After months of work, openSUSE 11.1 is now available. It's of course full of coolness inside, so you know you want to try it! Yep, go download it!

What's interesting about this openSUSE release, and what gets me really excited, is that it's the first release that has been mainly developed with the build service, which also means that we started growing our developer community for real! To put it simply, if there's something that you don't like in a openSUSE package, you can fix it: it's now trivial for everybody to submit an update.

And of course we're already planning the 11.2 development: there's a lively discussion around the 11.2 schedule, and I'm really happy to see the community jump in to give feedback there. Exciting times!

The answer is, of course, that you're going to Brussels for the FOSDEM. And as usual, GNOME will be there. Christophe took care of everything and we'll have a devroom (GNOME-only on Saturday, shared for cross-desktop talks on Sunday, as we did in the past few years) and a booth this year again! I created some wiki pages about the GNOME presence at FOSDEM a few minutes ago (yeah for copy & paste!), but I guess they need some more work.

I guess there will be a call for presentation so we can have an amazing week-end in the devroom, and you can already start thinking about stuff you can talk about there. Christophe will handle all that. While the devroom looks good, we have an issue with the booth right now: so far, we don't have an official organizer. It'd be really nice to have someone step up and take care of organizing the presence of volunteers on the booth and of making sure that we have all the necessary materials for the booth. That's not really a hard job, and it's really a nice and effective way to contribute to our community.

So if you want to help with the organization of the GNOME presence at FOSDEM, and especially for the booth, go read Christophe's announcement and contact him!

Update: of course, blogging past midnight is not good idea. It's not February 6-7, but 7-8 :-)

Every year, in December, you start seeing a lot of articles about the big events that occurred during the year, or about delivering awards for the best whatever of the year. And when I say a lot, I think I'm underestimating the amount of those articles. Some are interesting, some are meaningful, a few are both interesting and meaningful, probably most are neither interesting nor meaningful. So when Magnus gave a link saying that openSUSE was distro of the year, I wasn't sure what to expect. It turned out to be a good surprise.

Ars Technica chose two distributions as distros of the year: Foresight and openSUSE. I honestly can't say that the choice is good or bad -- all major distros are making great progress, because they all benefit from what the various upstream projects are doing. While openSUSE is now close to my heart, I'm still fond of Debian, Fedora or Ubuntu. That's probably because I'm still very much upstream-centric in my way of looking at the free software world (and hopefully, I'll stay this way). I could probably write stuff about each distribution, telling you a few things that happened there that were great, or why I like them. But let's focus on Foresight and openSUSE.

So yeah, it's good to see openSUSE picked up as one of the distributions of the year by Ars Technica, but I wouldn't usually care much about this -- nearly everybody has its own favorite distribution because it's the best out there (always funny to see that there are more than one best distribution ;-)). However in this case, the way the project evolved during the last year was considered and that's what kept my attention; I'm really glad to see that outside people are noticing that the openSUSE community is growing, with the development being more and more open; the openSUSE distribution certainly has many qualities, but this point is the most important change for the project. At least, that's my opinion. Sure, there are still tons of things to fix in the community and in the way we develop stuff, but we're getting there. And I feel a huge difference in the openSUSE project between what it was at the beginning of the year and what it is today.

It's also great to see the work done on Foresight noticed. What I really like about Foresight is that they provide GNOME with live media for stable releases, and they do that really quickly. That's simply awesome, no need to argue. As far as I know, they're also trying to not do a lot of changes compared to upstream, so you get an upstream experience. And I love that.

But in the end, I really liked the article because it was useful to me. Really. Let me tell you why. It helped me identify a goal for next year: try to get everyone to spell out openSUSE the correct way (hint: it's not OpenSUSE, nor openSuSE, nor OpenSuSE, nor...). Yeah, after the GNOME vs Gnome war, I had to find a new spelling war ;-)

Je suis tombé sur cette page à propos du Lutèce d'Or remporté par la GNOME Foundation il y a quelques semaines. Et à l'époque, il y avait un petit je-ne-sais-quoi qui me chiffonnait. Un lecteur averti trouvera rapidement la phrase coupable de ce méfait :

CollabNet, le principal fournisseur de services de développement collaboratif de logiciels basés sur les principes de l'open source, aide à la mise en place de la Fondation GNOME.

Je restai quelques jours avec celle-ci dans un coin de ma tête, la tournant et la retournant dans tous les sens, en me demandant comment il était possible d'avoir quelque chose qui me semblait faux de manière flagrante dans un tel article. Puis je décidai de prendre une pipe, d'attraper une loupe, de jouer du violon, et finalement d'enquêter. Après avoir joué de mes talents sur un site de recherche extrêmement peu connu (en six lettres), je parvenai sur ce communiqué de presse, avec cette phrase placée innocemment au milieu d'autres phrases parfaitement innocentes :

Collab.Net, the leading provider of collaborative software development services based on open source principles, is helping to organize the GNOME Foundation.

Je découvrai rapidement qu'il existe un second communiqué de presse mentionnant Collab.Net. La phrase avait donc une origine valide ; l'enquête pouvait ainsi être enfin close, le mystère étant résolu.

Reste cependant une interrogation : ces deux communiqués de presse datant de 2000, à l'occasion de la création de la GNOME Foundation, comment une phrase datant de huit ans, qui n'est plus d'actualité a pu apparaitre dans cet article. Je crains que ce nouveau mystère reste irrésolu, et désormaus seules des hypothèses, telles qu'une écriture quelque peu trop rapide de l'article en question, peuvent être évoquées.

Some people might remember SuperSonic Imagine as one of the sponsors of GUADEC this year. If this is your case, I guess your reaction was but who are those people?, and what is their relationship with GNOME? Which is understandable, since they're working in the medical imaging field: that's not really where you expect GNOME to be, do you? If you read a bit about the company, you can easily find out that they are building a platform to measure and visualize tissue elasticity (I'm quoting from the website) and one of the application is breast cancer diagnosis.

It turns out SuperSonic Imagine has been building a product around this: it's a system called Aixplorer. Mmmh, I could try to give details about their product, but I would probably be caught just repeating what I can see on their website ;-) It contains some information about the product and the medical technologies it's based on, and there's also a brochure with some details. Anyway, back to the topic: there's quite some free software inside this system, including the usual suspects from the GNOME platform. It also looks like they're big fans of cairo, and they're using a compositing manager based on cairo. They're working on putting the relevant source code and patches up somewhere, but I guess most (all?) of the interesting stuff is already available, for people who don't want to wait.

It's quite exciting to see free software used in such a field, and to think that it contributes to have an impact on the life of people we never thought of. Oh, and I heard that users can see the GNOME logo when the system boots. Extremely cool :-)