July 2008 - openSUSE Marketing - openSUSE Mailing Lists

[opensuse-marketing] openSUSE @ FrOSCon - call for volunteers
by Marko Jung 13 Aug '08

13 Aug '08

Hi Marketing-Team! In about four weeks a quite nice free and open source conference (FrOSCon) [1] will open it’s doors for the third time and in my opinion openSUSE should not be missed there. 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 [2]. I know no other event that offers for example a bouncing castle [3], free drinks for pre-registered visitors and a 5 Euro Kölsch-Flatrate [4] at the social event [5]. 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: http://de.opensuse.org/Events/FrOSCon/2008 Unfortunately nobody submitted a talk on openSUSE and the call for papers of course is finished, because the program [6] is already published. Fortunately there will be some lightning talks where we should participate in. Cheers! Marko [1] http://www.froscon.org/ [2] http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=froscon&m=tags [3] http://www.flickr.com/photos/quendor/1250691365/sizes/m/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/quendor/1251648496/sizes/m/ [4] http://www.flickr.com/photos/mortendk/1239800958/sizes/m/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/mortendk/1238932059/sizes/m/ [5] http://www.flickr.com/photos/mortendk/1239800086/sizes/m [6] http://programm.froscon.org/2008/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-marketing] website improvements for new users
by Andreas Demmer 11 Aug '08

11 Aug '08

Hi, I suggested some improvements for the WIKI to Zonker and he told me that the marketing mailinglist would be most probably the best place to turn to. All my suggestions here deal with the WIKI startpage (not the general "get it", "discuss", "create" doorpage although I support the discussions about a general browser-default-page centric page). IMHO the WIKI startpage needs prominent linked screenshots and something like a "desktop" tour. The Ubuntu website is a good place to get inspiration. :-) openSUSE 11 has succeeded in becoming one of the best (if not THE best) distros around, but the website is optimized for users who already know what openSUSE. The website though should reflect much more the needs of new, interested users. Therefore, we do not need to overthrow the existing design, but we need to add some informations more popular, such as screenshots, a "what can i do with openSUSE?" section and the like. The current text ("openSUSE is a project sponsored by Novell [...]") is quite gibberish for people who never hat contact to openSUSE. Even worse: In my opinion, its even not very obvious that openSUSE is a Linux-distribution and a very user-friendly one too. At least this page should much more promote the product and put the community thought in second place (without emasculating it). The text on the boxed version is a good text to show here and some really visually compelling artwork would catch the design-lovers. A "user-screenshots" section would also be nice. Spread the word how SEXY openSUSE can look. Here I made a first mockup: http://www.andreas-demmer.de/opensuse_website_mockup1.jpg It features a screenshot slider which shows some screenshots of openSUSE in action so the visitor intuitional gets an idea of what openSUSE is and what he can do with it. Here the saying is true: A picture is woth a thousand words! The slider could be implemented in JavaScript and Flash. Zonker noted, that Flash would not be such a good idea and maybe he is right. But I thought that Flash allows much more stylish effects than one can achive with JavaScript. The people we want address in the first place are most likely Windows users and therefore impressible by visual bling-bling. Maybe Flash is not such a bad idea after all. Nevertheless, I am a web-professional and can help implementing in whatever we come up here. In fact: I would love to do that! :-) My major skills are (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and the like but I have access to a whole bunch of professional screendesigners, flash developers and others. I await your feedback eagerly! Greets, Andreas -- Andreas Demmer Skype: andreas.demmer ICQ: 103 924 771 http://www.andreas-demmer.de

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[opensuse-marketing] openSUSE disks for LUGs in the UK
by Roger Whittaker 01 Aug '08

01 Aug '08

I'd like to start contacting UK LUGs with a view to sending each active LUG a number of openSUSE disks (and again after each release). If no-one else is doing this (if you are, please shout, so that we don't duplicate activities), and no-one has any objection, I'll start contacting the LUGs in the next few days. We had one request for disks from a LUG at LugRadio Live - I'll fulfil that request tomorrow. I'm doing this as an openSUSE volunteer, but as I'm also employed by Novell, that will help with logistics. -- ======================== Roger Whittaker roger(a)disruptive.org.uk http://disruptive.org.uk ======================== -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-marketing] openSUSE channel on Blip.tv
by Andrew Wafaa 24 Jul '08

24 Jul '08

Throwing this question to the floor before I'm too hasty and sort it out off of my own back. Do people think it would be a good idea to create an "official" channel on Blip.tv to host any openSUSE related video? Users are able to subscribe to the channel using a variety of apps, and it is available for all easily. Videos can be played in the browser and get embedded into posts, downloaded etc. Jakub Steiner has created his own channel to show screen casts for Tango related items. The channel could not only host the official videos from the likes of FOSDEM etc, but also any screencasts etc. Regards, Andy -- Andrew Wafaa, openSUSE Member: GNOME & Marketing Teams. http://opensuse.org/GNOME | http://en.opensuse.org/Marketing_Team openSUSE: Get It, Discover It, Create It at http://www.opensuse.org awafaa(a)opensuse.org http://www.wafaa.eu | http://www.forcev.net -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-marketing] seneca college, where are we?
by Stephen Shaw 22 Jul '08

22 Jul '08

Seneca college has teamed up with mozilla and fedora to generate an open source based style degree if I read it right. Not sure if this article mentions it, but Carnegie Mellon is backing this as well. http://www.linux.com/feature/140097 Stephen -- Some people are like slinkies. Not really good for anything but they bring a smile to your face when pushed down the stairs. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-marketing] LugRadio Live event
by Roger Whittaker 22 Jul '08

22 Jul '08

For the record: Andrew Wafaa and I had a Novell/openSUSE stall at the LugRadio Live event at Wolverhampton in England at the weekend. We gave away a large number of openSUSE 11.0 disks and geekos (thanks Zonker) and generally flew the openSUSE flag. Andrew did a half hour talk about the openSUSE project and community which was well attended. See also: http://lizards.opensuse.org/2008/07/21/lrl-uk-08-not-the-last/ http://disruptive.org.uk/2008/07/20/lugradio_live_2008_-_wolverhampton.html -- ======================== Roger Whittaker roger(a)disruptive.org.uk http://disruptive.org.uk ======================== -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-marketing] opensuse updater
by manchette 15 Jul '08

15 Jul '08

Hello all, I've got this tendency to think that features like opensuse updater are very convenient and can help the new (and old) users in their everyday updates process, but it looks to me so far that this function does exactly the opposit for it often times has problems... (and users are expecting it too work fluently, may be xrongly ? ) . Too bad , which i do not understand. I often have problems, which origin i'm not quite sure of and can be of various kinds : the open suse updater in itself, wrongly packaged rpms dependencies missing problems with repositories and so on ... Well, this might be a complicated subject to detect, analyse and solve for it continues. In my opinion a lack in this distro (even though people often skip this applet and use yast or zypper and the like all users are not able to do so, or do not wish to, i very often read questions asking for help about this applet including my owns , i'm thinking of problems with updating firefox which is a very commonly package and thus problem met, and recently opensuse education repo being a inconvenient ). Please let me know if i'm completely wrong or misunderstood something (?) Is there a process already on to list and solve these problems ? I'm sure this could market positively for openSUSE ;) i'm so sorry i can't provide you a patch or the like as i'm not technically skilled enough . Thanks Fabrice -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-marketing] www.opensuse-tutorials.com
by Stephen Shaw 14 Jul '08

14 Jul '08

This is something that sontek (John Anderson) and myself (decriptor/Stephen Shaw) had talked about doing for a long time and bought up the domain back in the beginning of April. This is what happens when you have nothing better to do during physics class :) Anyways, around here there are a couple guys, one that started ubuntu-tutorials.com which has been really successful for him and a fedora guy that followed suit and started fedora-tutorials.com. We figured it only fair to start opensuse-tutorials.com. We finally got around to updating our theme (wordpress; we aren't married to the theme and open to suggestions) and talking about what content we wanted up there. We were talking about some screencasts and tutorials in general, but wanted to have about 4 or so up there before we really announced it. Zonker mentioned that I should announce it on here and see where we could all work together. So here it is. So far sontek, suseROCKS, jzb, and myself(decriptor) are on there. Stephen Shaw decriptor -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-marketing] LugRadio Live UK?
by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier 14 Jul '08

14 Jul '08

Hi all, We're going to have a Novell/openSUSE booth at LugRadio Live this year - and I know that Andrew and Roger Whittaker are planning to attend - anyone else from the -marketing list going to LRL? Best, Zonker -- Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier openSUSE Community Manager http://zonker.opensuse.org/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-marketing] default webbrowser's startpage
by Rupert Horstkötter 02 Jul '08

02 Jul '08

All, What do you do when starting firefox for the first time after a fresh installation of openSUSE 11.0? I for myself change the homepage to something else (google). I think that the default startpage http://www.opensuse.org isn't very useful for the average user in everyday's use. I thought about implementing something like http://start.ubuntu.com/8.04 for openSUSE 11.1 - on the one hand this page offers the ability to search the web - IMO the most commonly used homepages (google, yahoo or whatever) nowadays, on the other hand it's a great way to promote openSUSE especially to new users not that familiar with the openSUSE services. Ok, we have that greeter at the first boot, but I think most users will instantly click close and that's it :) With such a startpage in the webbrowser we'd have the ability to raise the attention to the wiki, forums, OBS, bugzilla, the most common IRC support channels etc etc. Maybe a brief overview over the openSUSE project would be possible and last but definitely not least, we could extend the google search engine with a custom search for all openSUSE services - in that way that the user could click "search openSUSE" or "search the web". Most likely there are even more possibilities I cannot imagine yet. Unfortunately I haven't the required programming skills to create such a website, but I think there'll be others creating it with few effort. I'm in a serious hope that new users will keep this startpage at least longer as the current one. What do you think about it? Best, Rupert -- Rupert Horstkötter, openSUSE Community Email: rhorstkoetter(a)opensuse.org Phone: +49 6151 7897817 Mobile: +49 176 21820039 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help(a)opensuse.org

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