it ships, automatically.

Most distributions take weeks to produce coherently built and tested disk images & repositories.
Tumbleweed does it about 5 times a week.

And a ‘quiet’ week can consist of approx new/updated 150 packages and a new kernel.
A normal week is double, if not triple that, and it’s moving faster and faster..

All that extra work doesn’t get in the way. We often beat other rolling distributions into delivering tested versions of KDE Plasma and GNOME, because we can test them quicker and ship them with a certainty that nothing breaks.

That’s not universally true though, good testing finds bugs, those bugs need to be fixed, so if you ever notice something taking longer than you’d like, it’s often a sign that we could do with more contributors helping Package that particular software. You can learn how to contribute to Tumbleweed HERE.

Trusted by More and More

Most of what I describe above was implimented after July 2014 and culminated in the ‘merger’ of Old Tumbleweed and Factory in November 2014.

Since then, the adoption rate of Tumbleweed has been nothing short of astronomical..

If public numbers are to be believed Tumbleweed might already be larger than ‘more famous’ rolling distributions. Whether or not that’s true doesn’t change one fact - We want YOU to try Tumbleweed.

And you’ll be in good company. Not only amongst those users, but companies like SoftIron who ship Tumbleweed on their Overdrive 3000 64-bit ARM servers, and Fujitsu who offer Tumbleweed as their chosen community Linux to customers with Skylake hardware. GNOME advertise Tumbleweed-based GNOME:Next LiveCD’s so their users can play with their latest releases as soon as they are shipped, even before the tested packages appear in Tumbleweed properly.

I may be biased, but Tumbleweed is the only rolling distribution I’d recommend to any Linux enthusiast as their daily driver.

If you care about Linux, you want the latest packages, but you only want them when they actually work, Tumbleweed is the best choice, bar none.

And anyone who disagrees with me is welcome to join the openSUSE Project, find us on opensuse-factory@opensuse.org Mailing List and help make it even better ;).

NOTE: This blog post started as a response to a Reddit Post. Thanks to the OP for the inspiration!

I am a proud owner of a BlackBerry Passport since more than a year now and have been extremely satisfied with this device. But the latest update of the Facebook app and the announcements around Facebook for BlackBerry 10 and WhatsApp leave me with some frustration.

It is no secret that the Facebook app for BlackBerry 10 never was on par with the Facebook apps on Android or iOS - neither feature nor stability wise. Facebook for BlackBerry 10 always had some hick ups here and there, but in the...

Today a new major release of the Gnome desktop environment has been released. It is the first time that I announce that on my Blog because I used it on openSUSE Tumbleweed in version 3.18 for a few months (much longer than actually planned as it was meant to be a test run only) and although coming from KDE, Xfce and i3 I was quite impressed by how it performed on my Laptop.

Version 3.20 is not bringing big changes to the table but many nice improvements. A short overview from the Gnome annou...

Today a new version of the Plasma desktop environment has been released. It comes with a lot of nice improvements.

A short summary of almost all of them:

• task manager
  • showing task progress (copy, download etc.)
  • media controls in tooltip
  • jump lists (e.g. for Firefox Private Windows, for Steam etc.)
• KRunner
  • smoother look
• widgets
  • drag and drop for panel folder view
  • weather widget returned
• activities
• Wayland support
  • window decorations are now supported for Wayland client...

18th-20th March

Present:

• Richard Brown - Chair
• Michal Hrušecký
• Kostas Koudaras
• Tomas Chvatal
• Gertjan Lettink
• Bryan Lunduke - Extra special thanks goes to Bryan for attending via video conference at ridiculous hours in his local timezone after urgent personal matters kept him from attending the meeting in person.

As this years Board Meeting Minutes are so long, they are split into 3 sections

• Meetings - Covering the meetings the Board had with various SUSE executives, managers, and engineers.
• General - Covering the general agenda items/day-to-day issues
• Strategy - Covering the ‘big picture’ issues the Board discussed

This email is Part 3, containing ‘big picture’ strategy issues discussed

Part 1 is available HERE

Part 2 is available HERE

Strategy

Improve Visibility

Obviously, we want to improve the visibility of the openSUSE Project.

We have great distributions, great tools, and great technologies, and we want them to be adopted by as many people and other projects as possible.

We also want to be a natural choice for new contributors and new projects to come to openSUSE, work with us, and host their projects with us.

SUSE

SUSE is our closest, largest, partner. We have strong practical ties with them, but that does not mean we can forget about things such as regular clear communication and ‘internal marketing’.

SUSE are working on a number of exciting new things, and it’s important that internally openSUSE is seen as a natural home for SUSE’s open source contributions.

Working closely together also should enable SUSE’s corporate marketing experts to help spread the good word about all the awesome stuff the openSUSE Project is doing

AI:Bryan to investigate the possibility of Doug being invited to Weekly team meetings for SUSE Corporate Communications

AI:Bryan to drive ensuring openSUSE is well integrated with SUSE’s ongoing marketing.

Outreach

There’s no point only targeting our existing contributors and partners like SUSE. Any open source project needs new people and with new people comes new ideas, new solutions, and new exciting projects for people to hack on.

A huge challenge for new contributors and projects is understanding what is available

• Who is the openSUSE Project?
• What services do we provide?
• Where do I go to get involved?
• How do I get started?

These are questions which are key to have simple, clear, easy to find answers to

CALL FOR HELP: The Board wants to see getting started guides for

• New Users
• New Contributors
• New Projects- to encourage other projects to come use openSUSE as their home

to answer the above questions. These should be simple, clear, and relatively short. The produced guides should be easily usable on a wiki, the website, on flyers at conferences, short blog posts..we want to be able to spread them everywhere

The guides for new Contributors and new Projects are considered a Priority by the board- to use a football related quote “There is no point having fans, if you don’t have your 11 on the pitch to play for them”

AI:Board intends to create a skeleton of the above guides to help bootstrap this idea, and will drive this, but the Board is keen to see if anyone from the community dives in and gets to work on this immediately.

Other Projects

While openSUSE is keen to see other projects call the openSUSE Project it’s home, we recognise that it’s not viable for many, especially those larger ones with their own established communities

In cases like this the Board wants to encourage strong relationships with such Projects, and seek out partnerships and other arrangements with such Projects for the benefit of all involved

Examples include ownCloud and Kolab, where we believe openSUSE is in a perfect position to offer tools, community, and a solid environment for these projects to use as a default or recommended platform for their users

AI:Bryan to arrange information exploratory discussions

Hardware vendors

Having hardware sponsors and partners is nice but is hard. Solid hardware support requires the hardware to be available and in the hands of the right contributors to make it happen.

Otherwise there is no way how to support special hardware without the things available for testing.

However, we do have some relationships which are happening, and we want to highlight those who do stuff with us, such as

• Soft Iron are shipping 64-bit ARM servers with openSUSE Tumbleweed as standard
• Fujitsu offer openSUSE Tumbleweed to thier customers who want a Linux option on their Desktop & Server Hardware
• Epson have some printers using openSUSE and YaST
• Open Mainframe are investigating the possibility of building an openSUSE distribution for s390x

Reform and Remove Mess

Improving viability and reaching out to new areas is all well and good, but we need to make sure the project internals are tidy, clear, and easy to use

The Board discussed the state of many infrastructure and project policies and processes.

We agreed a principle of, when something is imperfect, we Reform (aka improve) or Remove it.

Services identified to be removed or reformed:

• Software.o.o:
  • Media download needs to be easier, prefferable static page
  • package search adds too much mess to the installed systems. Invalid repos should not be distributed by 1-click installs
  • somehow redesign and reduce confusion to ensure that users do not end up with 80+ additional repos.
• Wiki:
  • In order to fix the wiki quickly ,the board approved the idea of deploying the latest version of mediawiki on a new server without branding
  • branding can always be redone later
• Blogs/Planet:
  • Only a handful of people use lizards, but it takes a lot of resources to keep it running. We want to shut it down, and encourage it’s users move to their own blogs, which will then be aggregated on planet.opensuse.org
  • Improve planet.opensuse.org. Find a maintainer, use a clean upstream OSS soltion if possible

AI:Kostas to contact the few Lizards bloggers to discuss their migration options

• News.o.o:
  • Wordpress consumes too many resources and poses too many security risks
  • Replace with something lightweight

AI:Richard talk with Douglas about this

• i18n.o.o: Translations site is being migrated to l10n.o.o as we speak and i18n will be killed including the svn prior Leap 42.2 release.
• Legal layout of Board/membership: The current layout of the Board Election Rules, Membership Rules, and such are sometimes confusing and missing some details The documents will be updated and restructured to be more clear This should set the framework for discussing any reforms of the Membership process once the Membership tidy-up is complete

AI:board- get Infra team to provide list of services we have, soon to help with this endevour

18th-20th March

Present:

• Richard Brown - Chair
• Michal Hrušecký
• Kostas Koudaras
• Tomas Chvatal
• Gertjan Lettink
• Bryan Lunduke - Extra special thanks goes to Bryan for attending via video conference at ridiculous hours in his local timezone after urgent personal matters kept him from attending the meeting in person.

As this years Board Meeting Minutes are so long, they are split into 3 sections

• Meetings - Covering the meetings the Board had with various SUSE executives, managers, and engineers.
• General - Covering the general agenda items/day-to-day issues
• Strategy - Covering the ‘big picture’ issues the Board discussed

This email is Part 2, containing general agenda items

Part 1 is available HERE

Part 3 is available HERE

General

Desktops

Board discussed the state of the various desktops in openSUSE. Improving the selection screen to better reflect the actual nature of our distributions is something we certainly want to see.

AI: Board to discuss some ideas with our various Desktop Teams

Membership Tidy

Board discussed it’s ongoing efforts to tidy up the membership list. We have plenty of members that might not be around anymore. From previous discussions we have a draft of what we want to do and it was heavilly discussed over and over. So we will move to the implementation. Current plan is to do just a small changes that were already discussed (announcement pending), there might be a room for bigger changes and cleaning up the rules, but that would need mebers agreement. We should also remove inactive members of membership comittee. Together with retiring connect.openuse.org we probably can have some space to make membership management easier and faster.

AI: Tomas should investigate Helios voting system for openSUSE

AI: Michal to draft email about inactive members

AI: Michal to start with tooling and kickstart the process of retiring inactive members according to the proposal sent

AI: Michal is retiring connect.opensuse.org and doing the Membership tooling

Mailinglist Moderation

Board discussed concerns regarding some behaviour of a few individuals on the mailinglists.

We recognise that some misbehaviour requires fast action. Agreed that any one Board member can act on behalf of the Board.

When behaviour is not inline with the Guiding Principles the Board agreed a principle of 1 private warning followed by a Ban

Sponsorships

Conference in Albania asked for support, but as no person is going there from openSUSE, we are not providing money.

openSUSE only sponsors events where openSUSE can attend. We decided to become Platinum Sponsors to Greek FOSSCOMM- Greekos will be attending

We discussed updating the sponshorship document for people interested in sponsoring our Project in order to better guide what to do and what optons are available to become openSUSE sponsor.

AI: Kostas will take care of the Negotiation regarding FOSSCOMM

AI: Board to put together a Sponsorship policy document

Trademark

Trademark requests often get lost of spam, hoping the proposed new @opensuse mail system will be better with spam.

T-systems requested permission to use openSUSE on their new Open Telekon Cloud - Approved

AI: Richard to review/tune up filtering in current system so trademark requests don’t get lost.

Maintainer tidy up

Board discussed OBS state of inactive maintainers. With the members cleanup prepared we want to clean this up too.

It’s very important to new and existing contributors alike that it’s easy to identify who is responsible for which package, or which packages are low on active maintainers.

Technically we want maintainer tidy-up like the home: repositories cleanup

AI: Tomas will talk with Craig about OBS team preparing the code for this

Treasurer

Board wants to reduce it’s time spent worrying about money, sponsorship, and TSP related matters. The Board’s role is meant to be more focused on the actual immediate and long term issues impacting the Project as a whole, and the details of money matters is quite often a distraction from these.

The board agreed to create a openSUSE position called Treasurer. They will be a non-voting board member appointed by the Board. Responsibilities of the Treasurer:

• Money
• Sponsorships
• Event
• Merchandising materials
• TSP

Treasurer must provide regular reports to the Board and thus is expected to attend all Board meetings where the above responsibilities are discussed

As a Board appointee, any future Board is expected to confirm their choice of Treasurer in their first meeting after being elected

This Board has appointed Andrew Waffaa to be the current Treasurer, effective immediately

AI: board should add treasurer to board ML and create treasurer@opensuse.org mail alias

AI: Board to announce it to Project

AI: Board to put stuff on wiki regarding rules/scope

Kickstarter

With the sponsorship document updated we could provide kickstarter option for community to sponsor hadware.

This should aim to please most people requesting separate foundation, because even small donations will be allowed to flow in.

AI: Tomas will talk with Andrew and Marketing teams on how to do this

18th-20th March

Present:

• Richard Brown - Chair
• Michal Hrušecký
• Kostas Koudaras
• Tomas Chvatal
• Gertjan Lettink
• Bryan Lunduke - Extra special thanks goes to Bryan for attending via video conference at ridiculous hours in his local timezone after urgent personal matters kept him from attending the meeting in person.

As this years Board Meeting Minutes are so long, they are split into 3 sections

• Meetings - Covering the meetings the Board had with various SUSE executives, managers, and engineers.
• General - Covering the general agenda items/day-to-day issues
• Strategy - Covering the ‘big picture’ issues the Board discussed

This email is Part 1, containing meeting minutes of meetings with SUSE

Part 2 is available HERE

Part 3 is available HERE

Meetings

Meeting with openSUSE Release Manager - Ludwig Nussel

The Board met the new openSUSE Release Manager - Ludwig Nussel

He shared the following tentative information about the planned release for Leap 42.2:

• Leap 42.2 will be based on SLE 12 SP2 and their release scheduled are ‘aligned’ (ie. They will be developed together, but not necessarily release together)
• Target release date for Leap 42.2 is 1st week of Nov 2016. Expected to have an updated systemd, GNOME, Qt, kernel all inherited from SLE 12 SP2
• KDE of course will want to upgrade from 5.5, expected 5.6, discussions underway about what upgrade policy will make sense for the lifespan of Leap 42.2
• We don’t expect X will be updated, which will mean 42.2 will have the same version as 42.1, which is newer than the version in SLE 12 SP1 or expected in SP2

Leap 42.2 will start with a base of Leap 42.1, with packages updated from that point. The process for contributing to Leap 42.2 needs explanation

We discussed the shape of how we’d like to see the wiki. We all agreed want to see a big tidy up. Many of the Portals have little benefit and serve little purpose. We want to see the namespaces removed/flattened to help the search

• Tumbleweed deserves a Portal. Questions the page must answer include “What is Tumbleweed?” “Why use Tumbleweed?” and “Why might Leap be better for you?”
• Leap is similarly important, needing to answer the questions “What is Leap?” “Why use Leap?” and “Why might Tumbleweed be better for you?”
• Packaging Polices and the Factory process are other ‘key’ pages which must be preserved, polished, and refreshed during any wiki cleanup
• Team pages would be ‘nice to have’ but many Team pages are currently woefully out of date. We would like to see a solution investigated where the wiki team page is inherited from a devel project

We discussed the idea of forming a “Release Team” with specific roles that are responsible for ensuring that key parts of the Release process are carried out

Obvious roles include “Website coordinator” to ensure the website is updated. “Wiki Coordinator”, “Marketing Coordinator”, “Test Coordinator”, “Translation Coordinator” are other obvious roles

These people would not necessarily be responsible for doing the work, but for coordinating with Ludwig and ensuring that the work gets done by someone.

AI: Ludwig to mail the Board with any other “Roles” which are expected to be needed

AI: Board + Ludwig to send a ‘Call for Volunteers’ for the roles, and to put together the team

AI: Board to request release-team@opensuse.org list for this team

Discussed some of our local teams. We share concerns that those teams with their own forums, own wikis, and own websites ultimately ‘split’ the community and make it harder for everyone to benefit from the shared knowledge, experience, and feeling of ‘collective ownership’ of the project. We’d like to see such sub-communities bought closer together and go forward more ‘aligned’ with the rest of the openSUSE Project

We discussed some concerns regarding the current openSUSE Infrastructure software.opensuse.org serves two very important roles, both as the main download portal for our distributions, and as a software search for OBS

PROPOSAL: Split http://software.opensuse.org to have the download portal and search separate.

The download portal could be a simple, clean, fast, static site that would offer the Leap and Tumbleweed ISOs.

Software search would continue as it is…but we considered some problems with that

The current implementation of One-Click installs is often dangerous. Because they add all the repos setup in the OBS repo you often end up with crazy things like Factory:ARM repos being added on systems where they are not relevant

Furthermore, making it very easy to install packages from ‘non-official’ repos dramatically reduces the motivation and impetus for developers to put their packages in the Distribution

Having packages in the Distribution though is the best way to ensure your package works, is tested, and is integrated

So we would like to see One Click only pulling from the official repos. If Packages are not in the official repos, we would like the software search to put users in touch with devel project maintainers to encourage the packages be added to the distributions

CALL FOR HELP: We would like a maintainer for software.opensuse.org to help implement the above changes to the search and download functions of software.opensuse.org

Meeting with the SUSE Infrastructure Team

The Board received an update from Gerhard Schlotter, Marcus ‘darix’ Rueckert, and Lars Vogdt from the Infrastructure Team at SUSE

• SUSE host 12 physical servers for openSUSE services. This is in addition to the 127 OBS & openQA physical servers
• Those 12 macines host a total of 60 VMs
• The OBS and openQA hardware host a total of 820 VMs
• www.opensuse.org has 2.3 million visitors per month - how can we make that bigger?

Discussed the immediate problems with some part of the infrastructure, especially the wiki. Some is hosted in SUSE’s datacenter in Provo, some is hosted in Nuremberg. Nuremberg datacentre has room and admins, but limited bandwidth (not enough for how busy stuff gets on releases). Provo datacenter has room and bandwidth, but limited admins. SUSE have an engineer moving from Nuremberg to Provo to help illivate that problem. Having sponsored hosting elsewhere is an option we want to actively pursue. We have hardware available if we can find a host.

CALL FOR HELP: Please help us find sponsors willing to help find openSUSE infrastructure

Infrastructure guys would like the Sponsorship leaflet to be updated in order to better court possible hardware and hosting sponsors

AI: Douglas to update sponsorship guide

Improvements to the @opensuse.org email system are being investigated

Infra team would like connect.opensuse.org to be shutdown

AI: Board to investigate alternatives for voting & membership management

Lunch

The Board had lunch with dozens of SUSE Engineers. Lots of different conversations but the key topics that stuck with the board include:

• Discussions about how to improve translation/l10n tools and workflows
• Communication with the KDE Project
• How to get started with openSUSE, as a contributor and as a Project that wants to be part of the openSUSE Project.

Meeting with Ralf Flaxa - President, Product Engineering at SUSE

Ralf thanked the Board for coming and their ongoing work for the openSUSE Project, and expressed SUSE’s pleasure with the success of Leap and the general direction of the openSUSE Project

Ralf shared some ideas regarding oSC and his departments Hackweek

AI: Board to discuss the ideas with the oSC organisers

Meeting with Roland Haidl - Director, Operations & Communities at SUSE

Roland reaffirmed SUSE’s intention to continue funding the openSUSE Project at similar levels.

Roland shared Douglas DeMaio’s plan to refill our merchandise before openSUSE Conference 2016.

Board requested budget for openSUSE Asia at the same levels as last year - Approved

Discussed the possibility of the Board appointing a Treasurer to be the primary contact with SUSE on financial matters (Sponsorships, TSP, etc) - Approved

Discussed the possibility of a hackathon for the Release Team, once it’s formed - Approved in principle (Needs the team first)

Discused the possibility of more ‘minisummits’ consisting of openSUSE presentation tracks and related events colocated at other events around the world - Approved in principle (Needs events and volunteers)

Discussed the current wiki problems. Roland volunteered to help drive a solution.

AI: Richard - Infrastructure to be a standing topic in regular Chairman meetings with Roland

Tour

The Board was given a tour of the SUSE HQ, including the recently expanded office space and server rooms.

If you are a student, you have a unique opportunity right now. Join the Summer of Code, submit a project proposal until March 25th, and work with the people from an open source community during the summer. You will get paid for three months, you will become part of a community, and you will have the chance to make an important step in your career as a software developer. Google is organizing and sponsoring the program and hundreds of mentors from all kind of open source projects all over the world are ready to help you to do your next step in open source. I really would have loved to have such a program when I was a student. You are living in good times.

I have been a mentor for KDE and openSUSE for many years and have worked with many amazing students. This year we made an extra effort in openSUSE and set up a new web site to help mentors and mentees to find together. It collects a lot of information about how you can succeed as a mentor as well as a student, and provides a portal for all the openSUSE project ideas people from the community have come up with. KDE also has a list of exciting KDE project ideas. Pick one or, even better, come up with your own.


There are so many interesting projects and lots of good students looking for working on them. While I try to help with the overall organization a bit, I limit myself to mentoring maximally one student during the summer, so that I can do a decent job with that and don't get stretched to thin. I have put up a couple of ideas in both projects, KDE and openSUSE. If you would like to help with mentoring one, you are more than welcome. This way we could be able to provide mentoring for more projects. If you are willing to help please get in touch with me. It is a great and rewarding experience to be an open source mentor.

The KDE project, where I'm looking for a student, is Inqlude, the Qt library archive. It's a nice project mixing an interesting set of technology, some Ruby, a bit of HTML and CSS, plus some C++ and Qt, and last but not least the opportunity to do some user interaction design. You will certainly learn something, and as it's a pretty small project within the universe of KDE, you will be able to make a significant impact during the summer and beyond.

In openSUSE we have a couple of projects around Machinery, our pretty new systems management tool for inspecting, inventorying, validating, and migrating Linux systems. It comes from openSUSE, but it also runs on and supports other flavors of Linux. It's Ruby, and one of the interesting aspects is that we are doing serious test-driven development, code review, automatic tests on all levels, and more what constitutes the craft of software development. You will learn a lot there. Mauro and Andre are available as mentors there as well.

There is one more project, I find really interesting. That's reproducible builds for openSUSE. The reproducible builds project coming from Debian aims at making it possible to prove that a binary is actually built from the sources it claims to be built from. This can help to make build systems more efficient, but more importantly it helps to protects against malicious modification of binaries during the build process. This can have a huge impact. Bernhard has started to do some work on it and by joining this you could make a real difference for free software by making sure users can trust in the software they run.

I'm repeating myself, but this is a wonderful opportunity for mentors and students alike. Don't hesitate, get your proposals together, and join the summer of code.