Becoming familar with an open source project's code base can be quite overwhelming, especially for new developers.

While we tried our best to document the steps required for setting up a development environment and our contribution process, the next question usually is "where do I start?".

In the past days, we went through our Jira bug tracker and tried to identify a number of relatively easy tasks that would be suitable for new developers to become familar with the code base and processes involved. We've collected them on a dedicated Wiki page titled Low hanging fruit tasks.

These should be fairly simple and isolated tasks, so they would be ideal for someone to dip his toes into the water.

If you're looking for something to hone your skills and expertise, these might be a good start. If you're interested on working on any of these, please let us know!

I have found two really useful things this morning.

1. I didn't know that I can configure profiles within Thunderbird. Just start Thunderbird with -p to create several profiles:

   thunderbird -p
   

2. With PhoneLite it's possible to connect to your Fritzbox and use all the "phone" functionality at your computer. Now there's no need for a mobile device at the home office any more.

FrOSCon, the annual Free and Open Source Conference, takes place on August 20th and 21st in St. Augustin, Germany.

It is our great pleasure to be present there again - the openATTIC team will have a booth in the exhibition area. it-novum, the company that sponsors the openATTIC development, is also a proud Silver Sponsor of the event.

We'll be showcasing the latest development version of openATTIC, including the latest Ceph management features.

You will also be able to participate in a quiz contest for two Raspberry Pi 3 Model B single board computers, so please stop by at our exhibition desk if you want to join!

I will also give an overview talk about openATTIC 2.0 (in German), highlighting the latest changes and features as well as an outlook into future development plans.

We look forward to being there again!

Today, I enabled the RSS feed on the blog.

You can subscribe to that feed via https://blog.openattic.org/rss.xml.

Moreover, every time a new post gets created and published on our blog, there will be a notification in our IRC channel #openattic on freenode, too.

The openATTIC team visited the SUSE Headquarters in Nuremberg last week, to take part in the 14th annual SUSE Hackweek.

For us, it was a good opportunity to meet with some of the engineers from the SUSE Enterprise Storage Team in person, to further discuss implementation details of the Ceph Monitoring and Management features in openATTIC, look at some UI prototypes and to learn more about each other's ongoing projects and requirements.

Read more…

Yesterday, I gave a webinar about managing Ceph and Storage with openATTIC for the SUSE Monthly Open Source Talks. In case you missed it, a recording of the session is now available from the "on demand" section of that web site.

I really enjoyed giving this presentation and sharing an update about the current state of development with the audience. In fact, I got somewhat carried away, so I nearly ran out of time! Unfortunately this left no time for doing Q&A after the presentation, I apologize for that. However, we took note of all your questions, which I will answer below.

Read more…

For your information, I'll be talking about Ceph and storage management with openATTIC on Wednesday, July 6th at 17:00 CEST (15:00 UTC) at the SUSE Monthly Open Source Talks (MOST) Webinar.

In this webinar session, I'll be giving an overview about openATTIC, e.g. features and architecture. I will also talk about the state of the Ceph management and monitoring functionality and our future plans.

There will be a opportunity to ask questions or post comments during the webinar and I'd be happy to comment on them.

An in case you can't make it to the session: the recording will be available on demand afterwards, too.

See you there!

This tutorial will show you how to install Etherpad on Debian Jessie.

The following command will install all necessary packages:

apt-get install gzip git-core curl python libssl-dev pkg-config \
        build-essential python g++ make checkinstall \
        nginx-full mysql-server

Read more…

We now have our own etherpad hosted on etherpad.openattic.org.

Enjoy your collaborative editing in really real-time.

Last week, I attended the openSUSE Conference 2016 in Nuremberg, to give a presentation about Ceph and Storage Management with openATTIC. Thanks a lot for the conference organizers for inviting me, I had a good time there!

The sessions were also streamed live and they uploaded the recordings to C3TV and YouTube in record time, much appreciated!

The video of my presentation can be found here (C3TV) and here (YouTube):

I also uploaded my slide deck to SlideShare:

Enjoy!