The first two days were really tough: many of the concepts behind KDE4 are totally different from Gnome and Mac OSX so I had to get adjusted to it. As a former Gnome user I really like the idea of having not hundreds of configuration options per application. In my opinion the distributor should provide reasonable defaults for the desktop and it’s applications. Having tried the latest Fedora 10 preview and Kubuntu 8.10 I must admit, that openSUSE 11.1 delivers today the best KDE4 experience. Kudos to my colleagues from the KDE desktop team - you do a great job!

Nevertheless KDE4 has some disadvantages over the existing desktops: some parts of it, especially KWin, Plasma and Kontact are relatively unstable and crash regularly. On the other hand many features from existing KDE3 applications are still missing or do not work as expected. But you have the choice: all KDE3 applications are still available and of course you can mix them. For this reason I respect all KDE developers that work during the major version transition on two different versions of their application.

I am right now using exclusively KDE4 applications - even Kontact for my calendars (private Kolab, Google Calendar, Novell Groupwise and several iCal-based calendars) and Amarok2 for my huge music collection. The only thing that I did not migrate yet is my messenger. Despite the fact that one of Kopete’s developers is one of my room mates I am still using purple, which integrates well into KDE4. The only thing that does not work is compositing: KWin does not like my graphics card or its driver.

Concluding my first KDE4 test week I must say it changed my mind: I really like my new desktop and it makes fun to work with it. For me it is absolutely unacceptable now that people, which did not give KDE4 a fair chance by testing it at least a full work week, raise their complains that KDE4 is generally unusable or totally unstable. Everyone has to decide on his own if he wants a stable, well maintained KDE3 desktop or support the development of the future desktop. KDE does a great job making the transition as comfortable as possible and I think users should thank them for providing two desktop alternatives.

PS: I prefer using sudo instead of su. To configure this behaviour in kdesu you have to add to your ~/.kde4/share/config/kdesurc the following line:

    [super-user-command]
    super-user-command=sudo

Thanks to André & Tom for this hint!

This is quite good, but as Zonker already stated we hope to get this rate as close as possible to 100%. I hope the remaining openSUSE members or delegates will not miss their chance to take part in the decision who will run our project for at least the next year. If you are not decided yet, you shoud read through the candidates’ platforms in the wiki. In addition to this most of the candidates hang around in the #opensuse-project channel on Freenode or answer your questions by private mail.

Since the initial announcement we raised the openSUSE member count by 50% to now 212 approved openSUSE members. I am impressed by the enormous interest in participating in our project.

And we have a total of ten candidates running for a seat in the next openSUSE board:

Non-Novell

• Pascal Bleser (pascal.bleser@opensuse.org, platform)
• Peter Linnell (mrdocs@opensuse.org, platform)
• Tuukka Pasanen (tuukka.pasanen@ilmi.fi, platform)
• Alex Rodriguez (alexio44@opensuse.org.ni, platform)
• Jakub Rusinek (jakub.rusinek@gmail.com, platform)
• Bryen Yunashko (suserocks@bryen.com, platform)

Novell

• Marco Michna (konichiwamonsta@gmx.de, platform)
• Stephen Shaw (sshaw@decriptor.com, platform)
• Henne Vogelsang (hvogel@opensuse.org, platform)
• Federico Mena-Quintero (federico@novell.com, platform)

What is next?

During the next two weeks, each of the 212 openSUSE members is able to give voting privileges for this election to another user (which is not an openSUSE member). This person should be an active contributor of the openSUSE community and needs an account at users.openSUSE.org which has been created before September, 1st 2008.

The possibility to give franchise to another person is for you the perfect chance to get a friend or colleague more involved in the openSUSE project. Do not miss this opportunity and help us to get as much people as possible participating on the election! Unfortunately I used a wrong variable in the mail template, the appointment of additional voters ends October 9th, 2008 at 12:00 UTC. I am sorry for this, correct emails will be send soon…

Until ballots will open on October, 9th 2008 (12:00 UTC) we have now two weeks of campaigning, which should be mainly driven by the candidates themselves. Potentially there will be a public IRC debate with all candidates, but this is not set yet. If you are interested and have time to support us organizing it, please get in touch now!

Concluding I would like to thank all candidates for standing, the openSUSE board for checking more than hundret membership requests, my colleagues from the election committee and Zonker for their great support.

So why are you still reading, go and get your copy. Find the article on page 76.

There we aggregate blogs of the makers of Europe’s leading exhibition and conference on Open Source and Free Software. With our planet we want to introduce you the persons behind LinuxTag and give you some insights in the organization.

FrOSCon is a two day conference on Free Software and Open Source, taking place for the third time on August, 23rd/24th 2008 at the Fachhochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin near the cities of Bonn and Cologne.

I was asked to give a presentation on my research I am doing for my thesis. Please join me on Sunday at 11:15 in lecture room HS5 on my talk “Who can you trust - a trust metric for the openSUSE build service”. I will present my concept for integrating a community contributed user rating into the OBS to support collaboration and improve security in this distributed package building system.

Besides this you can find me most of the time at the openSUSE community booth in the exhibition area. I am looking forward to see you there!

Update: many LinuxTag core team members will be around. As far as I know you also can meet Elke, Florian, Guido, Michael, Oliver and Wolfgang this weekend in Sankt Augustin.

Hence I asked the organizers if they can provide the openSUSE project some space for an openSUSE booth and generously they agreed to this. Now I am looking for volunteers from the openSUSE community to support me driving the booth. You should have solid knowledge on openSUSE, be an outgoing personality and enjoy to share your know how with visitors.

To get an impression how much fun FrOSCon will be, have a look at more than 600 photos from the initial two events at flickr. I know no other event that offers for example a bouncing castle, free drinks for pre-registered visitors and a 5 Euro Kölsch-Flatrate at the social event.

If you have some spare time during the weekend on August, 23rd to 24th and would like to come to Sankt Augustin (nearby Bonn/Germany), you should not miss the possibility to participate at one of the coolest free software events in Germany. So hurry up and drop me a few lines and add yourself to the event coordination page in the openSUSE wiki. Thank you for supporting openSUSE!

I would like to thank especially all system administrators which support my work and keep the stuff running. For my work at SUSE/Novell this mainly is the SUSE R&D-Admin team. Kudos to Thomas and his crew for being available all the time and handling all kinds of requests very fast, efficient and straightforward. I deeply appreciate your work! Of course I also would like to express my thankfulness to all people at Novell’s IS&T.

As a user of the openSUSE Build Service I also depend on the work from some of my colleagues from my team and department. I am grateful for being able to use such a fast, reliable and innovative service.

The LinuxTag-Admin team, which is completely volunteer driven, also deserves my gratitude. I would like to mention our team lead Kester and moreover Stefan and Michael from Speedpartner for sponsoring infrastructure and joining our team.

Furthermore I am fortunate to have Emme as my friend - it is highly reassuring to know you have someone to ask in cases you need a dam good tip or just another crazy idea to find another approach to a problem. The hack-nights with you have always been very inspiring!

Last but not least I send my greetings to my former colleagues and friends at the MPII.

This article does not go much into particular neither explains concrete implementation details. Main target of this proposal is to have a basis for discussion. The article even goes beyond the focus on trust and proposes some additional metrics to support openSUSE users in their decision from which repositories they should obtain their software packages.

Within the next weeks I would like to discuss this with you. So if you are interested in this topic please contact me. Any suggestions, feedback or critics are highly appreciated.

By setting the following two values you can reduce this to two clicks:

• browser.ssl_override_behaviour = 2
• browser.xul.error_pages.expert_bad_cert = true

Then Firefox 3 behaves like it’s predecessor and you are not bugged by every self signed certificate. By the way: you should import CAcert.orgs root certificate at least for identifying websites into the keyring of your browser.

Kudos to Robin for mentioning the second configuration option to save another click!