Shiny new openSUSE and WordPress toys to play with

Happy solstice all! It’s summer in the northern hemisphere, and open source development teams are busy kicking out new versions before going on holiday. Of most importance to readers of this blog are this past week’s release of WordPress 3.0, aka Thelonious, and the first release candidate of openSUSE 11.3.

If you haven’t rushed to pull these down (or been nagged to do so by your WordPress.org dashboard), here are your links:

WordPress 3.0 + Announcement Post

openSUSE 11.3 RC1 + Announcement Post

In some ways, even more exciting than the software releases was the release for discussion of a Strategy for the openSUSE Project. This is a proposal from the openSUSE community board (composed of equal parts Novell employees and elected community members) to create a future for this distribution and its community.

Note that each statement contains three lists of activities describing current activities the openSUSE Project does and possible future activities (or tasks). The first list (“We need to be excellent in the following”) describes the items that we want to do really excellent and better than everybody else. The second list (“We will try to do the following effectively”) are needed to do but we don’t need to strive for excellence, just for effectiveness. The third list (“We will not focus on the following anymore”) are activities we will not do at all as part of the project but rather rely on other FOSS projects.

This is exciting because it represents a serious opportunity for openSUSE users and community participants to have a say in the direction of the distribution, and a significant sector of the Linux community as a whole. If you care at all about Linux generally, and openSUSE in particular, head first for the wiki page to read the documents. Then head for the openSUSE Forums and have your say.

Between assorted family obligations and some wacky DSL issues at my house this weekend, I haven’t had much time to play with any of these toys (or read the strategy documents). I did upgrade MichaelMcCallister.com to WordPress 3.0 with no hassle, but haven’t implemented any of the new features. I’m upgrading my openSUSE install on VirtualBox Tuesday, and hope to have a summary of that later this week. With some good fortune, I’ll get the strategy documents read this week too. You’ll certainly see more about that here. Meanwhile, feel free to contribute your own ideas on any of these items (or the coming of summer, for that matter) in that Comments box below.