Webpin; 10.2 release; and Community meeting.

Webpin

Today I updated my package search page to include openSUSE 10.2 repositories. I also modified the repository trawler to use the openSUSE buildservice api to locate repositories, and had it index all the valid 10.1 and 10.2 repositories in the build service.

This was quite straightforward as https://api.opensuse.org/source simply returns a list of repository names which can be easily converted to the appropriate URLs on http://software.opensuse.org/download/ .

Some Statistics:

There are now 221 valid 10.1 repositories indexed, and already 88 valid 10.2 repositories. Approximately 13,000 packages per architecture for 10.1. Only about 8100 packages per architecture built so far for 10.2 , but it was only released on Thursday. That translates to about 5 million files for 10.1, 3 million for 10.2.

openSUSE 10.2 release

As I mentioned above openSUSE 10.2 was released on Thursday, and it is looking like it could be one of the best SUSE releases to date. Few issues remain in the final release, and there are lots of user-visible improvements over previous versions. Some of these are shown in the screenshots page: http://en.opensuse.org/Screenshots/Screenshots_openSUSE_10.2 It is certainly a relief that pain of supporting users with 10.1 will soon be mostly over.

A tip to those installing 10.2, deselect the “Enterprise Software Management” pattern and select the “openSUSE Software Management” software pattern (pictured at http://en.opensuse.org/Image:Screeny102_software_patterns.jpg) during or after install. (The former pattern contains software that was partly responsible for many of the problems in 10.1, and still has issues: http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT5310810296.html). I disagreed with the decision to leave it in the default install, and it looks like my fears were justified here.

Community meeting

With the release of 10.2 out of the way, now is an ideal time to start setting some goals and starting some projects for openSUSE 10.3 and beyond. To this end we have organised a community meeting to help increase community involvement in improving the distribution. This will be held in 1 week (Saturday 16th 18:00 GMT) in #opensuse-community on the freenode irc network, see announcement and explanation here: http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-announce/2006-12/msg00003.html

This is the first time anything like this has been attempted, so it would be great if as many people as possible could turn up. It gives you the opportunity to find out what is already going on, help brainstorm improvements to openSUSE, and perhaps even get involved yourself.

: 10 Dec 2006 00:20 |  Tags: Opensuse Suse |  Comments (2) |  Report a problem