At the openSUSE conference last week, Lydia Pintscher from the KDE Community Working Group led a BoF on “women in openSUSE”. This is what we (Stella, Bruno, Lydia, Pascal, Susanne, Greg) worked out:

There are very few women in openSUSE for a variety of reasons. In our perceiption, despite the good efforts of moderators on IRC, forums and mailing-lists, some attitudes there still persist, and we believe these are a key issue that keeps women away. To further address this as a small group, we decided to start at just one place, opensuse-project@. Here’s why and how:

There is quite some research on why there is so few “women in FLOSS” in general. One of the recurring topics there, and one that we also quickly came to in the BoF, was the ‘flaming’, or more generally, the negative possibilities of the direct, unfiltered yet anonymous communication on IRC, forums and mail.

We all value the speed and positive directness of those forms of communication — however it’s cutting off facial expression and physical reaction. So it’s very easy to miss the tone, without even noticing. To more sensitive souls, this is creating a barrier of entry that especially women do not want to cross, or if it hits you unprepared, will reject you, often with no return. Nota bene: this effect is not limited to women! It just happens to reject women more than men.

What’s going on there? On one side there is newcomers wanting to learn, and with a great potential to contribute, however with a “thin skin”, an expectation of being treated with respect and politeness, whatever that means. On the other side, there are knowledgeable people, often young, sometimes unpatient, maybe tired, frustrated themselves. Now the former ask naive questions while the latter “shoot out” a quick response without any visual feedback on what happens right after they hit the “send” button. Kazoom! And the frustration results into discussions that quickly are far beyond the original topic, frustrating, unproductive and the opposite of what we want: respect and getting things done.

openSUSE, like many other open source projects, has set the direction for mutual respect by working out Guiding Principles, and making members accept these. The openSUSE project Board is forming a body of volunteers who “enforce” these rules, something like the Community Working Group in the KDE project. The objective is to focus the speed and directness of the communication on productivity: turn the flaming energy of frustrations into creative energy that makes openSUSE a place to enjoy and to contribute to!

We, the BoF participants, want to simply support that effort, by working on just one list (opensuse-project@), and by providing additional material that complements the very high level goals set forth in the guiding principles.

Stay tuned

One of the things that came out of the recent Geeko Love-In for me was a new project to immerse myself in within openSUSE. Yeah I know, we have enough existing projects already so why create a new one? Simples! Believe it or not but openSUSE is behind the curve in a specific segment, and that segment has yet to explode to its full potential. That segment is ARM. No I’m not talking about your upper body appendages, but the architecture that powers most of your little devices (and some bigger ones too).

Unfortunately the good times have come to an end, one of the best shindig in a long time has been and gone. Friends from far away have returned home, as have I. Yes, the openSUSE Conference of 2011 was an absolute blast. Seriously, I had an absolute scream. As I mentioned before I was expecting a whole heap of fun, and boy did the Geeko deliver!!! I met up with all sorts of people, starting off with Richard Brown a.

Even if the last news from the Education project is just one month old, many people asked me during the openSUSE Conference why the Education project itself is currently so quiet.

Well, the “problem” is, that our Education team is currently more a team of technical specialists and many work is done behind the scenes without communication to “the outside”. So even if you did not hear from us for some weeks, we are still alive and coding!

Here are just a few examples, that are going on behind the scenes:

• Translation of the new openSUSE Education Portal is work in progress. Many thanks to our contributors Guillaume for the Français, Freek de Kruijf for the Nederlands, Sabarth for the Português, Gankov for the Русский (Russian) Portal translation!
• Kirill is currently reviewing all 425(!) packages in the Build Service Education project and submitting them to openSUSE Factory afterwards – so openSUSE 12.1 will come with a huge set of packages directly inside the official repository.
• Cyberorg is working on the next release of the openSUSE Edu Li-f-e DVD with the LTSP integration.
• Anubusg1 and many others (the project currently lists 44 maintainers) are doing the “normal” packaging stuff like upgrading and fixing packages for 12.1 (aka Factory)

The Desktop4Education project from Austria was again present at the Conference and gave a great overview of the current status of the project during their talk. Good to hear that the project is being frequently used as a reference case by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture and as such promoted by them throughout Austria.

Talking with Andre Massing from the Simula Research Laboratory during his talk at the conference was quite interesting. Looks like the Science project might see some very interesting new packages in the next months. During the discussion, we agree that the Education and the Science project can share a lot of efforts in their project setups and organization. But they will stay separated (at least in the Build Service) as their audience is very different, even if they share some packages (which is currently done via links inside the Build Service).

Hello everyone!

Back to Thessaloniki after a great openSUSE conference in Nuremberg and I am very pleased to announce the new issue (192) of openSUSE Weekly News in Greek.
In this issue you will read about:

* Jos Poortvlieet: Sponsors present at openSUSE Conference 2011
* Jos Poortvlieet: Bretzn at oSC
* Kai-Uwe Behrmann: Oyranos @ rwx³
* Greek openSUSE Ambassadors: openSUSE Greek community and 76th International Trade Fair,
Thessaloniki
* Wazi/Anatoliy A. Dimitrov: How to Secure Your Apache Web Server

As well as many interesting news about openSUSE and useful advice, which can make our lives easier.

Enough said though... Read more at: http://own.opensuse.gr, http://el.opensuse.org/Weekly_news or www.os-el.gr

We are always looking forward to receiving your comments as well as suggestions regarding things you would like to read about in our next issue.

The openSUSE Weekly News is being translated in the Greek language from issue #150. You can read older translated issues here: http://el.opensuse.org/Κατηγορία:Weekly_news_issues

Enjoy it!
Efstathios Agrapidis (efagra)

I just spent a day figuring this out, so figured I'd share it with the world because I'm sure other people are going to want to know how to do this...

So the question is,

How can I get my MKMapView to respond to coordinate changes in my custom MKAnnotations?

As it turns out, this is incredibly simple. In your MKAnnotation subclass, whenever you want to change your Coordinate property value, you need to do the following:

void UpdateCoordinate (CLLocationCoordinate2D newCoordinate)
{
    this.WillChangeValue ("coordinate");
    this.Coordinate = newCoordinate;
    this.DidChangeValue ("coordinate");
}

That's it! It really is that simple...

The reason this works is because MKMapView observes changes in its list of MKAnnotations, you just need to signal to it that changes are about to happen (and did happen).

Happy hacking!

I’m happy to announce LibreOffice 3.4 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service LibreOffice:Stable project.

LibreOffice 3.4 provides many interesting features and fixes. The openSUSE packages are based on the LibreOffice 3.4.2 release but they include all fixes from the last 3.4.3 bugfix release. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE LibreOffice build on the wiki page.

The openSUSE LO team hopes that you will be happy with this release. Though, any software contains bugs and we kindly ask you to report bugs. It will help us to fix them in the future releases.

Other information and plans:

It took me quite some time to prepare the 3.4 update because the split build was not longer supported and I had to completely rework the packages.

We are going to prepare official maintenance update for openSUSE-11.3 and 11.4. You might expect it within next few weeks.

I am going further improve the build framework to be able to early provide LO-3.5 packages in the LibreOffice:Unstable project. You might expect something about Christmas, see the LibreOffice 3.5 schedule.

Greeks woke up earlier in order to be in time at Zentrifuge. We ate breakfast and we prepared ourselves for taking the road to the conference. We were a bit tired but we wanted to live again and again the experience of participating at the openSUSE Conference. So we took the metro and went at Zentrifuge.

There were many community based presentations and many technical presentations about Google summer of code projects and in general technologies that openSUSE uses and updates. Our day started by attending the conversation about “Do we need an ambassador mentoring program?” by Koudaras, Kostas where we talked about ambassadors and how we can improve the program in all ways. Many people from Novel attended the presentation and integrate with ideas in order to help improve the program. After that, we attended “Connect - a social networking platform for the openSUSE Community” by Mr. Vogelsang, Hendrik and Rusnak, Pavol who presented us this new awesome community tool, how it works and how we can improve it.








But, the last day of the openSUSE Conference wasn't over. After leaving Zentrifuge we went at a nearby city where there is the beer factory that made us the “Old Toad” openSUSE beer! We were guided in the factory rooms and saw how beer is made. After that, we ate local food and drunk local beer at the local restaurant where we stayed there till late at night discussing, drinking beer and having fun!





openSUSE Conference was a great experience for everyone. We met new people, we met the global openSUSE community, we learnt many things from them and how they work and the most important is that we worked with them and we will collaborate in the future.

You can find photos from the openSUSE Conference at our facebook group, and at Kostas Koudaras Picasa. We upload photos all day long !

Last but not least, you can get informed of what is happening at openSUSE Conference via the Greek Community twitter account, the openSUSE Conference twitter account, Kostas Koudaras and George Bratsos.

From Nuremberg,

The Greeks woke up early today. The cloudy weather of Nuremberg didn't stopped us from taking the road to openSUSE Conference. We also had Lydia Pintschert of KDE keep us company for the way to Zentrifuge.

Today there are many interesting presentations about community tools and about new technologies in Linux. We started from Lydia's awesome presentation about “Social skills for geeks”. After that we attended the presentation of Mr. Vogelsang, Hendrik about “How to contribute to the openSUSE Wiki” which was very interesting and we all were there get informed on our next community target ;). Also, we attended at the main hall the presentation of an important member of SUSE and openSUSE Mr. Milller Michael who told us about his experience with SUSE and openSUSE. After we ate, talked with people and rest ourselves we attended the conversation about “Playing with Geeko: Contribution can be fun” by Koudaras, Kostas and Gupta, Manu where they presented to the community why and how we can contribute at the project.

After attending all those interesting presentations it was time for an extraordinary one! George “Etern4L” Bratsos and Kostas “Warlordff” Koudaras signed up and attended the “8 bit music workshop" by Mr. Fertala Hannes. They had a tweaked Game Boy and tried to make music from it. After that, Kostas presented the music that he made which was awesome!!!

Stathis “Efagra” Agrapidis focused on Packaging presentations and workshops while he is a packager.

Stella went with Jos at the supermarket in order to buy steaks, sausages, salads and etc for the barbeque. Also, there was an extraordinary happening. Fertala Hannes, had an 8bit Music concert !!! We had a lot of fun eating, drinking beer and hearing the great music from the Game Boys!

You can find photos from the openSUSE Conference at our facebook group, and at Kostas Koudaras Picasa. We upload photos all day long !

Last but not least, you can get informed of what is happening at openSUSE Conference via the Greek Community twitter account, the openSUSE Conference twitter account, Kostas Koudaras and George Bratsos.