OpenSUSE Made Good Progress This Summer

Thanks to the Google Summer of Code, the openSUSE distribution made progress on several fronts.

Nine students were active this summer in advancing openSUSE features through the popular GSoC program. Work this year included a "beautiful" one-click install, a complete AppStream/Software-Center with PackageKit, a karma plug-in for openSUSE Connect, an Open Build Service osc2 client, a popularity conest program for RPM packages (similar to Debian's popcon), a re-designed fdisk, a Ruby on Rails securty scanner, an upstream/downstream tracker, and writable EXT4 snapshot support.

Bringing Ubuntu's Software Center to other Linux distributions such as openSUSE involved more work to PackageKit than to the software itself. A new library was also created for handling AppStream meta-data. The redesigned fdisk program came down to cleaning up and modernizing it, making it more extensible, easier to support more disk labels, and basic support for the GPT disk label. The other interesting work was done to add writable snapshot support to the EXT4 file-system. EXT4 writable snapshots now work, but there needs to be wider testing done plus integration work by distribution vendors.

Over at news.opensuse.org is a recap of these summer projects.