Summary

Long time no see! The last update on lizards is now over 2 months old and a lot of stuff happened. The Boosters have finished two Milestones: The build service project overview and the integration of web-apps with a common theme. Both results are awesome and enable people to be more productive. The build service project overview helps project maintainers, like Coolo for openSUSE:Factory, to keep up to date on what happens in their project. The overview includes things like packages that are not building, packages with a diff to the devel project and packages with a pending request. You know what’s the best part of this? To make the build service project overview possible we have put a lot of general work into the OBS webclient. So much that the webclient changes will be a big part of the upcoming OBS 2.0 release. The other Milestone we finished is the integration of our web-apps with a common theme: bento. Once we deployed bento to our apps everybody can navigate the opensuse web with a nice, task oriented design and find information where one expects them. Check out the screenshots below.

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

Events

The LinuxTag 2010 programm is final and online. We have 6 talks accepted ranging from packaging to kernel hacking. Most of them on Saturday which is traditionally the strongest day.

• Ruby on Rails in der openSUSE.org Infrastruktur – Thomas Schmidt
• Kernel Mode Setting – a Change in Paradigms for the Graphics Driver Stack – Egbert Eich
• The road to GNOME 3.0 Vincent Untz /Johannes Schmid
• Distribution Image building with KIWI – Christopher Hofmann
• The live A-Z Guide to openSUSE Contribution – Henne Vogelsang/Vincent Untz
• The Free Software Hell And How To Escape It – Adrian Schröter/Henne Vogelsang

We also got accepted as project for a booth and are currently working on the booth setup and program. Stay tuned for more news to come around this topic. Other events that we boosted are the Tokamak4 plasma hacking sprint Will successfully organized in our office. Vincent went to a GNOME Usability and a GSettings Hackfest. He also covered Solutions Linux 2010. Pavol, Michal and Petr went to the Chemnitz Linux Days 2010, Installfest.cz and LinuxExpo. Klaas to openExpo in Switzerland and a KDE Finance sprint in Frankfurt. Oh and Google Summer of Code sadly didn’t work out this year, maybe next time. As you can see we were busy event bees!

Milestones

We are currently trying to reach 3 Milestones. The Squad that is trying to create Discoverable Centralised Developer Documentation is progressing nicely. They fixed a lot of issues with mediawiki and Bento for the new wiki instance, transfered and re-worked the general wiki documentation so that people can help with the general transition and they also moved content like the Build Service pages and started with the Packaging side of things. The general focus is still on groundwork. The squad wants to transfer all the developer documentation as an example on how a topic in the new wiki should look and feel like. The next steps will be finishing that off and then to help with the attraction of contributors to the general transition.

Another squad is working on improving openFATE, especially to make it really usable for the screening team. In the end they want to have a new role of screener in the feature workflow. The role can change the status and reassign features between products. The first sprints where spend on educating themselves about the architecture of FATE and the structure of the web-app. The squad then worked on the proxy which is by now already passing changes through to the keeper. The next steps include changes to the web-app and hermes for reporting. During the course of these sprints discussions about introducing more roles and new features happened so the Milestone probably will get more Goals in the future.

The third squad is currently in transition away from the Bento/Umbrella milestone. The development of the theme for the Build Service, the Download Portal and the Wiki are done. They are currently working on a wrap-up post that will show you all the cool stuff. The remaining tasks of deploying all the services, and helping to create themes for openFATE, the Forums and our Wordpress instances are new Milestones. Which Milestone this squad does next is not decided yet.

Read at Lizards

This is a plea to the openSUSE Community!

This is an appeal to you!

This is a incitement to kick ass!

You think that you are not entitled to decide something?
YOU ARE GO KICK ASS!

Don’t be humble. You’re the man!

Despite the fact that our distribution is around for some time we are a very young open source project. We don’t have much organization. No hierarchy, very little processes, no roles or functions, no directions and only general rules. You participate in a time where it’s really you that makes a difference. If you’re humble now and try not to stick your neck out, this project will fail. Don’t be humble, KICK ASS!

Don’t wait for anything “official”. There is no one official.

There is only you and the people next to you. There is no one steering the openSUSE project, there is only you pushing your topic. There is no mastermind behind all this, there is only you thinking about your thing. There is no management (no also not from Novell), there is only you running your things. If you do something it’s what openSUSE does. If you decide something it’s what openSUSE decides. Don’t wait, KICK ASS!

You’re worried about your idea being liked?
THEY LOVE IT GO KICK ASS!

Don’t let the nay-sayers stop you. Push for your goal.

We value others’ opinions. We value openness. We value critique. We do NOT value consensus. It’s nice if it happens, it makes you feel warm and fuzzy on the inside but consensus is not the prerequisite for action. Try to incorporate the feedback you get as good as you can. Be open minded and willing to try new things. But also keep your goal in mind. You started with an idea on how to do something, don’t let the feedback kill your idea. Remember, there are at least 20 people who just like your idea and don’t say anything. Don’t let the nay-sayers stop you, KICK ASS!

Don’t be afraid of contradiction. We are not a logical consistent universe.

We can have a team but no leader. We can have vim and emacs. We can be self-contradictory! openSUSE consists of so many projects, ideas, values and people that they can’t possibly be all on the same page. You don’t need to prove to yourself or anyone else that you are. There also can be two or more things of the same kind even if they do exactly the same thing. Don’t be afraid of contradiction or duplication, KICK ASS!

You are unsure about something?
TRY IT GO KICK ASS!

Don’t think everything through to the end. Be playful!

We are an open source project. You need to release early, release often. Everything! Not only code but your frustrations, ideas and plans also. That means that people will see your early errors. People will spot your inconsistencies. People will get on your nerves with their own ideas about your stuff. But it also means you don’t have be 100% correct, don’t have to be 100% ready and you don’t have to do 100% yourself. Put everything out there, KICK ASS!

Don’t doubt it for a second. If you fall you will be picked up.

More often then we like it the things we dream of, the ideas we come up with, the lines of code we produce STINK. And that’s okay, shit happens. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes, nobody will think less of you. In this community people will scrape you off the ground and put you on your feet again. Failure is punished by a pat on the back and a smile. Don’t doubt that for a second, fail but KICK ASS!

Stop contemplating!
Stop holding back!
Stop worrying!
KICK ASS!

 

Summary

The last sprint was going from February 4th to February 16th. Even though it included all of us going to FOSDEM over the first weekend we were able to reach one milestone: Buildservice Project Overview Page (a.k.a. factory.o.o) hurray! The wiki milestone finally moved forward again and the umbrella milestone got a new push with limiting it’s scope to the Bentoo theme. All in all a pretty successful sprint.

Retrospectiva

We finished the evaluation of retrospectiva and deployed it to http://retro.opensuse.org. Retrospectiva is now our project management tool of choice. The best part is that everybody, yes that means you, can simply follow what we do with it. For this you need to understand a few things. Most importantly the Terminology we use.

Milestones are big things we want to achieve. Like

Rid the world of all Evil

Goals are simpler things than milestones. They are defined from the customers point of view. It can be for example something like

Destroy the One Ring so we can get rid of the Dark Lord

Stories are simple technical steps that need to be done to reach a goal. Stories can be done by people. In this example it would be something like:

Cast the ring into a Volcano (Frodo)

Pretend to have the One Ring to distract the Dark Lord (Aragon)

Be the backup for Frodo (Gollum)

Customers don’t really want to know all that, the important thing is that we reach the milestone (no more evil in the world).

Sprints are the time units in which goals are achieved through finishing all stories they consist of. If they are not achieved they are simply moved to the next sprint. Once all goals are finished the milestone is reached and a new milestone is sought after.

The interface of Retrospectiva is pretty straight forward. On the top navigation bar you can choose how detailed you want to look at what we do.

If you choose the milestone option you will always see the three milestones we currently work on. They provide you with a high level overview and are the main information you can gather from this tool. If you choose the goals option you can have a look at the goals in the current sprint, which you can choose at the right hand menu. In the stories view you do the same, choose a sprint at the right menu and you have very detailed overview about who currently works on what.

We hope that you will find this tool useful, we for sure do. Of course we will continue to update everybody what we’re up to in blogposts like this, our mailinglist and our IRC channel. You should see this as additional source of information.

Standup Meeting

Last but not least the report about our last standup meeting. In this every squad has to stand up and tell the others what they did do in the last sprint, what they are planing to do in the next sprint and what blocks them currently.

The Factory Status Page Squad

We did finish upstream version tracking and with it the whole milestone.
You can see the result at:
https://build.opensuse.org/project/status?project=$PROJECT
so for instance
https://build.opensuse.org/project/status?project=openSUSE:Factory

We plan to announce it properly on and tell people about it. AI: wstephenson

We are blocked by nothing.

Integrate all Infrastructure under one Umbrella Squad:

We did add a proof-of-concept API to connect.o.o and generally worked on it. Thought about group Membership request voting (eg. for opensuse members group). We also deployed a new VM to be able to deploy/incubate our project. It also serves as host for retrospectiva.

We plan to push the Bento theme to wiki.o.o in cooperation with Frank. Port software.o.o to bento theme. A couple of Bento problems also need to be solved. We need to find a solution for wiki specific links and the
left column. We also will start browser testing/debugging. And to be able to gather contributors for connect.o.o we plan to finish the deployment and announce it properly.

We are blocked by nothing at the moment.

Discoverable Centralised Developer Documentation Squad

We did help to prepare the new instance so we can actually transfer content into it. For this we are making sure that the current content on wiki.o.o, mainly templates, is functional and follows the various guidelines of the wiki team. This is proving to be more work than expected, but it’s going forward.

We plan to finish the overhaul of the content and work on some missing technical features of the wiki like change notification. After this is finished we plan to finally transfer developer documentation into it. This shall be the first really useful area in the new instance and serve as an example of all the new features and processes.

We are blocked by nothing at the moment.

As one squad is finished with its milestone we also talked about how to continue from there. The outcome was that we will go after the milestone “Improve the openFATE process” and shuffle people around. The resulting new squads are:

Wiki: Henne, Tom, Petr, Lubos
Umbrella: Coolo, Robert, Darix, Michal, Pavol
openFATE: Klaas, Vincent, Will, Egbert

Thats it for this week. Thanks for reading and remember to have a lot of fun!

Read at Lizards

We arrived, very relaxed, yesterday at 21:00 thanks to our awesome openSUSE Bus. Its a nice to fall out of the Office, into the bus and then crawl out of it again in front of the Hotel. It’s more comfy than any plane i have ever been on and we used the time well. Lot’s of socializing, beer and Pavol even ran a pretzel-stick eating contest (guess who won!). I think this will be our mode of travel for the next FOSDEMs to come. After everybody checked in we went to the FOSDEM beer event. It was packed, as every year but quite a blast. Met up with Michael Meeks, Greg, Pascal and all the other openSUSE people.

And now the talks are underway and the hallway is more and more empty. So I thought its time for a short recap. The first hours today went great. We arrived at the venue at 9 and were setup by 9:30 thanks to our new and shiny TouchSmart desktops. Thank you HP! Apparently people love to touch stuff so the booth is always visited and people play around. We also give out free T-Shirts to everyone participating in our newest survey. So all in all everything is going smoothly. Stay tuned for more updates!

Read at Lizards

 

General Things

First of all some general things. We are currently evaluating a project management tool called Retrospectiva. It supposed help us with two things: Keeping track of our work and inform people, in depth, about it. The first part is coming along pretty nicely already. In December we met and agreed on terminology and a way to use the tool. We will work on Milestones, that consist of one or more Goals which consist one or more Stories. Each Milestone can have one or more Sprints which are time boxes stretching for  2 weeks. In the last couple of weeks Michal pushed some patches that implemented features we missed upstream. Henne transfered all data from our test project to the one we want to seriously use now. And Darix is working on the deployment of the new version to the community.o.o host which is currently prepared by Berthold Gunreben from the Autobuild Team as a XEN instance. Of course there are still several things to do. The squad leaders need to take care of their milestone descriptions to be very specific and from the customers view so people can actually understand them. Also we have to check the transferred data that got migrated and darix needs to deploy the head branch and push Berthold to finish the server. Because of our general goal to create a lot of buzz about what we do we need to attach a default story “make buzz about it” to every goal. Michal is looking into that.

For everybody’s favourite FOSS show FOSDEM in February we are ready to go. Boosters have 4 talks on the distro devroom’s schedule:

• Klaas: Hermes message dispatching
• Coolo: Clicfs as perfect live cd file system
• Vincent: Working with GNOME upstream
• Pavol: RPM packaging collaboration

Another show in desperate need on Booster Talks is LinuxTag 2010. Their call for papers is running and every booster shoud put in a talk! There are instructions on the CFP about what they are interested in, what topics they want to focus on, what is expected of speakers and how to submit a talk. So all of us are currently thinking about what we could talk about to the FOSS community.

In general we talked a lot about how we can make more buzz about what we do.  We agreed that the least we can do is to write something to our own mailinglist so other boosters are aware of what you are doing. The next steps would be to keep the parts of the project up to date that you are working in (OBS, Wiki, Web) via reports to their mailinglist and then tell the world what you do via your blog/lizards/news. Henne got the action item to push out our sprint meeting minutes to other channels than our own mailinglist. And NO goal should be closed without reporting about it to the world. We also have to think about how to use Retrospectiva for this.

Standup Meetings

We also run so called Standup Meetings where every squad has to stand up and tell the others what they did do in the last sprint, what they are planning to do in the next sprint and what currently blocks them.

For the Centralized Developer Documentation squad this was for the first sprint this year:

What we have done:
The general wiki transition has gone forward. There are transition guidelines, the new instance is deployed, working and tested. Currently there are some bugs blocking the transition related to some extensions. Nearly all the templates are in place and the wiki meta documentation is starting to shape up.

What we want to do:
We will create a portal and go on from there. Collect all developer documentation and transfer it to the new instance.

What is blocking us:
The bugs that block the general transition.

The Factory Status Page squad also had a lot to report:

What we have done:
80% of the milestone is done. The old factory page that coolo implemented is nearly transferred into the OBS. It’s not “live” in the master branch yet but deployed on the staging instance of the OBS web client. The development also introduced some new features in general like requests for the project page, build status popups for submit requests or the forward submit requests button.

What we want to do:
Smaller things: code cleanup, get some more information onto the page without showing it by default. Outdated package version information

What is blocking us:
We don’t want to and can’t be in the 1.7 release so we are waiting with merging until this is out of the door. But before we have to split some things like the new css and so on.

The squad that cares about unifying the openSUSE web experience (they call it Umbrella Project) reported the following:

What we have done:
On the theme side nothing happened because robert is offline. On the technical side we investigated solutions to incorporate. The investigation phase is done now.

What we want to do:
Document the results of the investigations and then start to implement.

What is blocking us:
Nothing at the moment

Thats it for now. Expect to hear from us again as FOSDEM gets nearer, and when the public Retrospectiva instance is ready.

Until then, we’ll be hard at work making openSUSE a better place to contribute your Free Software time.  And remember, if you want to join the Boosters, or just hang out with us, come to #opensuse-boosters on FreeNode!

 

 

 

 

 

Read at Lizards

What a week! The first ever openSUSE conference provided us, the multiplier team, with a great momentum to finally kick-off the team. So after a smooth Sunday on the conference with the nice lightning talks and Gianugo’s closing keynote we went for 4 days to some remote farm in the Franconian Switzerland to work on a plan of what we want to do and how we’re going to do it. This is my personal travelogue.

Monday

Travel day. On Sunday I went home early from the conference. I tell you, 4 days of constant talking and sharing ideas with other humans is tiresome! Good that we choose a place to go to that is so remote that you have to hike there. I welcome another couple of hours doing non-geek activities. But first I have go to the main train station to buy some tickets for the team, then back to the office to unravel the rest of the conference party fallout and pick up everybody else at 9am. We are 15 people to go on the trip. So after everyone is in, and we pass on the luggage to Roland, we head off to the central station. Then go to Gößweinstein by Train/Bus and from there hike to our destination: Gut Schönhof, an old farm (still operating) that has some hotel rooms attached. It’s the most beautiful weather and everything goes smoothly. We arrive in Gößweinstein and have a quick look at the famous basilica and then go on along  the river Wiesent.

After a quick lunch stop at one of the local breweries (did you know that the Franconian Switzerland is the region with the highest density of private breweries in the world?) we arrive. The Schönhof people have prepared a couple of rooms and the barn for us. I decide to stay in the barn together with Tom and Robert.

By now it’s dinner time and it’s still very warm so we eat outside in the sun. The farm has also cows so we get the most amazing, fresh, organic steaks and fries you can imagine. Well-fed and satisfied we have our first session of talking. Mostly about what tasks everybody brings as baggage into the Team. After that the mood is slightly down because we discovered that some of us bring quite a lot. Anyway, this needed to be in the open so everybody knows what we can and can’t pick up. Then most of us quickly go to bed. After playing some cards for an hour or so with Klaas, Tom and Robert I go too.

Tuesday

The breakfast is as good as the dinner yesterday. This is not the usual supermarket stuff you get in the city. Superb self-made sausages, cheese and jam. Milk and Eggs that not long ago were in the cow/chicken and freshly baked bread/buns. Off to talking again, AJ and Michl join us today. This time we start to come up with things that we want to do in the future. The list is growing very fast. It contains very dull hands-on stuff like centralizing the widespread, messy developer documentation in the wiki but also cool new stuff like integrating the build service with the SUSE Studio Marketplace. This is awesome! We then start to pick out things to discuss in detail. Coolo is doing this as -1,0,+1 voting and it turns out that this works for our group very well. We pick 6 topics we want to discuss in detail.

In the coffee break some of us decide to explore one of the near by old castles.

We conclude the day by discussing some of the things in great detail. Everybody is eager to hand out Action Items and we wouldn’t be geeks if we didn’t drift off into implementation details all the time. But in the end everybody is on the same page. I must say, I expected productivity here but not that much. The people in the Team are all old dogs, but apparently old dogs that can learn new tricks! Everybody is very open minded, positive and honest.

Dinner and then we take the projector we brought and turn the barn into a cinema. I fall asleep shortly after the opening credits…

Wednesday

Today we are going to prioritize the tasks we want to do. But first things first. We talked a lot about what we do, what we want to do and so on. This morning is for the how. So we talk about development methods, structural things like communications channels, meeting culture and things like this. In the end we agree on trying one of the hip agile methods. It fits us perfectly because the general direction we worked out by now for the team is “Growing Community by Enabling Community”. This will require us to jump from task to task and from topic to topic. Everybody is very eager to try this out.

Now that we know how to do things and what we want to do we start the prioritization. We again do this by a -1,0,+1 vote. This is it, our first sprints are set and over Dinner we split up into 3 groups and have our first planning phase. Time to check out the second castle that is around the corner. We arrive there by nightfall so there is not much to see. But we find a nice tavern in the valley for some beverages. During the evening Vincent and Lubos get into an ice-cream eating contest.

After they battled it out we head home through the dark forests. 15 people and 2 flashlights but we make it back. That was fun!

Thursday

Wrap up time! We want to leave at 11am so we can be at the office at 4′ish. A lot of us have more travel to do afterwards. There are bits and pieces here and there we still need to talk about but mainly we gather the next steps we want to do, like when to meet, how to tell the world about this team event and “marketing” in general. We also do a small retrospective on this kick-off and try to come up with a nicer name than multiplier team. At 11 we do the obligatory group photo and afterwards head out to the next bus stop in Pottenstein. We go the hike route, mostly on the road. 100 meters out i manage to trash my camera by smashing it on the pavement. The rest of the walk I talk to Egbert about the ongoing Board effort to establish an openSUSE foundation. He was long enough in the X.org board who also started a foundation and has a lot of insights. At around 3pm we arrive in Pottenstein and an hour later we part at the central station again.

Conclusion: Holy Moly! This was productive! This is a bunch of people that will do great things for the openSUSE project. Not that they did not do so already, most of them are already leading figures in the project, but together we will rock the boat for sure. I’m looking forward to work with these guys to grow the community by enabling the community!

Read at Lizards

Come get some! As someone who keeps a boomstick and a chainsaw in the basement, just in case i get problems with a Kandarian spirit, I have to have this:

Yes this is a Bruce Campbell action doll. It comes with an impressive amount (7) of accessories and you can dress it up like any character Bruce ever played! For Ash just remove the Hawaiian shirt and for Sam not. And this is not even an official feature of the Doll, Groovy. I’d buy that for a dollar!

Guess what, even i was allowed a week of hacking last week. So let me tell you what i did. My initial plan for the week was to spend half of it on freevo bug hunting and the other half on the osc factory plugin i started some weeks ago.  Python all the way… So i started on Monday on freevo and hunted a bug down that was nagging me. After a couple of minutes it turned out it was a timing problem in an OSD function. To understand it i had to learn about the new OSD dialog plugin Adam hacked up to style freevo on screen dialogs. He said on the freevo-users lists a couple of weeks ago:

“The overlay display stuff is still pretty much in development and needs someone with some artistic ability (ie. not me :-)) to design a nicer display for the seeking/pause display.”

So i thought what the heck let me see if i can come up with something. My artistic skills are limited but i think i understand what about the freevo user interface attracts me and others so much. It’s the right mixture of Text and Graphics. Usually media center developers try to impress you with glowing, transparent 3D graphics that turn, slide, flip and flow. You have to memorize what each of those animations means and that makes it pretty complicated in my eyes. Freevo on the other hand uses Text a lot.

A directory for instance is no fancy folder icon, a file is neither, they are represented as Text. A directory with square brackets and a file without.  But of course there is also an area for things like a cover or descriptions.

The fancy stuff is good to have but navigation and general usage have to work without it. Graphics should support Text – thats what i like about the user interface  of Freevo. What did not have this right mixture in Freevo was the OSD.

So i tried to come up with an OSD that follows these principles. Here is what i ended up with after many tries.

So i fixed some bugs, had to add a couple fo features to the dialogs core and styled this OSD theme. I was done by Friday so no osc factory plugin. Luckily i hack a lot on my normal worktime too so you don’t have to wait too long for it ;-)

Update: The code is in the Freevo tracker…

This week there will be once again LinuxTag. It will be strange for me because this will be the first show in a long time for me without Martin. I think the last one without Martin was LinuxTag back in 2002 in Karlsruhe, so we all will terrible miss him. As a consequence Michl and me have to run the booth and keep the flock together this time. Lets see how that goes…

Because everything changes, we thought it might be a good time to try something different for the booth. Usually we ran the LinuxTag booth as pure info booth. So you put out a GNOME and a KDE installation on display and wait for people to come look at it. If you are lucky they ask questions and you are drawn into a conversation. We think this is what an exhibition is all about. But this was getting harder and harder every year. The reason for this is very positive one: Everybody knows Linux. There are nearly no people anymore on exhibitions that do not use it already. So instead of trying to inform people in general about the openSUSE distribution we will focus on communication and adapting openSUSE to your own needs this year.

To foster communication we will try to make hanging out at the booth as pleasantly as possible. For that we reserved space for some beanbags, a table, a whiteboard and other fun stuff. So an area where you can hang out and talk. We hope this will set a tone for the booth and makes everything hang a bit loose!

To help people adapting the openSUSE distribution we have a suse studio counter and a openSUSE buildservice counter and a table with some Laptops to try out the image or package people have build. Of course we also bring some Moblin/Goblin netbooks,  can show you Linux in general and openSUSE Linux in particular, tell you all about the openSUSE project, answer all your support questions and so on and so on and so on….

If you have a couple of bucks to spare i would suggest you go head to you local (LA, SF) Idiot Box gallery. They are celebrating their 5th year anniversary and have a lot of new paintings and other art available. I hear artwork is a great investment these days, right after Sun stock. My favorite:

But i also would not mind the Laura Palmer presentbox.

I’d buy that for a dollar!