openSUSE, Hedgewars, syslog-ng, oyranus, ownCloud are moving GSOC along!! Participate and Submit your proposals Fast!!!

[](//news.opensuse.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/400px-GSOC_2013_logo.jpg)_A message from the openSUSE GSOC team

Many of you must already have seen the news: openSUSE has made it to the list of 177 organizations participating in this years edition of the Google Summer of Code! Like in previous years, we have a few other projects join us, including ownCloud, Oyranos and Hedgewars. The four of us have loads of great ideas lined up and we’re looking forward to the proposals! Read on to find out about GSOC, the plans and how to be a part of it!

GSOC 2013

For those unfamiliar with GSOC, the Google Summer of Code is an annual program paying students to write code for open source projects. It gives a chance for college students to hack on really cool stuff and learn a lot in the process. You can read all about it on our wiki page.

Introductions

Several projects collaborate under the Green Umbrello. We have a large number of cool ideas around cloud, OBS, virtualization and more and we’d like to introduce you to the projects behind them!

ownCloud We all live with our head in the Cloud these days. ownCloud is all about making sure YOU own that cloud! You don’t want to loose your head, don’t you? Originating from the KDE community, ownCloud these days has a company behind it to move development forward. Still very much true to its slogan “Your Cloud, Your Data, Your Way!”, the team recently released ownCloud 5.0. This awesome PHP server application is easy to deploy, yet you can entrust it with your files. It will make sure they are synchronized between all your devices, lets you share them with friends or access them via a web interface. It has fancy features like versioning and undeleting of files, support for external storage, galleries, calendaring and offers a great API to build your own apps in. That might very well be where you can come help out: building a ownCloud app isn’t as hard as you think it is! App developers would also benefit from API’s to use maps in their apps - so the API itself could use your efforts too. Go and check out the ideas for ownCloud to pick your poison!

Cross-distribution ideas In real openSUSE tradition, we have a series of awesome cross-distribution ideas. Want to help us improve our (and others!) Github code review process? Also tired of the work it takes to build AppArmor profiles and agree there should be a tool? Want to help get the Fcitx input method in Wayland? If you’re more of a virtualized person, maybe you’re willing to help out get libvirt support for xenlight (libxl) up to musterd. There is plenty to do which will benefit not just the Geekos but all of Free Software and we’re happy to support that!

Open Build Service Building everything, everywhere, the Open Build Service has grown to service over 30.000 packagers delivering 200K packages to users around the world. Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE - on OBS the lights are all Green, for everyone. OBS is a server, firing up Virtual Machines to build packages whenever it encounters work coming in via the web- or command line interfaces or due to changes in other packages. This web interface is looking for a facelift, while packagers would stand to benefit from the possibility of users providing feedback and comments to the work they do. The team is looking towards YOU to help make these and more possible, check out the OBS ideas section to find out what you can do!

syslog-ng syslog-ng is a premier logging tool, able to collect, store and show details on what is going on many systems. You’re the type of person who wants to be in the know? Want to make sure syslog-ng can store its data in MySQL? Send it to XMPP services? Or you rather secure the logs by signing them? Take a look at the syslog-ng ideas for these and more suggestions!

Hedgewars IT IS TIME FOR WAR! Assemble a crack team of pink hedgehogs and battle your way up from the depths of hell to the vastness of space! Hedgewars is FUN, a great match to the Geeko. Offering a turn based strategy, artillery, action and comedy game with attitude, the Hedgehogs are looking for help. No Piano strike is complete without some proper testing, there’s work to do on the intelligence of the enemy armies and conversions to 3D technologies like WebGL and OpenGL-ES. Check out the Hedgewars ideas on our wiki if you’d like to become part of the army!

Oyranos Color Management Surely you figured out that colors are not that simple when you played with paint at school. There is this strange difference between mixing colors on a screen and in paint and all these weird ‘color spaces’ like CMYK which printers bother you with. If all this is not strange to you or you’d like to dive into it, Oyranos is your thing! This project delivers color management on the operating system level, matching input and output device colors across applications. In short, it makes sure that when you paint a pretty pink pony, it won’t be printed bloody red but exactly the gorgeous pink you intended! As we all love ponies, it is clear that this is a crucial part of a modern operating system and improvements are always welcome. The project looks for hackers to help GNOME users get their Pink Ponies and get support for ICC databases built. Check the Oyranos ideas to see how you can help!

openSUSE Projects Of course, there are projects more unique for openSUSE-the-distribution. If your ownCloud seems too simple, how about playing with the Big Boys for a while? We’ve got excellent support for OpenStack but there is room for improvement in our CloudStack and Eucalyptus support! We are also looking for somebody who wants to dive into filesystems and help us get LVM volumes to resize automatically. There are plenty more ideas around, check out the wiki and come make a difference!

Let’s GOOOOOO!

If any of the ideas above or from the wiki or something you cooked up yourself seem like worth doing, start talking to mentors. We prefer to see something from you, both in terms of communication AND in terms of code, so don’t be afraid to submit a bugfix or start hacking. Even if we do not have enough GSOC slots, we will be more than happy to mentor you and help you find your way in the wonderful world of openSUSE. Keep an eye on the timeline to make sure you don’t miss any deadlines but most importantly: get crackin’!

The GSOC team:

• Matt Barringer

• Manu Gupta

• Saurabh Sood

They usually hang out on IRC at #opensuse-project on freenode where you can ask them or the other openSUSE folk all the questions you have.