Roger Whittaker

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openSUSE Conference day 3

Saturday 19th September 2009

This morning I went to the following talks:

Adrian Schroeter on OBS and Cross-Platform Packaging. I other words: how the build service copes with building packages for non-SUSE distributions.

Klaus Kaempf on Visualising Package dependencies. Klaus showed how he produces graphical views of the dependencies between packages. These range from simple graphs generated by graphviz from the output of sat-solver to awesome moving videos showing the dependency relationships of packages being displayed in the order that they would be installed.

Aaron Bockover on Making Banshee scream cross platform. Aaron described the architecture of Banshee and demonstrated various features including the new netbook style desktop interface.

After another good lunch (sausages and a kind of mixed vegetable dish -- very tasty), I attended a discussion on using Social Networking discussion to spread the word about openSUSE.

Federico Mena-Quintero ran an "unofficial" session presenting interesting new ideas on desktop usability (Zeitgeist): in particular the concept that the system can or should remember what you have been doing and present that back to you in a helpful way so that you can more easily track and find files that you have created and so on. There will be more on this tomorrow.

Another discussion on the governance on the openSUSE project took place, with particular emphasis on the nature of the authority of the Board its role in communication with the community and with Novell.

The atmosphere throughout has been very good, and the availability of unlimited amounts of coffee and excellent fruit juices throughout the day each day is really nice (unlike some events I've been at where the coffee comes out at 10:30 and disappears at 10:35). It turns out that although there's no wireless, there are enough chances to get hold of the end of an ethernet cable for everyone to connect when they need to, and in some ways this is good, as it helps make people more sociable as they cannot always be dealing with their remote concerns.

I took a walk (including another look at the vegetables growing all around the fields near the conference centre) and then walked to the tram stop and took the tram down to the city and had a walk around the old town, where there seemed to be considerable festivity going on.

Some more photos.