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.

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.

Unfortunately, the official website of the faculty of computer science does not provide any information on this subject. The only notice I have got is a mail from the secretary of the centre for bioinformatics, Mrs K. Jostock:

——– Original-Nachricht ——–
Betreff: Absolventenfeier
Datum: Tue, 27 May 2008 08:04:29 +0200
Von: Karin Jostock

[...] die nächste Absolventenfeier für die Informatik- und
Bioinformatikabolventinnen und -absolventen findet aus organisatorischen
Gründen nicht, wie zunächst vorgesehen, am 13.06., sondern erst am
10.07.2008 statt. Nähere Informationen entnehmen Sie bitte in Kürze den
Webseiten der Informatik. Außerdem erhalten die persönlich Betroffenen
vorher wieder eine Einladung. [..]

In my opinion this is real shame: if you expatiate upon the fact that you have won two projects within the German Excellence Initiative you should also be able to sustain the announced date of your graduation ceremony. An other well known elite university has already announced their dates until end of 2010.

Fortunately my graduation ceremony (which will be end of this year) has not yet been announced

The user interface is clear and simple but to me very appealing. I have seen the new design of the installer first at FOSDEM where the developers asked for feedback, whereby I would like to mention that nearly all ideas from the developer room in Brussels have been integrated to the current version.

After the welcome screen the installer asks the usual questions like language, keyboard layout, date, time and timezone. Then you can choose between GNOME, KDE 3.5 and KDE 4.0 and I really like the way SUSE does not give a recommendation to the user. In my opinion this solutions is the best way not to discriminate one of the big desktops.

After this choice openSUSE wants you to set-up the hard disk. Therefore the amazing partitioner suggests a new partition layout where YaST should propose a for more than 99% of all situations suitable solution. The partitioner supports LVM and Kernel-Raid and is really intuitive to use. To get LVM or RAID configured, you have to use in Ubuntu the ‘alternate desktop CD‘, which is not only text based but much complexer and for a newbie in my opinion absolutely unusable.

The next step is to configure the authentication or create a local user and set the root password. I found it quite impressive that binding to a NIS or LDAP server is extremely easy. If the it staff does their job well (as they to at SUSE) YAST takes all information from the received DHCP offer and you just have to tick a select box - even for auto mounting NFS exports. I have to admit that I dislike the possibility to login a user automagically. In my opinion this is a strange behaviour of Windows you should not copy, but probably many people are used as much to it, so that they put their habit over security. For security reasons this option should not be enabled by default.

After this all important questions are answered and YaST presents a helpful installation summary where you can change even more things like the software selection or the default run level. In case you messed it up you can reset everything to openSUSE’s defaults. The installation itself seems to me to be relatively fast. This may be due to the fact that it is based on so called base images which speed up the whole process by about 30 percent.

A well known Debian developer said that even a hen can install Debian, if you put enough corn on the enter button.Even if this rule also applies for openSUSE 11 (as for nearly every distribution), a newbie definitively would prefer the graphical installer from SUSE. If everything with openSUSE works as well as the installer I probably will just miss the .deb package format.

Find a full installation walktrough in the openSUSE wiki.

First I will start a new series: migrating Marko (from Debian and Ubuntu) to openSUSE. I started a new job as working student for SUSE Linux Products GmbH where I got an exciting research topic for writing my thesis. Even I started using Linux with SUSE (I think it was around version 11/95) I switched starting with my employment at the MPII to Debian GNU/Linux in 1999. Because I am a creature of habit I have since them rarely used SUSE. But I think it is a extremely interesting experiment to switch to a totally different distribution, not like trying Ubuntu instead of Debian.

Let us see where it ends…