Like openSUSE, iFolder is an open source project sponsored by Novell. iFolder is a simple and secure storage solution that can make syncing and sharing files easy. You can back up, access, and manage your personal files from anywhere, at any time. Once you have installed iFolder, you simply save your files locally and iFolder automatically updates the files on a network server and delivers them to the other machines you use.

To install iFolder, just fire up YaST’s Software Manager and search for “ifolder3″, or open a terminal and type the following:

sudo zypper ref

sudo zypper in ifolder3

The iFolder server is available in the openSUSE Build Service. Just search for “ifolder3-server” at software.opensuse.org/search.

For more information on iFolder, see the iFolder site. Want to run an iFolder server without having to set up a server from scratch? Stephen Shaw, Mario Carrión, and Andrés .G Aragoneses created a openSUSE-based server appliance using SUSE Studio. Just download the VMware image and fire it up in VMware or VirtualBox.

To get involved with iFolder, see the how to contribute doc and join real-time discussions in the #ifolder channel on Freenode.

Part of this can be blamed squarely on the economy, and part of it lies with the fact that Linux is no longer the exciting new kid on the block technology.

Community Shows / Regional Shows Rule

So far this year I’ve attended seven eight nine events (that I can recall off the top of my head, anyway — there may have been more) related to Linux and open source:

• Linux.conf.au
• Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE)
• FOSDEM
• Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit
• Florida Linux Show
• Linuxfest Northwest
• SouthEast LinuxFest
• Open Source Business Conference
• LinuxTag

Now, the Open Source Business Conference really is the “one thing not like the others” in this list because OSBC is aimed squarely at a non-community crowd and not directly at Linux folks, either.

Of the others, the most successful events have been the regional shows like SCALE and LFNW, and events that have very specific audiences like the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. By “successful” I mean, they’ve drawn close to their capacity for exhibitors and attendees, the crowds have been enthused and engaged, and the shows themselves have run well and pleased attendees and sponsors (and, presumably, organizers).

LinuxTag is the only “big budget” show on the list, and I’m not really sure it needs to be “big budget.” From a commercial perspective, I’m not at all impressed by LinuxTag — don’t get me wrong, I think it was a fine show and drew a pretty enthusiastic community audience — but as a show where commercial interests would get leads, and show some return on investment? Not so much. The venue is probably a bit too pricey for the show itself. The LinuxTag folks might want to re-think the “.org meets .com” thing and consider just going all-out .org and scaling down the venue to meet the needs of the exhibitors who have remained. LinuxTag draws a community audience, but at commercial prices it’s a tough one.

If I added up the sponsorship fees and real costs for SCALE, LFNW, SELF, and the Florida Linux Show, it would probably not pay for LinuxTag. Considering we’re reaching the same kind of audience, I’m not sure that’s justified. Food for thought for next year as our openSUSE Ambassadors start thinking about FY10 shows.

openSUSE Day

The openSUSE Day got off to a slow start, but the room started to really fill up with Andreas Jaeger’s talk on What’s new in 11.2. The Wine and “Why my WLAN isn’t working” talks were really packed and for the most part the room was quite well-packed. Pictures of some of the talks are available on my Flickr page with the openSUSE set:

Most if not all the pictures are uploading to Flickr as I type this.

A couple of thoughts on openSUSE Day for next year’s LinuxTag and/or future events:

• The popular talks (excepting AJ’s) are not distro-specific.
• Presentations are good, but more interactive sessions would be better. Next time, we need to have a mix of presentations and working sessions as we will have at the openSUSE Conference.
• 10 a.m. Saturday is still to early to expect people to show up after two days of talks + social events. Next time, we’ll serve coffee and donuts at 10 a.m. and start the proceedings at 11 a.m.
• We cut for two hours for the keynotes and lunch. I think this would have been a good time to do some working sessions — not everyone cares about the keynotes.
• Though it was a bi-lingual event, the talks in German seemed to be much better attended.

My intent was to sit down right after LinuxTag on Saturday and write up a summary, but Brent McConnell, Jan Weber, and Vincent Untz were available for dinner and a trip into the downtown area of Berlin — and that seemed like a much more relaxing way to spend the evening.  So, this post is a little later than planned, but in time for Monday reading while you’re settling in with coffee or passing time during conference calls.

It looks like we’ll be getting some of the community leaders around RPM together at the openSUSE Conference in September. Had a talk with an RPM.org developer, and he seemed interested in coming to the conference in September and working with openSUSE developers on RPM. So I’m hoping we can finally pull off an “RPM Summit” at the conference and make some steps towards a harmonized RPM at some point.

Also went to the Friends of Qt (pronounced “cute,” by the way) dinner. To say that the food was good and plentiful would be a serious understatement. Fantastic pasta and pizza, and it just kept coming. If you’re ever in Berlin, definitely check out 12 Apostles, great restaurant!

Had a great conversation with my tablemates about the state of the Linux desktop and where Linux needs to go. While there was some disagreement (as always) about the necessary strategy and tactics, there’s little disagreement that we need to be doing more to reach users who haven’t heard about or know very little about Linux and explain the benefits and advantages of Linux to those folks.

Overall, day two turned out to be a pretty productive day. Day three is a bit slow so far, but it may be that many people were at the social event last night and not too quick to get out of bed today.

Tomorrow, it’s openSUSE Day and we’re going to have quite a lot of fun! If you’re in or around Berlin, I do hope you’ll join us!

If you have an own Blog, we would like to motivate you, to blog. You can write about interesting Features or Tips and Tricks, or new things, you have learned. You can tell us, what you like at the Project, or what you doesn’t like. You can give Proposals or other Stuff. We need you as Author.

We do!

Not just for openSUSE Weekly News, but for the project in general. Too many people are doing great work, but staying quiet about it.

You don’t need to be a great writer to blog about your work. You don’t need to be long-winded about your work, but please take some time to blog about what you’re doing, and maybe give some pointers on how other contributors could get involved.

If you have questions about “how to blog,” ask us on the opensuse-marketing mailing list, or in #opensuse-marketing on Freenode. Or if you’re shy and wondering “is this OK to blog about?” feel free to drop me an email if you want feedback on that.

Take Michael Meeks’ blog. (Not to pick on him, but he has a great no-frills blogging style.) A typical example:

The openSUSE News folks hang out on #opensuse-newsletter on Freenode, and have their discussions on the opensuse-marketing mailing list. If you’d like to make sure your news makes the weekly, drop in and say “hi” and ask to have your post included, or see the FAQ on how you can contribute directly to openSUSE Weekly News.

Well, not business exactly. It’s open for fun. Development fun. Contribution fun. Most importantly, it’s open for you whether you work for Novell or not. From the announcement, the juicy details:

Factory development is being split into devel projects organized by topic areas, such as KDE, GNOME, Education, Java, and so on. Devel projects are responsible for sets of packages and will be able to organize themselves rather than following a top-down model of management.

The idea is to allow teams to be self-organizing and for all contributors to have equal footing in terms of being able to contribute to openSUSE Factory.

To get started, the current Novell and openSUSE package maintainers will be working with each other to define responsibility within the devel projects and how the team will work together. As time goes on, they will integrate new maintainers into the teams and commit privileges will be based on merit and not whether a person is employed by Novell.

How to Get Started

If you’re new to working with Factory and the openSUSE Build Service, you can start with the Factory Packaging page on the openSUSE Wiki. This explains the Factory workflow, how to check out packages and submit changes, how to create new devel projects, and so on.

Have questions or need help getting started? There are plenty of openSUSE Factory contributors who’d be happy to answer questions and help you get started. To learn more, join the opensuse-factory mailing list, or get real-time help in the #opensuse-factory IRC channel on Freenode.

This is the culmination of some very hard work by Henne Vogelsang and other openSUSE contributors.

Let’s look at all the things that have happened in the last year or so on the tools and policy front to make openSUSE more open and independent as a project, and to make it easier to contribute and/or use openSUSE for new projects:

• The openSUSE Build Service has added features to allow all contributors to be able to work on openSUSE and submit changes directly using the same tools that Novell developers are using.
• The project has opened up the feature tracking and request system, called openFATE, and we’re accepting features from openSUSE members and eventually a wider community. (Work in progress, but moving ahead nicely!)
• We’ve revised our trademark guidelines and distribution license to make it easier for people to remix and republish openSUSE in a way that meets their needs.
• The openSUSE Build Service has added features to allow builds not just of packages, but of entire product images — so people can build customized openSUSE releases in the openSUSE Build Service.
• Switched from an appointed board to an elected board.
• openSUSE is also available in SUSE Studio — currently in beta — which makes it ridiculously easy to create openSUSE derivative distros.

Thanks to Henne and all the openSUSE contributors who have made this possible. This is a major step for the project and will make openSUSE even easier to contribute to.

Daren and James Tremblay

I’d say that it was very well done for a first-time event, but that’d be damning SELF with faint praise. It was well done, period. The fact that the organizers pulled it off so smoothly the first time around, that’s just doubly impressive. I got to see the event from the sponsor, speaker, attendee, and exhibitor angles — and at every turn, they were great to work with and delivered more than they promised.

The turnout for the event was fantastic. The crowd was lively and the place was packed (but not over-crowded) the entire day. The exhibit hall was pretty modest, but we had steady traffic at the openSUSE table most of the day and plenty of people who came by to get openSUSE DVDs and swag, and to talk about openSUSE and the openSUSE Education project.

And the openSUSE Education project was very well represented. James Tremblay and his brother Daren came out to man the booth, along with Bob Ghosh from OS4Ed. They did a five-hour drive to come and represent the green at the show, and did a great job of demonstrating openSUSE and the Education project at the table all day. I also had time to talk to James about openSUSE Edu and what we can do to help promote openSUSE and education throughout the next year. We catch up in IRC from time to time, but nothing beats actually having time to sit down and talk to someone face to face.

SouthEast LinuxFest audience for morning keynote

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to give the morning keynote for SELF, and I have to say it was a blast. The topic for SELF was “Reaching the Masses,” and I think it went over pretty well. I got a bunch of good questions and comments during and after the talk, which I’ll incorporate if I do it again.

The room was nearly full and the audience was a lot of fun — and didn’t seem to mind me chucking Geekos and Penguins at them at regular intervals. (Getting to throw things at random people while talking is one of the great perks of this job…)

The rest of the schedule was fantastic. My friend Paul Frields from Fedora gave the closing keynote, and they also had Chris DiBona from Google, Clint Savage, Keith Bergelt from OIN (who gave a great talk on patents), Wendy Seltzer, Richard Weait from Open Street Map & Ontario Linux Fest.

The organizers took great care of the speakers and exhibitors, getting us lunch and checking in often to see if we had what we needed.

At the end of the day, I had the chance to spend some time talking to the Dual Core guys. With any luck, we’ll get an openSUSE rap in time for 11.2. I’d love to ship a Dual Core Ogg on the DVDs in November.

If you didn’t make it to SELF, you really missed a great ‘fest. It’s right up there with Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE), Linuxfest Northwest (LFNW), and Ohio Linuxfest. The location was pretty close to perfect for the size crowd that turned up. The exhibit hall was a good fit this year, but I suspect they’re going to have to find a bigger boat next year.

Build your own Geeko with Geekobuilder.com

If you love the Geeko — and who doesn’t? — There’s a new site you might want to check out: Geekobuilder.com. The site was launched today, it allows you to “build” your own Geeko with custom backgrounds, props, and outfits. (Or no outfit. It’s a bit risque, I guess, but you can have an au naturale Linux Lizard if that’s how you roll.)

You can save your masterpiece as wallpaper, or as an icon/avatar like the Geeko shown here. Takes no time at all.

As an added bonus, there’s a contest for the best Geeko. Submit your entry by July 31st, and you could win a Flip HD video camera, custom branded. Either way, you get a slick custom Geeko for your desktop, just like you’ve always wanted.

I think this is a great idea, but I’m curious how many people would actually try openSUSE (or any Linux distro…) if they receive the disc at a sporting event?

Obviously, this would be a target-rich environment for people who hadn’t tried Linux yet. You could definitely meet and talk to a lot of people who aren’t familiar with openSUSE, Linux, or open source, and hand out a lot of openSUSE discs.

That’s great, but what about the downsides? Are baseball fans likely to hold on to the disc, take it home and give it a shot, or is it likely that they’ll discard the discs or just never get around to trying it out?

I love the idea of having openSUSE contributors converging on sporting events on Software Freedom Day and talking to people about Linux and openSUSE, but I wonder if giving out discs would be an efficient use of the discs.

So, is there any demand for this sort of thing? Also talking about doing some interview ‘casts, but this would strictly be a quick look at the openSUSE happenings. I know saigkill (Sascha Manns) is doing something similar with the openSUSE Weekly News, but in German.

Curious to see if there’s interest. I don’t listen to podcasts much myself, but I get the impression that people who enjoy them really enjoy them. Sort of like talk radio, I suppose — I’m more of a “music while I work / drive,” guy.

Pros

There’s a lot to like about meeting in IRC (or any chat “room,” really):

• IRC meetings are loggable — you can save the discussion for later, so people can refer back to action items, or review the entire discussion if they were unable to attend.
• IRC logs (once published) are searchable — post the IRC log to the Web and it’ll be indexed by Google, so there’s a chance that you’ll turn up information that came out in a meeting by doing a quick search.
• IRC doesn’t require 100% undivided attention — if you’re participating in an IRC meeting, depending on your role in the conversation, you can also respond to email, etc., while in the meeting. (This is only true if you’re not leading the meeting or heavily involved in a discussion, though.)
• IRC doesn’t require silence. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys some music while you work, there’s no reason you can’t blast some tunes while participating in an IRC meeting. (This alone makes IRC much more attractive than phone meetings.)
• It’s clear who’s talking, and there’s less “cross-talk” than in phone meetings.
• You don’t need to repeat yourself — if someone missed something or needs to re-read an answer, they can just scroll up.
• IRC is a more “level” playing field for a multi-lingual group, in some respects. (At least, I’ve had non-native speakers tell me they’d prefer chat / IRC to a phone conversation.)
• No international dialing required — No need for people to have to maintain a call-in number for every country or require participants to dial into an international number. (Though this is mitigated if you use Skype or something that makes international calls really cheap.)

So there’s a lot to recommend IRC against phone meetings… what are the cons?

Cons

• Conversations move much more slowly — Unless everyone in the conversation is a speed typist, IRC conversations move much, much more slowly than phone conversations.
• You lose a dimension of communication – when you’re dealing with text only, you lose nuances of speech and the ability (sometimes) to tell when someone’s frustrated, happy, aggravated, sarcastic, etc.
• Computer required — With phone meetings, you can dial in from anywhere — back of a taxi, while driving to work (using a headset, of course), while taking a walk, etc. IRC is sort of demanding in this regard.
• Frustrating for slow typists — I’m not a slow typist, but I expect that IRC meetings are very frustrating for peek-and-poke typists who don’t do 80+ words per minute.
• Reduced complexity — this is sort of a con and a pro: Having a discussion in IRC typically reduces the complexity of the discussion because people just don’t invest as much time in writing as they do talking.
• IRC avoidance — some people just don’t like having to switch communications mediums, and refuse to participate in IRC. I’m not sure I consider this valid, but it’s a fact of life that a few people will simply not participate via IRC.