Virtual easter eggs

Easter eggs are fun. A special kind of them are winter easter eggs (do you still call this easter egg?). In the spirit of this tradition we added some snow to SUSE Studio last week. Now when booting a virtual appliance in SUSE Studio's testdrive today, the openSUSE boot screen was all snow with some penguins wandering around. What a splendid coincidence. I guess you can call this a virtual easter egg. Fun :-)

Looking forward to real snow now.

By the way, did you notice that you can stop the snow in SUSE Studio?

Build openSUSE 11.2 appliances in SUSE Studio

We released support to build openSUSE 11.2 appliances in SUSE Studio today. It took a bit of time to sort out all issues and do proper QA, but now it should work fine. If you find remaining problems please let us know.

Many of you will want to migrate existing appliances using an older version of openSUSE to 11.2. In many cases it's probably not a lot of work to recreate the appliance from scratch with openSUSE 11.2 as a new base, but that's clearly not a good solution for all cases. So we are working on a way to automatically migrate appliances to a newer base system. We'll let you know when it's done.

And now for something completely different: It's snowing in SUSE Studio land.

Opportunity for intership at KDE e.V.

KDE e.V., the non-profit organization which represents, supports, and provides governance to KDE has grown significantly over the last couple of years. In 2008 we hired Claudia Rauch as part-time business manager taking care of event management, partner communication, and organizational support. Since beginning of 2009 she works full-time for us, and in August this year we opened a joint office with the Free Software Foundation Europe in Berlin, Germany's enthralling capital.

To continue this growth and being able to increase KDE e.V.'s support for the KDE community and free software, we are looking for an intern in the area of event management, business, and communication for the Berlin office. Read the full job description for details.

This internship is an exciting opportunity for passionate candidates to gain some experience with working in a high-performing non-profit organization on the topic of free software in general and KDE in particular. If you are interested in the position, please send your application to the board of KDE e.V.. If you know other people who might be interested, please point the to the job description as well.

openSUSE 11.2 and SUSE Studio

Last week we celebrated the release of openSUSE 11.2, the latest incarnation our fine green Linux distribution. It's a great release. People seem to like it. One quote: "OpenSuse stands out as a fine example of what a Linux desktop operating system can be."

Here at the SUSE Studio team we got quite some requests when openSUSE 11.2 will be available in SUSE Studio. Rest assured: We are working on it. There is some infrasructure to adapt, importing repositories, updating templates, upgrading Kiwi, and we are also planning to add a feature to migrate openSUSE 11.1 appliances to openSUSE 11.2, so you don't have to start from scratch, when you want to make use of the latest openSUSE for your existing appliances. It will need a little bit of time, but we'll add the support over the next few weeks.

So stay tuned, you'll soon be able to make use of all the openSUSE 11.2 goodness in SUSE Studio as well. I'm looking forward to what you will come up with.

4,273,291 lines of code

4,273,291 lines of code, that's the size of the KDE core modules, which are released as the official KDE software distribution, as of today, the numbers generated using David A. Wheeler's SLOCCount. Of course we all know about the problems with counting lines of code, but I still find it interesting to run these statistics from time to time. I was doing so tonight, and thought, when I do so, I can just as well share the data with the world.


Please see this as an interesting but not too significant data point about what's going in KDE, and don't forget that removing code is one of the finest tasks of a developer.

Of course these four million lines of code are only a part of all the KDE code that is written. There are tons of applications which are not part of the standard KDE distribution, but are just as great. Would be interesting to do the complete statistics, but this is hard. How to get hold of all KDE source code which exists?

Concluding random data point: SLOCCount thinks that it costs $ 175,364,716 to develop the code of the KDE core modules.

KDE Showcase

This week there is the openSUSE Conference in Nuremberg. There is a lot of activity planned, and as there will be quite some people there from both the KDE and openSUSE communities, I thought it would be a good idea to use that opportunity to work on a project I always wanted to spend some time on: Creating a KDE Showcase.

The idea is to create a live system, which shows KDE as it's meant to be. Based on openSUSE, but with plain upstream KDE packages, augmented with some demo data and configuration, this system can be used to show KDE at trade shows, be given to users as a teaser, provide a reference for press people looking at KDE, and lot of other cases, where you want to show KDE in all its glory.

A couple of years ago I made a screenshot for a contest showing KDE 3.1.5 in action:


This screenshot was a success, and won me a price., Now, five years later, I would like to do it again with current technology. Not only doing a screenshot, but a whole live system, and of course with the latest KDE 4.3.1.

We'll have a small team at the conference, which will work on creating KDE Showcase. If you would like to join the fun, there is a session on Thursday afternoon as part of the unconference. Or just contact me directly. Ideas and other input are more than welcome. We'll collect what we are doing at the KDE Showcase wiki page.

How to build a KDE 4.3 distro with SUSE Studio

Last week SUSE Studio was launched, and this week KDE 4.3 was released. They make a great combination. With SUSE Studio you can build a KDE 4.3 distro in just a few minutes. Here are the instructions how to do it.


SUSE Studio provides openSUSE 11.1 as a base template. By default it comes with KDE 4.1, but in the openSUSE Build Service, there are the latest KDE packages available. To build a distro using them, just follow these steps:

• Go to your home page in SUSE Studio, click the "create new appliance" button, select the openSUSE KDE 4 template, choose a fancy name and click the "create appliance" button. You'll end up in the appliance editor.
• Go to the software tab, click on "Add repositories", search for "KDE4", and then add the repository "KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop openSUSE_11.1".
• Go back to the software selection, and remove the pattern "kde4", and the package "kde4-kdm-branding-openSUSE".
• Search for "KDE 4.3", add add the pattern "KDE 4.3 Default Desktop".
• If you prefer the original KDE branding over the openSUSE branding, replace the packages whose names end with "branding-openSUSE" by those ending in "branding-upstream".
• Do whatever other modifications you would like to do (for example uploading a beautiful wallpaper, or select some of your favorite applications), go to the build tab, and click "Build".
• Wait a couple of minutes (could be slightly longer, if the system is very loaded), and you are done. You can download or testdrive your new KDE 4.3 distro now.

As an example I've build a live CD with KDE 4.3 and the original KDE branding. You can download it from the Studio site.