And so the fun ends, as today is the last day of HackWeek III and also my last day (hopefully not ever) here in the Nurenberg Offices 🙁

I managed to grab Will Stephenson for a brief chat on camera about KDE and how it fits in with openSUSE, many thanks Will.  I also had some discussions with several people just to make sure I squeezed the last out of “ChatWeek”.  I spoke with Marko Jung about the upcoming Board Elections for a fair while, and we can’t stress enough how important this event is for the whole openSUSE Project.  For those that are keen to stand for election, please follow the Notification instructions here.  Also, those that do wish to stand, you will have to fund your own election campaign as neither Novell nor SUSE have the budget to fund a campaign like Obama or McCain.  The one advantage that we do have over the US elections is we won’t be anywhere near as long and drawn out, also we’ll be a lot friendlier (I hope).

I would like to thank everyone at SUSE and Novell for inviting so many external community members to Nurenberg for HackWeek III, this was the largest by far and was an absolute winner!  I would like to especially thank Andreas Jaeger and Michael Loeffler for co-ordinating the event for us; Martin Lasarsch who even though he was feeling decidedly crappy thanks to a persistent cold was able to perform his host duties impecably; Sonja Krause-Harder for allowing me to occupy part of her office, Marco Michna for being that great shadow that appears when you need him; and also to the un-related to openSUSE but just as important to me AirBerlin, a mighty fine example of how flying can still be enjoyable, in this day and age of tight fisted, service void, unpleasent airlines.

I am currently working on editing the video that I have, and will try and get something out ASAP, honest.  If there are any animation supremos out there that would like to do a bit of animation wizardry, please let me know!

Thursday was my last way of Hackweek since I went on FTO on friday. Jan had the great idea to take a group photo, so here you see a photo of all invited guests to hackweek together with some Novell folks they hacked together. After the photo it was time for a small ice-cream party.

While I think that many people will blog in more detail on what they’re been doing during hackweek but let me give a short summary of those folks that came to Nürnberg.  This is the status from Thursday afternoon:

• Benji Weber: worked on the software portal with Pascal. He spend most of the time on mapping packages to applications – since users look for applications and not for packages. He wants to publish a test page soon. Btw. the software portal can use some help, so if you are a Java programmer or web designer and like to help, please contact Benji and Pascal.
• Pascal Bleser called it  “Chatweek” – and was working also on the software portal.
• Jan Weber, a GSOC student working on LTSP, created an education YaST module to create users and assign groups for kiosk/sabayon so that admins/parents can easily setup the system with the appropriate permissions for the kids. He showed that YCP is not such a complex language ;).
• Andrew Wafaa wants to work on a documentary about openSUSE staff and started doing the first videos.
• Marcus Hüwe worked on the openSUSE Build Service to resolve dependencies using metadata instead of downloading packages directly (works so far for Debian packages only)
• Andreas Demmer started to redesign openSUSE web pages with Robert Lihm, the current version has been sent to the opensuse-wiki and -marketing lists for review.
• Frank Karlitschek worked on the “Social Desktop” – community is a strength of Open Source but the desktops do not really show the community and enable easy interaction, this could allow different communities like GNOME, KDE or openSUSE, to better interact and grow.
• Jörg Riedel worked with Alexander on KVM: Now KVM can run inside KVM.
• Sebastian Trüg has been discussing and hacking on the KDE desktop.

I repeat myself but we spend indeed a great time together and discussed a lot besides all the hacking.

For the first time this week, I didn’t do a great deal of chatting.  I did manage to interrupt some of the X11 team and chatted about the whole X thing and how weird convuluted and generally messy the whole thing is – highly enjoyable and depressing at the same time.  As a result I managed to get some interviews done which was great.  I’d like to thank Sonja Krause-Harder, Garett Le Sage, Martin Lasarsch, Marco Michna, Flavio, and especially Cornelius Schumacher.

Why am I especially thankful to Cornelius? Well Cornelius was kind enough to spend the longest time in front of the camera and gave a brilliant interview explaining quite a bit about the Incubation Team and their work on SUSE Studio.  A lot of misconceptions are dispelled and some light and clarification is shed on the whole product.  He also managed to enlighten us as to what being Vice-President of KDE.e.V and his HackWeek Project on the Social Desktop.

The others managed to enlighten us as to what it is that they actually do during normal day to day operations, and also what they are doing during the week.  Hopefully I can get some more interviews tomorrow, and actually manage to get some editing done.

In the evening most of the remaining external community members that were left went out for dinner and had a great meal and a few drinks, and chatted about a lot of stuff – both openSUSE related and general.

I’m feeling a bit sad that I have to leave tomorrow as everyone here has been great and it has really been invaluable to me (and hopefully to those in SUSE) to meet in person and talk about many things that interest and annoy us.