Report from Fosscomm 2011

FOSSCOMM 2011 was held in Patras on the 7 to 8 May from Patras Linux User Group (PLUG) and the Department of Computer Engineering & Information Technology (Computer Laboratory / Computer Center), University of Patras. The conference was very interesting with several additional speeches, several parallel events (booths from communities and projects, parallel talks, workshops) and live streaming.

The Greek openSUSE community has united to present this two-day conference in Patras. There, we met people from other communities, discussed and promoted openSUSE and FOSS.


The community participated at the conference with the following presentations and parallel events:

Saturday, May 7,


Presentation by Bruno Friedmann, for the openSUSE project and its future.

Presentation by George Bratsos for the release of openSUSE 11.4 and the new technologies and innovations brought by the distribution.

Presentation by Kostas Koudaras who presented the Greek openSUSE community and their actions, the project dealt with and the events it has organized.

Presentation by George Koutsikos, for the Enlightenment Project.

Presentation by Athanasios Elias Rousinopoulos about a subproject of openSUSE, the openSUSE Medical, which contains tools used by the branch of medicine.

Presentation by Efstathios Iossifidis about the Greek Gnome community and the release of Gnome 3 and the new technologies and innovations.

Lighting Talks by members of the Greek openSUSE community about sub-projects with which we participate, but also things that we do all together.
Introducing YaST (Efstathios Agrapidis),
Add / Remove software in openSUSE (Athanasios - Elias Rousinopoulos),
Weekly News - The Greek way (Efstathios Agrapidis),
Evergreen Project (George Tsiapaliokas),
Tumbleweed Project (George Bratsos),
KDE Akokandi (Antonis Tsiapaliokas),
Guidelines for mariners, using openSUSE Community tools (Efstathios Iosifidis).


Sunday, May 8,


Presentation by Efstathios Agrapidis for the revolutionary OBS platform that solves packaging problems.

Presentation by Efstathios Iossifidis on how we can create an openSUSE distribution with SUSE Studio.

Workshop by Efstathios Agrapidis to create .deb and .rpm packages with OBS.


The openSUSE community booth was one of the largest in the organization and except the dvds, posters,, flyers, cheat-sheets etc. we co-hosted the booth of the Greek community of Gnome, the Enlightenment Project and the amazing people of other communities who were there to assist and promote their favorite project and FOSS in general.


On Saturday evening the openSUSE community had a Release party for the distribution of openSUSE 11.4 at the hotel where he resided. The party achieved its purpose because, apart from the cake we ate and the beer we drunk, we came closer to people from other communities such as the Ubuntu, Slackware, Gentoo, FreeBSD and OS-arena. At the end of the night Red Hat people visited our party, with whom we shared the same roof (hotel). :P

The workshop ended with a farewell message from the organizers of Fosscomm whom we thank for the wonderful organization even though the misfortunes of the second day which left us without power and wifi internet access for the most part.

More photos can be found in our group on facebook.