During the last week blogs, twitter, facebook and other means of communication for the users experienced a lot of traffic related to the Humble Indie Bundle. This bundle was nothing more than a package composed of 6 DRM-Free games developed by 6 Independent game developers that could be obtained at a price set by the user. This bundle included the games World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, Penumbra Overture and Samorost 2. The bundle was available for one week and the earnings went to the developers, The Child’s Play Charity and Electronic Frontier Foundation depending on the will of the buyer. At the end of the week the bundle reached 1’000.000 US$ of income, reason for which Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD and Penumbra Overture are releasing their code under FLOSS licenses. As you can see here was already released under GPL2, and the other games source code is being prepared to be released within this week.

In addition to this, it was officially announced that Steam will be available for Linux at the end of this summer, which means lots of games and lots of fun is coming to gnu/linux and the breach in gaming between gnu/linux and other OSs is getting smaller.

Here some trailers of the games that will be released as FLOSS  from the Humble Indie Bundle

Aquaria |  Gish |  Lugaru HD |   Penumbra Overture

Linux gamers it is time to have even more fun

jaom7

Yes I’m still at it, trying to get YOU the openSUSE community talking about what is important to you. This time round I’d like to hear your opinions and thoughts about something. I’m going to keep my views on the matter quiet until we get some dialogue going, so if you want to hear my thoughts (and let’s face it who doesn’t? ;-) ) best you start airing your opinions.

Attempt to create structure in the wiki, or to classify all articles, is next logical step after years of, to be modest, disharmony in the current wiki, but how far we should go and what content can be structured with reasonable amount of work, and what should be left to self organization.

Article Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags talks among other things about application domain of ontology.

Now applied to our wiki, we have:

1. mix of both stable well defined categories and new topics that are in flux,
2. relatively restricted domain - Linux and openSUSE, but we go into a lot of details there,
3. mix of topics that cross boundaries of disciplines, 
4. participants are more or less not experienced,
5. there is a limited number of people interested in the work on the wiki, specially to spend time learning how it works 

To me it seems that we are a bit more on "let it organize itself", which will mean make basic structure and rules for maintenance crew, so that copy-editors can straighten out stray articles on important topics without author complains, and don't be to much upset when the rest lives its own life.

or yet another way to shoot yourself in the foot.

Supporting people with problems too long creates support burnout. Those that suffer from it can't find that by themselves, and even resist to accept facts when confronted. It manifests in to much attention to details that should provide better support, but actually stand in a way for the primary goal of any support effort, a happy user.

Today I had one more touch with that.
One of people that supports open-slx version of openSUSE wanted to add Support Database (SDB) to the new wiki Main page and he did it. I objected, but did nothing to remove the entry. First it is visible only in a draft page (our wiki is using FlaggedRevs, a MediaWiki extension), so normal visitors will not see it, and second I want to  discuss this on the wiki mail list.

Why giving so prominent place to Support Database is bad?

SDB has many articles from those that solve problems with openSUSE, to few that explain how to use Linux for daily tasks. What will be opinion of a new user that just installed Linux thing and has no required background knowledge to explain large disproportion between articles about problems vs. advices how to do regular daily tasks using new applications and functionality. I know that I would not feel comfortable with software that has many problems and few useful functions, and I have no reason to think that that majority will have different opinion.

Ditto, SDB should be easy to find, but giving people with problems few other options before they start digging trough it, like it was done in Support article. I must admit that now reading article again, I can see my support burnout in the tone of the article and the fact that SDB link was first in the section "Non interactive", before Spyhawk (Remy) added documentation  link as a first and saved the day.

In my opinion, we (openSUSE) have to keep advices about daily tasks and problem solutions for irregularities separated as much as it is possible in the visitor eyes, which fits fine with current description in Help:Namespaces :

• Main - Presentation of the current version of the openSUSE distribution. Everything for consumers of our distribution.
• SDB - Help, Howtos, support. If you have a problem with the distribution you will find help here.

What can be better presentation of your new operating system then articles that will explain how you can do all that you did before and of course much more. 

So further to my post on a11y in openSUSE, I was asked how one would enable Accessibility. Now to be honest I only *kind of* know how to do it in GNOME, so I set off on a little exploration of the other desktop environments. It may seem strange that I’m trying to champion a subject that I don’t really know, but that’s part of the reason why I’m doing so.

There is an 13 letter word that begins with “a” and ends with “y”, can you guess what it is? Yup, *a11y* is what I’m on about, also known asAccessibility. I think the subject of a11y is possibly a very misunderstood one, I for one incorrectly associated it with disabled use of a computer. I have been corrected (on more than one occasion) to the fact that Accessibility actually refers to the ability for anybody to be able to use a computer (or any other device) regardless of any impairment they might have.

We just released the first of the unstable/beta releases leading up to Banshee 1.8. We are aligning with the GNOME release schedule for 1.8, like we did for 1.6. The Banshee calendar has the full release schedule. Our download page describes how to get beta releases. See the 1.7.0 release notes for more information.

One small new feature is the ability to switch sources quickly via the keyboard. You can type 'g' to activate the switcher, then type a source's name, acroynm, or substring of the name to switch to it — eg g then np to switch to Now Playing.

Busy Busy
There is a lot going on in the Banshee community! For example:

• Alex Launi was accepted to Google Summer of Code to work on Banshee's Now Playing source, making it slicker and more useful. Banshee co-maintainer Alexander Kojevnikov will be mentoring him.
• Mike Urbanski is working hard to get his podcast-ng branch merged into master, get it tested, and possibly replace the current Podcast extension for 1.8.
• Paul Cutler is preparing to ramp up his docs branch work, adding in-app end-user documentation to Banshee.
• I'll be speaking about Banshee at GUADEC. More on this later.
• We'll be making very frequent 1.7.x releases, quickly getting contributors' fixes and features into users hands.

There will be dozens of other features in 1.8, but they depend on what piques contributors' interest and motivation. You can wait and see what makes it — or get involved and make things happen!

xl2tpd в Factory. Один шажок к выпплнению фичи #309322

Многое нужно пофиксить...
Хотелось бы больше получать обратной связи по этому пакету любыми возможными способами (IRC, E-mail, forums, bug report).

Continuing with another round of pictures from the Venezuelan FLISOL, i bring here a small recopilation of pictures from galleries of the main site, Caracas, where openSUSE has presence like in the other 19 sites.

This time, i wanna take time to thank Maria “tatica” Leandro, the national coordinator of the event, for all the invaluable help and dedication that she put to get our FLISOL a really great live experience.

She is a famous Fedora Ambassador in the region, that got the sponsorship from Novell for all the sites, and even to get spread the openSUSE word in other post-flisol events. I would like help her in getting the material, but this happens in a time that i was bloated of work. So, I hope she gets her beatification from her invaluable help in the event.

(some of the photos are under a creative commons license)