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Busy Oktober

November 10th, 2010 by

Last month I went to the Ovi and KDE sprint, Qt Developer Days 2010 -both in Münich- and the openSUSE Conference 2010 in Nüremberg. It was a busy Oktober. (pictures below!)

The Ovi and KDE sprint took place at Nokia’s Münich office, where we discussed why integration between KDE and Ovi would be beneficial for both (better user experience, exposure to a large userbase). There I had the pleasure to meet lots of KDE people; Leinir, Frank Karlitschek, Chani, Myriam Schweingruber, Sascha Peilicke, Sivan Greenberg, Mark Kretschmann, Rune Jensen, Arjen Hiemstra, Jonathan, Dinesh, Krzysiek, Knut Yrvin…
After the Ovi sprint, the Qt Developer Days 2010 began. The training sessions took place the first day. Even though some exercises were skipped, I liked it. Days 2 and 3 were focused on showing how cool Qt is. I never thought QML could be that easy, powerful and straightforward. Besides all of the presentations, we also had dinner with the Trolls, played the “fact or crap” game and tried some Meego-powered devices. So yepp, I enjoyed it and I’m looking forward for the 2011 edition 🙂
BTW, /me was wearing an openSUSE t-shirt which made Martin Mohring approach me and talk to me. That way I met him.

As I said, I also attended the openSUSE Conference 2010. Dan’s connecting flight was the same as mine (what a coincidence) so we took the Zürich-Nüremberg flight together. The same day we had dinner at Barfüsser with other people who had arrived earlier. Raymond Wooninck (tittiatcoke) drove 400 km in total to join us for the dinner only! Perhaps next time he can stay for a bit longer.
I stayed at the conference hotel. Having the conference and the hotel at the same place was a great idea. The location itself wasn’t that good since it was in the outskirts of Nüremberg but hey you can’t have everything. The very first day I met more fellow contributors… many interesting conversation took place in the hallways, between talks which made me skip some presentations. Besides that, there were some interesting talks taking place at the same time, so I had to choose between one or the other. Frank and I organised a workshop, “the Open-PC case” which went well. There were many attendees interested in getting an Open-PC. I also had the chance to meet and talk with many people: Adrian Schröter and I talked about obs, Nuno Pinheiro showed me some of his Inkscape techinques, I talked with Bruno Friedmann about many things -KDE/Factory too, of course-, I discussed artwork stuff with Gnokii (S. Kemter), Nuno Pinheiro, Robert Lihm and Kai-Uwe Behrmann, testing Factory with Bernhard Wiedeman, how to improve the documentation’s visibility with the Documentation team (Frank, Thomas, Katja, Jürgen) KDE stuff with the KDE people (there were lots of them at the conference),… speaking of KDE stuff, Thomas Thym brought some KDE merchandising to sell. 🙂
BTW, Gnokii’s Movie Night was nice. I really liked the free movies he played; not just software has to be made free!
This time I didn’t have time to go for a stroll in the city. From what I saw (little), Nüremberg seems to be a quiet and nice place.
I have to say that it was a great experience, I really enjoyed it and that I’m looking forward for next year’s openSUSE Conference. So yes, it was a big success 😀

Thanks to all the people who made these events possible!

Some pics:

Posted in Desktop, Events, KDE | 1 Comment »

Upstream holiday

October 24th, 2010 by

The openSUSE Conference went really well last week. There was an amazing range of material and the audience’s participation in every talk I attended showed that the openSUSE project has moved past the show-and-tell presentations of a company and its customers to a community using the event to share knowledge between its members and develop.  As part of the openSUSE Boosters team, I was in it up to my neck.   On Wednesday I started with a talk on image building for application authors which was well attended but I think I should tweak towards users’ needs as there weren’t many app authors present.  I gave a talk about the upcoming KDE features that will be in openSUSE 11.4 on Thursday, because  openSUSE 11.3 had KDE 4.4 but due to the 3 month difference in both projects’ release cycles, openSUSE 11.4 will have the KDE 4.6 releases of platform, workspaces and apps.  That equals a lot of changes, so I summarized them for people who don’t read Planet KDE as avidly as I do.  The Lizard Lounge event in the SUSE building on Thursday night gave everyone a chance to catch their breath drinking limited edition Old Toad SUSE beer.

On Friday I gave a spontaneous BoF on KWin’s current and upcoming features.  Can you name the four ways to show your desktop in 4.5?  I only had 3 until a member of the audience pointed out a 4th.  And yesterday I supported Chani’s workshop on developing for Plasma using Javascript and QML, which piqued the audience’s interest by showing how KDE’s high-level services like the Plasma applets framework and the KConfig configuration storage library add value to the glamour of QML and QGraphicsView.  To enable all of the audience to participate, I’d prepared another live image, this time an SDK based on KDE trunk, Qt 4.7 and latest Qt Designer 2.0.1 with all the headers and developer docu on board.  This paid off, as unlike at Akademy, most people didn’t have developer builds ready to go on their laptops.  Within minutes we had copies booting from everyone’s USB sticks and people were working through the included git repository of tutorials prepared by Chani, making flags change colour on click and saving applet state using only a schema file and a Qt Designer config UI.

Unfortunately the talks weren’t recorded live, but a number of people who were in other tracks at the time have already asked me about the KDE talk so I’ll record it again and upload it for you, and Chani and I will polish the Plasma material and get it online at some point.

So having talked myself hoarse, I’m taking this week off to hack on upstream KDE code and get my plans there nailed down before the upcoming soft feature freeze.  In the past I tend to notice the freezes once they are past (whoops!) meaning that my openSUSE work was doomed to sit in a branch until it could be integrated next release.  I hope to get some Network Management features in now and work on polish across the desktop while I’m not handling bug reports, righting wrongs on the lists and fixing build failures.  See you in a week.

Posted in Boosters, Events, KDE | 2 Comments »

openSUSE Conference

October 23rd, 2010 by

I am home from the openSUSE Conference 2010 and finally landed on the sofa. I don’t know why conferences are so exhausting, but they are for me. My brain slowly becomes sorted again and starts to reflect what happened on the conference. Wow, I can say that I didn’t expect it to become such a great event. There were so many interesting and enthusiastic discussions about topics concerning the openSUSE distribution or about things you can do under the openSUSE umbrella.

The fun side of community and technology was inspiring people all over, in opposite to some situations I remember on the last years conference where we had to deal with unpleasant topics. This seemed to have completely went away, instead people were aiming to solve problems together in a constructive way or, even more fun, worked on new things without so called stop-energy.

It seems to me that a kind of openSUSE core-community stabilizes. People know each other, it has sorted who finally really is interested in openSUSE and continously contributes. That builds trust, and to that adds the self confidence which results out of the good quality of the recent distros we as a community were able to release. This nicely turned out for me in the strategy discussion lead by Jos. People were supportive, sorted out issues here and there, but moved ahead and came to decisions together on a topic which had endless and partly unpleasant discussions on mailinglists before. The power of meeting face to face on the one hand, but also signs that we learned from the last years and grew up.

From the talk quality the conference for me personally was one of the best FOSS conferences I have attended until now. All keynotes were done with great passion, uniquely and addressed specifically on current topics in our community. Hennes on the first day painted a good frame for the whole conference in his unique style. Cornelius and Vincent on day two were also great, they did not play friends just to let the sun shine on the conference, but for me they proofed that the openSUSE community has built a fundament were we not only accept each other but can work together werever it makes sense to tackle the higher challenges. Gerald speaking on Friday was repeating facts of the relationship between Novell and openSUSE. It was good hear it again that Novell wholeheartly supports the openess of the openSUSE project and what that means from a corporate point of view. Today Frank was introducing the project Brezen which will increase the ease of use of openSUSE a lot for the user and free software developers. Great that there is already code, I am really looking forward to see stuff coming into our distro.

You see, quite a lot happened on osc10. I will continue writing but I am too tired now…

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Posted in Boosters, Events | 1 Comment »

openSUSE Conference KDE Team Party

October 15th, 2010 by

Next week is openSUSE Conference week! I’m using both my openSUSE and KDE blogs to remind everyone that we’re having a pre-conference meetup at 6pm for the KDE team before the real conference begins at Barfüßer in the Nuernberg old town. Remember a morning of keynotes is only fun if you have a thumping hangover from microbrewed beer (and if you’re a keynote speaker, from local schapps too)! If you are attending the conference or if you are just a friend of KDE in the area, please join in.

If you add your name to the wiki I’ll have an idea how big a table we need, I’ve provisionally got space for 20.

Posted in Events, KDE | Comments Off on openSUSE Conference KDE Team Party

systemd – and #osc10

October 8th, 2010 by

Systemd is a replacement for SystemV init and in heavy development since the first announcement on April 30th by Lennart Poettering. Thanks to Kay Sievers’ work, we have packages for openSUSE curent Factory stream as well. I gave them a try a couple of weeks ago but somehow did not succeed with getting a working system. At LinuxKongress I met Lennart and decided to give systemd another try. I still could not log into the system due to it using NIS and automount for NFS home directories and started debugging this together with Kay over IRC in a virtual machine first. Once we had a workaround for me, I used systemd on my workstation and Kay and Lennart fixed the problem in systemd properly. I run into a couple of more problems and thus were fixed quickly so that the last release – systemd 11 – works fine on my workstation running openSUSE Factory (Factory is the development version for the next openSUSE release, in this case for 11.4).

The role of init, whether it’s SysV init, upstart or systemd, is to initialize the system (it’s the first process that gets started by the kernel) so that users can login, starts all the essential services, e.g. the cups daemon for printing, and handles session management. So, it’s a system and session manager.

So, what’s so cool about systemd? (more…)

Posted in Base System, Distribution, Events, Factory | 8 Comments »

It’s good to visit Conferences

October 8th, 2010 by

This post is about why one should visit a conference at all and hopefully is a good read for people who haven’t been on a FOSS conference yet. For oldtimers this might be unbelieveable, but I remember perfectly how I thought “This conference sounds interesting, but its probably only for checkers, long term contributors, not for me”. Thanks god I had somebody convincing me that that’s wrong and pulled me to my first Akademy which was a great experience as well as all the other conferences I have been later.

The main thing that happens on conferences is learning. While sitting in workshops and presentations you can learn so much about technologies, and since you take the time to really listen to it, it sticks very good in your mind. If questions remain open, you can be sure to immediately find people who can help to clearify.

Learning often results in motivation because if you learned something you want to try it out. Since you again have time after the conference presentations and you are surrounded by others who are interested in the similar topics, the motivation grows to really put the hands on the keyboard and try things out.

Another motivational factor can be that people adjust your opinion about your own contribution, if you already did some. You might think your contribution is only small, not comparable and not so important. After having three people met who were thanking you for your work and telling you how important it was for them, you will feel the motivation boost. But attention – that sometimes works the other way round as well 😉

But that guides us to the most important thing: Meeting people in person, get to know each other, make friends. I know so many people from visiting conferences, and the quality of “knowing” is so much higher if a face, a smile, a good presentation or other things like funny clothes can be put to a name. Even people I do not know know me because I visited a conference once.

Working for and with people you know in person is much more pleasant as if you only know their email addresses. And we’re not talking about conflict situations which are so much easier to solve if you have met before.

openSUSE Conference 2010

Last but not least the possibility of influencing things must not be forgotten. Often on conferences things move forward, because the right people are on the same spot and discuss things and come to decisions. Believe it or not, it happens quickly that you end up in the circle of people if you want.

Ah yes, there is another reason why people like to come to conferences: It’s called ‘having fun’. I am not sure what is that about, but it must be cool 😉

Very soon the second international openSUSE Conference takes place in Nürnberg, Germany. If you are interested in the openSUSE project, the distribution or upstream projects, I really like to encourage you to conferencing give FOSS conferencing a try if you had never done it before. If you had, you will be there anyway 😉

Please do not hesitate and register now.

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Posted in Boosters, Events | Comments Off on It’s good to visit Conferences

frOSCamp 2010 – Zürich The day after – Event report

September 19th, 2010 by

After a good night of sleep, I’ve finish the Member/Ambassador report.

Gallery picture and mini-film : Here

Event Report : PDF or ODP

Others pictures : frOSCamp gallery

Report done by Sirko Kemter (aka gnokii) karl-tux-stadt.de

Posted in Boosters, Events, Marketing | 3 Comments »

frOSCamp Day II

September 19th, 2010 by

08h00 : ok Saturday morning : always rude to get wake up.

About the FreeBeer www.freebeer.ch after a mini pool it seems that Swiss love it, Germans doesn’t like it’s taste, Hungarians doesn’t drink beer ( oh really ? I mean those beer ). Me I really enjoy it and it’s open concept.

09:30 Not to much people here. Did we miss the adv part of it ?
10:00 Filling the ambassador event report … Updating the gallery with yesterday afternoon
11:00 Trying to record the Pavel talk about openSUSE Connect, with the video-cam, and badly discover that when the “rec record lamp” is not flashing it’s not recording. Too bad … Put frOSCamp guy recorded the voice, and the slide so they will be available soon.
11:00 – 17:00 Rescue an hp laptop bugging under 11.3 32 bits with not able to call mmio during boot. 64Bits version is working !
Demo install with KVM, show lxde desktop, kde desktop also the netbook interface.
16:45 All penguins are sold, transform the 50 CHF income to a FSFE donation.
17:00 I have to fill my feedback form, there’s a Nokia N900 to win 🙂
17:35 So the N900 is won by a Debian guy
18:00 Time to unset the booth.
18:30 All stuf in the car, gnokii too, start driving him back to his car.
19:30 we found the FUDCON dinner event place. ParkPlatz & Zürich, a real love story 🙂
20:45 Time to me to leave Fedora & openSUSE guys, if I stay for eating I will not start before 2 hours and a half.
23:15 At home !

Posted in Boosters, Events | Comments Off on frOSCamp Day II

frOsCamp day I

September 17th, 2010 by

So our little team found it’s way to Zürich yesterday.
Every body is here this morning.

More content will be coming, but I offer you an exclusive look & preview right now !

Album frOsCamp

ps : gnokii can you stop eating all sugus candies they are for visitors 🙂

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Posted in Events | Comments Off on frOsCamp day I

Free BEER for free people

September 17th, 2010 by

When we call beer “free”, we mean that it respects the users’ essential freedoms: the freedom to drink it, to study and change it, and to return empties with or without some changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech”… but in this case also “free beer” too.

Why man have to choose a free beer? Because it’s open and free to use. Everybody can give some feedback on the freebeer’s twitter page.

The project was started by Wädi Bräu in Switzerland like “open source beer” project. On the home page you can get more information about this project, for example, news and last updates.

License: creative commons.
Alcogol vol: 4.8 %
Size: 0.33 L

Be free… drink free beer 😉

p.s. Who know, maybe Novell will be sponsored this great open source project (?) 😉

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Posted in Events, Miscellaneous, Usability | 4 Comments »

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