Good news, everybody! iFolder client packages are now available for openSUSE 11.1 from the openSUSE update repositories. This means you can install iFolder client on openSUSE 11.1 using YaST or zypper, without any modifications to your installed system.

Like openSUSE, iFolder is an open source project sponsored by Novell. iFolder is a simple and secure storage solution that can make syncing and sharing files easy. You can back up, access, and manage your personal files from anywhere, at any time. Once you have installed iFolder, you simply save your files locally and iFolder automatically updates the files on a network server and delivers them to the other machines you use.

To install iFolder, just fire up YaST’s Software Manager and search for “ifolder3″, or open a terminal and type the following:

sudo zypper ref sudo zypper in ifolder3

It’s amazing how quickly four days can zoom by! LinuxTag 2009 is now in the rearview, so how did it go? By any objective measure, LinuxTag 2009 was a bit of a mixed bag. It drew a quality crowd, but smaller than last year (which by many accounts was smaller than the year before) and fewer exhibitors than the year before as well.

Part of this can be blamed squarely on the economy, and part of it lies with the fact that Linux is no longer the exciting new kid on the block technology.

Community Shows / Regional Shows Rule

So far this year I’ve attended seven eight nine events (that I can recall off the top of my head, anyway — there may have been more) related to Linux and open source:

The traffic picked up quite a bit yesterday at LinuxTag. The openSUSE booth was much busier. Still not quite swamped, but a good crowd and lots of good questions.

It looks like we’ll be getting some of the community leaders around RPM together at the openSUSE Conference in September. Had a talk with an RPM.org developer, and he seemed interested in coming to the conference in September and working with openSUSE developers on RPM. So I’m hoping we can finally pull off an “RPM Summit” at the conference and make some steps towards a harmonized RPM at some point.

Also went to the Friends of Qt (pronounced “cute,” by the way) dinner. To say that the food was good and plentiful would be a serious understatement. Fantastic pasta and pizza, and it just kept coming. If you’re ever in Berlin, definitely check out 12 Apostles, great restaurant!

Please see below the Meeting Minutes of the openSUSE Board. We welcome any feedback and recommend to use the opensuse-project mailing list so more people can participate. As always the openSUSE Board is reachable through board@openSUSE.org

June 3, 7-9:15pm UTC Participants: Stephen Shaw, (decriptor) Federico Mena Quintero, (federico1) Hendrik Vogelsang, (henne) Michael Löffler, (michl) Bryen Yunashko, (suseROCKs) Pascal Bleser, (yaloki) Joe Brockmeier, (zonker)

List of topics: * Ambassador program Announced and already pretty many people signed in for it.

* Foundation Zonker and michl will meeting with a Novell expert on such stuff on Monday June 9 to evaluate which possibilities we have and which way openSUSE should take.

* Membership requests We are too lame, 15 requests out of the last round are waiting for more than 4 weeks for final approval now. Just another 70 requests were imported into the tool today.

The Kablink team has released 2.0 of the Kablink teaming platform.This release includes an updated user interface, advanced workflow features, an “expertise locator,” and tools for users to define what is (and isn’t) relevant to them.

What is Kablink? Kablink is an open source collaboration platform that is the foundation of Novell’s Teaming + Conferencing products. It’s a “total” collaboration tool that integrates blogs, wikis, forums, document sharing, and workflow features for teams that need an integrated collaboration platform rather than a piecemeal set of collaboration tools that only solve part of the collaboration puzzle.

The 2.0 release is ready for download — you’ll find a Linux installer, a VMware image, and Windows installer (if you insist) on the Kablink Web site.

Questions about Kablink? Touch base with Brent McConnell, who’s the community manager for Kablink and the ever-popular iFolder.

LinuxTag is going well so far, but tomorrow will be the big day! The openSUSE Day takes place tomorrow (Saturday, June 27th) at LinuxTag, and we have a full track of excellent talks that will be of interest to new users as well as openSUSE contributors and users.

openSUSE Day kicks off at 10:00 a.m. (a completely reasonable and sane time, plenty of time to grab breakfast and coffee even if you’ve been to social events the evening before!) with a break for the LinuxTag keynotes between 13:00 and 15:00. Here’s the rest of the schedule:

The good news is that Microsoft is writing extensions for Firefox. The bad news is, the Redmond giant is slipping the extension onto systems without notifying users and making it difficult to get rid of the extension. Even worse? It’s an extension that allows Web sites to install software onto users’ PCs behind the scenes — meaning that Firefox users on Windows may not be as safe as they think.

Brian Krebs, who originally recommended the .Net Framework that sneaks the extension into Firefox writes:

Anyway, I’m sure it’s not the end of the world, but it’s probably infuriating to many readers nonetheless. Firstly — to my readers — I apologize for overlooking this…”feature” of the .NET Framework security update. Secondly — to Microsoft — this is a great example of how not to convince people to trust your security updates.

Matt Asay excorates the whining masses that are taking Twitter to task for its ill-considered removal of the @replies feature. Asay says “pay money so that you actually have the right to voice your displeasure as a customer rather than as a user.” However, Asay misses a glaringly obvious point here — Twitter hasn’t given anybody the ability to pay up.

In general, I do agree with Asay that being a user isn’t enough to give someone the right to complain — or, at least, the right to be taken seriously. For open source projects, there needs to be some kind of consideration before taking a seat at the table — either as a contributor or customer. If you’re putting in sweat equity to a project, rather than cold hard cash, you should be taken seriously.

How do you enable “the wisdom of crowds”? Part of the power of community is that a group of people can solve problems much more easily than individuals, but only if you can provide tools that make it possible for them to do so and appeal to their own interests.

Derek Powazek has an interesting post over on A List Apart that details some of the components necessary for “a crowd to be wise.” According to Powazek, you have to have simplicity, a clean interface, aggregation, and a group of people who are thinking about their own needs:

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