KDE Connect is an application that I use on a daily basis between my mobile and my desktop or laptop Linux systems. Most of my systems are openSUSE machines running KDE Plasma and the mobile devices are running LineageOS (Android). Up until I decided to run a non-KDE Plasma desktop. ​I was given the distinct … Continue reading KDE Connect CLI | A gift to Future Self →

Managing issues is part of the daily life of most software projects. Reacting to bug reports, feature requests, pull requests, tracking what's going on and where to put attention, all that is usually handled in the bug or issue tracker of the project's choice.

On GitHub there are the GitHub issues, and they have become quite powerful over time. Just recently GitHub added the capability to show related issues, pin issues to repositories and to move them between repositories.

One important tool to manage issues on GitHub are labels, those nicely colored badges you can add to issues to get a better overview, to filter lists and queries, or to build further automation such as the presentation of good first issues to people new to the project.


If you have a lot of labels it tends to become a bit of effort to manage them well, especially if you want to keep colors consistent and descriptions up to date. It becomes even more effort when you try to do so across different repositories. We have all seen the psychedelic potpourri of colorful labels which tends to happen when you use labels generously.

Last year I saw Mitchell Hashimoto's excellent talk about anything as code at the Open Source Datacenter Conference in Berlin. He showed there how to use Terraform to manage infrastructure as code beyond the typical management of computing infrastructure such as servers or networks. He showed how to use it for more administrative tasks such as managing teams on GitHub.

This is a great approach because it replaces clicking around in a user interface by a more programming-like approach of maintaining configurations, preferably version controlled, and applying the same rules on them as on code. So you can do pull requests, review changes, have the history of what happened in git, run tests and other automation easily, etc.

The GitHub provider for Terraform also handles labels so I thought I would give it a try to manage labels as code. Directly doing this in the Terraform configuration is possible but it's a bit cumbersome and limited in what you can do with the data in this format. So I decided to put the data into a good old YAML file and writing a bit of Python code to deal with it.

The result is beautiful-labels, a small tool to manage GitHub labels from a YAML description via Terraform. It scans your repository for existing labels and their data, creates a YAML description from it, and then provides you the tools to turn it into a Terraform configuration.

Terraform is great in handling the state of things in the cloud, it takes care of operating the API in an effective way, figuring out what needs to be updated, and gives the user control, for example by providing a dry run which tells what would change without applying the changes yet. This is all quite convenient and powerful.

One thing beautiful-labels is supposed to make easy is the management of label colors. In addition to the convenience of managing them in YAML instead of having to use the UI, it also adds the option to generate an overview of the labels as SVG, nicely grouped in categories. This helps in grouping things together using colors and generally can augment documentation about how you intend labels to be used.


The tool is in an early state but it works. I use it to manage the labels in the inqlude repository on GitHub.

You could add another step of automation by letting CI run Terraform on commits to the YAML file. Maybe something to try for the future. As managing labels is not something you usually do on a daily basis, some manual step might also be good enough.

One caveat with labels is that GitHub uses the name of the label as identifier. That usually works great but can be a bit tricky when changing the name of a label. For this case I recommend to do it in the GitHub UI for now.

There are some other approaches how to do this kind of stuff. One of them is labeler which is a nice tool written in Go to manage labels from a YAML description. It directly operates the GitHub API. The advantage is that it's self-contained but it lacks the power of Terraform in terms of state management. Another is Zach Dunn's post "How we organize GitHub issue: A simple styleguide for tagging" which introduces the notion of color-coded categories.

It's wonderful when pieces come together, such as the GitHub API, Terraform, YAML, git, and people writing open source code around that. They result in a way to beautifully manage labels without having to put in too much effort.

If you have feedback or input please don't hesitate to drop me a line. I would be happy if beautiful-labels would be useful for you as well. Let me know how it goes. :-)

I am a Commodore 64 enthusiast. It is still my favorite computer system ever made. My childhood initiation into the computer world was through this machine. I dreamed of making an “Ultimate” Commodore 64 with sketches and specs with all kinds of nonsense. Today, my Commodore 64 sits beside me in my SuperCubicle with an … Continue reading Ultimate 64 | A New Commodore 64 main board →

Excellent memiliki beberapa markas. Ada markas Excellent DJ yang merupakan rumah saya sekaligus menjadi awal lokasi “kantor” Excellent pertama kali, ada markas Excellent Premier Serenity yang menjadi kantor operasional saat ini, ada juga markas Taman Bacaan Excellent berupa kebun buah dan kolam ikan (Excellent Farm).

Markas Excellent DJ dan markas Excellent Premier Serenity merupakan lokasi data center kecil-kecilan, ditambah dengan data center kecil juga di Gedung Tifa Jakarta. Untuk melakukan pengelolaan sistem di lokasi berbeda ini, saya kerap menggunakan aplikasi SSH, Remote Desktop (RDP), Team Viewer atau AnyDesk.

Karena koneksinya timbul tenggelam, pengalaman remote berbasis desktop ini kurang menyenangkan. Saya lebih memilih untuk mengaktfikan akses VPN.

Kebetulan di masing-masing markas Excellent ada Synology yang digunakan sebagai shared storage, media penyimpanan file sekaligus backup data. Synology memiliki feature yang cukup komplit dan konfigurasinya relatif mudah.

AKTIVASI VPN SERVER

Untuk mengaktifkan VPN pada Synology, berikut adalah prosesnya :

• Login ke Synology
• Masuk ke menu Package Center dan search VPN
• Aplikasi VPN ada pada group Utilities. Klik Install untuk melakukan instalasi package-nya
• Setelah package terinstall, pilih menu Open
• Aktifkan salah satu atau beberapa pilihan VPN server. Ada VPN server berbasis PPTP, OpenVPN dan L2TP. Sebagai contoh, saya menggunakan OpenVPN. Lakukan setting terkait OpenVPN termasuk maksimum koneksi, authentikasi, port dan lain-lain

• Setelah selesai, klik Apply
• Pastikan port 1194 UDP disisi firewall sudah diopen
• Scroll ke bagian bawah konfigurasi dan pilih menu Export Configuration. File konfigurasi dalam format .zip ini berisi file konfigurasi OpenVPN, readme dan file SSL Certificate dan bisa dipergunakan sebagai media import konfigurasi koneksi menggunakan VPN Client

KONEKSI KE VPN SERVER

• Download aplikasi OpenVPN Client sesuai dengan sistem operasi yang dipergunakan. Jika menggunakan Windows bisa menggunakan aplikasi VPN dari website OpenVPN sedangkan jika menggunakan Linux bisa melakukan instalasi paket OpenVPN melalui repo Linux masing-masing. Karena saya menggunakan Mac, saya memilih aplikasi TunnelBlick.
• Pada aplikasi yang digunakan, pilih menu import file .opvn yang ada dalam file .zip. Jangan lupa sesuaikan alamat server pada file konfigurasi tersebut. Jika menggunakan Linux, bisa menggunakan perintah : openvpn –config client.ovpn
• Jika sudah terkoneksi, test akses IP lokal disisi VPN server, seharusnya sudah bisa diakses

Contoh diatas saya menggunakan OpenVPN namun aktivasi PPTP dan L2TP secara prosedur hampir sama. Sedikit perbedaan hanya disisi klien saja.

Dengan menggunakan VPN, saya bisa bekerja dengan mudah dan memiliki banyak pilihan akses terhadap server yang ada disisi remote. Karena server disisi data center Tifa memiliki spesifikasi yang cukup tinggi, saya bisa menggunakannya sebagai server simulasi untuk keperluan penulisan update buku VMware vSphere 6.7.

Disisi lain, saya juga tidak perlu selalu melakukan remote GUI, baik ke data center Tifa maupun ke markas Excellent lainnya karena bisa melakukannya dengan mekanisme SSH atau akses via Web tanpa perlu melakukan setting port forwarding berbagai macam port.

CATATAN

• Dalam beberapa kasus, segmen IP lokal disisi VPN server tetap tidak bisa diakses/ping meski sudah memilih menu “Allow clients to access servers LAN”. Jika ini yang terjadi, jangan berputus asa atau mutung melainkan cari solusinya, hehehe… Solusinya, edit file konfigurasi .opvn dan hilangkan tanda pagar (#) dari baris berikut : redirect-gateway def1

# If redirect-gateway is enabled, the client will redirect it's
# default network gateway through the VPN.
# It means the VPN connection will firstly connect to the VPN Server
# and then to the internet.
# (Please refer to the manual of OpenVPN for more information.)
redirect-gateway def1

• Secara default, OpenVPN akan menggunakan authentikasi yang dipergunakan untuk login ke Synology. Kita bisa mengatur list user yang diberikan akses melalui menu Privilege

Chafa (github) started out as a small piece of supporting code for an obscure personal project I may announce at some indefinite point in the future. Then I decided to release it as a tongue-in-cheek thing for the VT100 anniversary last year, and, well… it gathered a bit of steam.

Chafa 1.0

Since I'm not one to leave well enough alone, I packaged it up over the holidays for the 1.0 release. It brings a pile of improvements, e.g. new symbol ranges like ASCII and Braille, better image preprocessing and a new --fill option for halftone/dithering. It's also, like, real fast now, and the build is much less brittle.

Big thanks to everyone who contributed to this release: Adam Borowski, Felix Yan, Lajos Papp, Mo Zhou, Ricardo Arguello, Robert-André Mauchin, @dcb314 and @medusacle.

You'll find packages out there for Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo and Ubuntu now; check your repositories. Extra big thanks to the package maintainers.

As the post title implies, I think Chafa is now the least bad tool in this tiny but tradition-rich niche. So what's so not-quite-terrible about it?

Only the best for your aixterm

If you've been around text terminals for a while, you'll know what this means:

Up until fairly recently, the most colorful terminal applications would operate within the confines of some variant of the above palette, and many still do. It's a nice and distinct (not to mention cheerful) set of colors, but it's not a great match for most image material you'll come across, which makes legible Chafa output a challenge. And that is precisely why I had to try (here with a nice woodblock print):

The top left image is the best reproduction you can get with Chafa using a modern 24-bit color terminal emulator (in this case, GNOME Terminal) at 60 characters wide. At top right is the 16-color mapping you get without applying any tricks; this is pretty close to the mark given the muted moonlight colors of the input image, but it doesn't make good use of our palette, nor does it convey the essence of the scene very well. Blue sky, rolling hills, green grass. A shady waterfront pavilion. Given our limitations, the output will look nothing like the original anyway, so we're better off trying to capture the gist of it.

We do this simply by cranking up the contrast and saturation to levels where our cheerful old palette can do a decent job (bottom left). Chafa no longer relies on ImageMagick for this, so it's available in the library API, and integer-only math makes it performant enough to run in real time on animations and video (more on this in a later post, perhaps).

It gets even better if you do color assignment in DIN99d space (bottom right), but that's way slow, so you have to explicitly enable it.

No ANSI? No problem

You can generate varied output without any color codes at all. The above examples also demonstrate use of the --fg option, which, along with --bg, exists to tell Chafa what your terminal's default colors look like so it can target those, but is equally useful for tweaking monochrome output thresholds.

So if for some reason your terminal can't handle ANSI or you still have one of those warm & fuzzy monochrome tubes sitting around, we've got you covered. Or break out your civil rights-era dot-matrix printer and make some precision banners to hang in your lab!

You might have heard that openSUSE’s board elections are underway for three open seats to be filled. I’ve been thinking about running for board for a while and now it seems to be the right time to step up.

The following text is a plain, unedited copy of my application.

Introduction, Biography and Contributions

My name is Vinzenz Vietzke but sticking with the much short “vinz” or “vinzv” is what I prefer. I’m 34 years, live in a small town in southern Germany. Like most German Linux users around my age I made my first steps with S.u.S.E. back in the late 90s. Over the years I moved across various distributions and contributed to quite a few of them in different ways. My day job is product management and marketing at Linux hardware vendor TUXEDO Computers.

openSUSE and TUXEDO

Starting with just one laptop running openSUSE we at TUXEDO now offer around 20 different models plus a wide range of desktop PCs all with Leap 15 pre-installed. Customers also get free lifetime support for their preinstalled system. Therefore of course our free phone/email tech support team need to be trained for openSUSE as well. For this whole project I was and still am in charge as the tech and project lead so to say to “bring” openSUSE on TUXEDO’s computers. I got in touch with oS, worked out how and when we get everything done.

In addition to technical affairs I’m the pushing person at TUXEDO Computers to make our company step up supporting openSUSE. As a result since October 2018 we are officially sponsoring the openSUSE project. We offer any of our models as demo and workshop devices at no cost and take care for the logistics and event booth support. Furthermore we’re sponsoring oSC19 in Nuremberg with demo and install fest machines.

Of course these things are mainly financial efforts and company internal projects. But yet to get openSUSE a wider reception there needs to be someone coordinating, pushing and taking care. That’s why I call my contributions to openSUSE mostly “meta contributions”.

i18n

Besides the TUXEDO stuff which is partly paid and partly free time efforts I’m coordinating translation teams of upstream Xfce, actively translating openSUSE and quite a lot of other projects. For details please check my profiles at Crowdin, Gnome, Transifex as well as my personal website.

Aims/Goals

Like every volunteer-run project openSUSE has it’s issues to tackle. Most of them are obvious and already under work: consolidating web appearances, cleaning the wiki, sorting out the communication infrastructure and possible extensions to it. I don’t think there’s anything further needed to push these things besides time. The board has done a really awesome job in the past on these things and surely will in the future.

Major and Minor Issues

One of the major issues I experience is public reception like in how openSUSE as a distribution is seen. When people talk about openSUSE they’re mostly telling from their experiences they made (literally!) a decade ago. You ran into some YaST issues in 2011 and this is why you stopped recommending openSUSE and you never ever re-thought your opinion? Jeez. These memories need to get overhauled and put into correct contexts. Most of them are prejudices anyway.

On the other side people who have heard about Linux but hardly any knowledge mostly equate one specific distribution with Linux. Though it’s not technically correct end-users do this – which is fine. But they don’t equate it with openSUSE and that is shame. oS really has come a long way and is easy to install, to run and to use. People just need to know about and this is where the prejudices mentioned earlier come into play. The “tech guy” inside a circle of friends is some multiplier and needs to be convinced that openSUSE is something he totally can recommend in good conscience.

Role of the board

From my perspective the board has two main roles: First and foremost it is some kind of service provider. It serves the whole project as contact point for questions, projects coordination and pointing in directions etc. This is crucial for the whole openSUSE project and should never be changed but merely extended if possible.

The second role might be named as “ideas sparking pot”. Most ideas coming from the community are of a technical nature which is entirely logical. Just sometimes there are things that the whole project would benefit from but no one sees them or has time to do so. This is where the board could jump in throwing sparks and giving input from someone being able to take a step back for viewing the bigger picture.

My role in this board team would both being approachable and helpful for part one. But also to give thoughts and ideas when needed, especially in the second part mentioned.

Why you should vote for me?

I’ve been into Linux and open source communities for about 10 years now. Though I’m not a long term contributor for openSUSE I know how “things work” in such a big, diverse project and how to handle this stuff. If you want to get someone with no “Geeko glasses” on you should vote for me. Not that being deeply inside openSUSE’s community is a bad thing! But I can bring in new perspectives, most of them related to end-users, Windows-ditchers and curious but not tech-savvy people. I both understand developers and tech people on the one hand as well as people who are buying Linux preinstalled hardware with little will to tinker around. This way I act as some proxy between those worlds which in the end might be good for everyone involved.

Conclusion

As elaborated above my main goal boils down to people thinking of easy but powerful Linux when they hear openSUSE. The project in total is big and strong enough to really serve as “the makers’ choice for sysadmins, developers and desktop users” – all of them!

Ask me anything

If you made it this far – thanks for your time and interest. For any questions, comments or disagreements feel free to contact me. I appreciate any of it via:

• Email
• XMPP
• IRC (user: vinzv)

Du hast vielleicht schon gehört, dass die Wahlen für drei offene Sitze im openSUSE Board im Gange sind. Ich habe eine Weile darüber nachgedacht, für das Board zu kandidieren und jetzt scheint es der richtige Zeitpunkt zu sein, um mich einzubringen.

Der nachfolgende Text ist die deutsche Übersetzung einer einfachen, unbearbeiteten Kopie meiner Bewerbung.

Einführung, Biographie und Beiträge

Mein Name ist Vinzenz Vietzke, aber ich bevorzuge es, beim viel kürzeren “vinz” oder “vinzv” zu bleiben. Ich bin 34 Jahre alt, lebe in einer kleinen Stadt in Süddeutschland. Wie die meisten deutschen Linux-Anwender in meinem Alter habe ich bereits Ende der 90er Jahre meine ersten Schritte mit S.u.S.E. gemacht. Im Laufe der Jahre wechselte ich zwischen verschiedenen Distributionen und trug auf verschiedene Weise zu etlichen von ihnen bei. Mein Hauptberuf ist Produktmanagement und Marketing beim Linux-Hardwareanbieter TUXEDO Computers.

openSUSE und TUXEDO

Ausgehend von nur einem Laptop mit openSUSE bieten wir bei TUXEDO heute rund 20 verschiedene Modelle sowie eine große Auswahl an Desktop-PCs mit vorinstalliertem Leap 15. Kunden erhalten außerdem kostenlosen lebenslangen Support für ihr vorinstalliertes System. Deshalb muss natürlich auch unser kostenloses Telefon/E-Mail-Supportteam für openSUSE geschult werden. Für dieses ganze Projekt war und bin ich als Technik- und Projektleiter sozusagen verantwortlich, um openSUSE auf die Computer von TUXEDO zu “bringen”. Ich bin mit oS in Kontakt getreten, habe ausgearbeitet, wie und wann wir alles realisieren können.

Zusätzlich zu den technischen Angelegenheiten bin ich die treibende Kraft bei TUXEDO Computers, damit unser Unternehmen die Unterstützung von openSUSE intensiviert. Seit Oktober 2018 sponsern wir daher offiziell das openSUSE-Projekt. Wir bieten jedes unserer Modelle als Vorführ- und Workshop-Gerät kostenlos an und kümmern uns um die Logistik- und Event-Betreuung. Außerdem sponsern wir die oSC19 in Nürnberg mit Geräten zur Demonstration und für Installationsfeste.

Natürlich sind das vor allem finanzielle Anstrengungen und unternehmensinterne Projekte. Aber um openSUSE einen größeren Bekanntheitsgrad zu verschaffen, braucht es jemanden, der koordiniert, vorantreibt und sich kümmert. Deshalb nenne ich meine Beiträge zu openSUSE meist “Meta-Beiträge”.

i18n

Neben den teils bezahlten und teils Freizeitaktivitäten für TUXEDO koordiniere ich Upstream-Übersetzungsteams von Xfce, übersetze aktiv openSUSE und vielen anderen Projekten. Für Details siehe meine Profile bei Crowdin, Gnome, Transifex sowie meine persönliche Website..

Ziele

Wie jedes von Freiwilligen geführte Projekt hat auch openSUSE seine Probleme zu lösen. Die meisten von ihnen sind offensichtlich und bereits in Arbeit: Konsolidierung von Webauftritten, Reinigung des Wikis, Sortierung der Kommunikationsinfrastruktur und mögliche Erweiterungen. Ich glaube nicht, dass es noch etwas mehr braucht, um diese Dinge außer der Zeit voranzutreiben. Der Vorstand hat in der Vergangenheit bei diesen Dingen eine wirklich großartige Arbeit geleistet und wird es sicherlich auch in Zukunft tun.

Große und kleine Probleme

Eines der Hauptthemen, die ich erlebe, ist die öffentliche Wahrnehmung, z. B. wie openSUSE als Distribution wahrgenommen wird. Wenn Menschen über openSUSE sprechen, erzählen sie hauptsächlich von ihren Erfahrungen, die sie vor einem Jahrzehnt gemacht haben (wörtlich!). Du bist 2011 auf einige YaST-Themen gestoßen und deshalb hast du aufgehört, openSUSE zu empfehlen, und du hast nie deine Meinung geändert? Meine Güte. Diese Erinnerungen müssen überarbeitet und in einen korrekten Zusammenhang gebracht werden. Die meisten von ihnen sind sowieso Vorurteile.

Auf der anderen Seite setzen Menschen, die von Linux gehört haben, aber kaum Kenntnisse haben, meist eine bestimmte Distribution mit Linux gleich. Obwohl es technisch nicht korrekt ist, tun Endbenutzer dies – was in Ordnung ist. Aber sie setzen es nicht mit openSUSE gleich, und das ist schade. oS ist wirklich weit gekommen und ist einfach zu installieren, zu betreiben und zu bedienen. Die Menschen müssen nur etwas darüber wissen, und genau hier kommen die oben genannten Vorurteile ins Spiel. Der ” Technik-Typ ” in einem Freundeskreis ist ein Multiplikator und muss überzeugt werden, dass openSUSE etwas ist, das er mit gutem Gewissen uneingeschränkt empfehlen kann.

Rolle des Boards

Aus meiner Sicht hat das Board zwei Hauptrollen: In erster Linie ist es eine Art Dienstleister. Es dient dem gesamten Projekt als Anlaufstelle für Fragen, Projektkoordination und Richtungsweisung etc. Dies ist entscheidend für das gesamte openSUSE-Projekt und sollte nie geändert, sondern nach Möglichkeit nur erweitert werden.

Die zweite Rolle könnte als “Zündfunke für Ideen” bezeichnet werden. Die meisten Ideen aus der Community sind technischer Natur, was völlig logisch ist. Nur manchmal gibt es Dinge, von denen das ganze Projekt profitieren würde, aber niemand sieht sie oder hat Zeit dafür. Hier könnte das Board einspringen, um Zündfunken zu erzeugen und Input von jemandem zu geben, der in der Lage ist, einen Schritt zurückzutreten, um das Gesamtbild zu betrachten.

Meine Rolle in diesem Board-Team wäre sowohl für Teil eins zugänglich als auch hilfreich zu sein. Aber auch, wie im zweiten Teil erwähnt, bei Bedarf Überlegungen und Ideen zu äußern.

Warum solltest du für mich stimmen?

Ich beschäftige mich seit etwa 10 Jahren mit Linux und Open Source Communities. Obwohl ich kein langfristiger Mitwirkender bei openSUSE bin, weiß ich, wie in einem so großen, vielfältigen Projekt “Dinge laufen” und wie man damit umgeht. Wenn du jemanden ohne “Geekobrille” haben willst, solltest du für mich stimmen. Nicht, dass es schlecht ist, tief in der Community von openSUSE verankert zu sein! Aber ich kann neue Perspektiven einbringen, die meisten davon bezogen auf Endanwender, Windows-Flüchtlinge und neugierige, aber technisch nicht versierte Menschen. Ich verstehe sowohl Entwickler und Techniker auf der einen Seite als auch Leute, die vorinstallierte Linux-Hardware mit wenig Lust zum Basteln kaufen. Auf diese Weise fungiere ich als Stellvertreter zwischen den Welten, was am Ende für alle Beteiligten gut sein könnte.

Zusammenfassung

Wie bereits erwähnt, läuft mein Hauptziel darauf hinaus, dass Leute an einfaches, aber leistungsfähiges Linux denken, wenn sie openSUSE hören. Das Gesamtprojekt ist groß und stark genug, um wirklich als “die erste Wahl für Sysadmins, Entwickler und Desktop-Anwender” zu fungieren – und zwar alle!

Frag mich irgendwas

Wenn du es so weit geschafft hast – danke für deine Zeit und dein Interesse. Für Fragen, Kommentare oder Widersprüche stehe ich dir gerne zur Verfügung. Ich freue mich über alles davon via:

• Email
• XMPP
• IRC (user: vinzv)

About two years ago, I wrote a mail titled "Another openSUSE Board candidate". These two years passed quickly, and I really enjoyed being part of the Board and helping the community whenever needed.

I'd like to continue this "job", and therefore decided to run for re-election.

I use openSUSE since years (it was still named „SuSE Linux“ with lowercase „u“ back then) and started annoying people in bugzilla, err, started betatesting in the 9.2 beta phase. Since then, I reported more than 1300 bugs. Nowadays, OBS ruins my bugzilla statistics by introducing the option to send a SR ;-)

One of my current activities in openSUSE is working in the Heroes team, where I started with moving and upgrading the wiki. I also help out on various *.opensuse.org servers since someone was evil enough to give me root permissions on lots of them ;-) (Transparency note: I helped to setup the elections.opensuse.org server before last year's elections - but will of course not touch it until the elections finish.)

My other openSUSE hobbies ;-) are AppArmor and PostfixAdmin, where I'm active in upstream development and as packager. AppArmor also turned out to be a good opportunity for cross-distribution collaboration.

You can find me on several mailinglists and on IRC (nickname "cboltz"), and of course I still scare people in bugzilla. I‘m also a regular visitor and speaker at the openSUSE Conference, and visit other conferences as time permits.

My day job has nothing to do with computers. I produce something you can drink that is named after a software we ship in openSUSE ;-)

Oh, and I collect funny quotes from various mailinglists, IRC, bugzilla etc. that then end up as random [1] signatures under my mails, so be careful what you write ;-)

There are some things I‘ll never do (you might remember them from two years ago):

• use a stable release on my main computer – Tumbleweed is just too good ;-)
• open a bugreport if fxing the bug and sending a SR is faster
• be too serious – hey, our motto is „Have a lot of fun...“ ;-)
• drink beer ;-) (sorry, not even openSUSE beer)

If you want to read more from or about me, have a look at

• https://blog.cboltz.de (some more posts would be nice, but I prefer actually doing something over writing about it ;-)
• https://connect.opensuse.org/pg/profile/cboltz
• https://en.opensuse.org/user:cboltz

I wish all candidates good luck, and hope that we‘ll see some more candidates and lots of voters!

[1] sometimes I hand-pick signatures, and this is one of these cases with a non-random signature ;-) (yes, I know it's unusual for a blog post to have a signature at all, so this will stay a rare exception)
--
Christian, there are times you are a pain in the ass, there are times I really like you.
This is one of both of those times ;)
[Richard Brown]

J'ai décidé ce jour de présenter ma candidature aux éléctions au Conseil openSUSE. Voici pourquoi.

Je ne suis pas un super hacker très expérimenté, je serais plutôt un bidouilleur très intéressé, toujours en apprentissage et aimant partager autour de savoir-faire techniques.

Depuis que je suis passé à openSUSE (voir ici), j'ai pris plaisir à créer et maintenir des paquets, dont certains sont maintenant dans les dépôts officiels. Petit à petit, j'ai rejoins la communauté française, jusqu'à devenir président de son association, Alionet, l'an dernier. J'ai aussi écrit quelques articles, avec l'aide de Seb95 de passionlinux, je traduit et relaie les news du projet openSUSE et je suis régulièrement présent sur le stand openSUSE lors des événements du Libre en France.

Et pourquoi je voudrais candidater au conseil openSUSE alors ?

Eh bien, simplement parce que c'est un projet qui me plaît. Je prends plaisir à y contribuer, c'est simple et accueillant, même quand j'ai fait des erreurs lors de la construction de mes premiers paquets les discussions étaient ouvertes et détendues, chose parfois rare dans le Libre. Je n'ai pas non plus trouvé de guerres de chapelles dans ce projet, ou moins qu'ailleurs il m'a semblé. Faire acte de candidature est donc pour moi un moyen de rendre à ce projet ce que j'ai pu en apprendre et c'est aussi une façon de démontrer mon intérêt et qu'il compte pour moi.

Si je venais à être élu au sein du Conseil, il y a deux sujets sur lesquels je souhaite plus particulièrement travailler:

• le lien avec les communautés d'utilisateurs: comment les encourager et les accompagner à contribuer ? comment mieux coopérer avec les groupes d'utilisateurs existants ?
• il y a eu de nombreuses discussions très intéressantes sur la forme juridique du projet il y a plusieurs mois. Si ces sujets sont encore d'actualité, je souhaite m'y pencher. Réfléchir et travailler à la transformation d'un tel projet sera sûrement une expérience passionnante.

Vous pouvez trouver plus d'infos sur mes contributions sur:

• ma page wiki: https://en.opensuse.org/User:Sogal
• ma page Connect: https://connect.opensuse.org/pg/profile/sogal

Si vous êtes membre du projet, je vous encourage à vous intéresser au processus d'éléctions en cours, voire même à vous présenter également!

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PeppermintOS is a bit of a different distribution that I have become aware of in recent months. Peppermint is built with the LXDE interface that is very nicely customized. It can be downloaded from here in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The latest version, Peppermint 9 Respin can be downloaded in both to see how they … Continue reading PeppermintOS | Review from an openSUSE User →