To share a bit more about this long trip but worth to made it.
You can now enjoy the video clip made during this event.
Was a real pleasure to meet so numerous openSUSE users.
To share a bit more about this long trip but worth to made it.
You can now enjoy the video clip made during this event.
Was a real pleasure to meet so numerous openSUSE users.
If running a booth is, for sure, an investment of time, energy and money (even if TSP contribute to help you), We often forget to say
how much it’s important for our community and project.
Booths makes openSUSE alive in all open source events! and it’s a great experience to live, for any of us.
I strongly believe that openSUSE has be to visible on events like KDE Akademy, Scale, Fosdem, Guadec.
It’s not a question of "Bang for the buck", than a simple obviousness:
The obviousness is: if openSUSE has no booth there, you just see Ubuntu and Redhat, and let’s add Debian, Mageia etc for Fosdem or Scale.
You all know how much I like our Geeko community. And when Akademy staff proposed us to run a booth, I said yes, great I will be there!
After comparing ways to go to Brno, the Geeko’s car was the less expensive, and allow me to pick the demo touch screen at SUSE Headquarter.
So I took a full week off and drive 2000 kilometers to make it happens.
2 Weeks ago myself and Françoise had joined the [http://www.randa-meetings.ch/ Randa Meeting] in Switzerland.
This event is a full hack-week where between around fifty people, that help to change the world, met together and hack around [http://www.kde.org KDE Community] related stuff. More on
KDE sprint page
I’ve heard about Randa from years, and had seen numerous reports about how Randa hack-week has allowed lots of changes : Plasma, Software collection, etc…
This year, we decided not only to financially sponsor the event, but also be part of as simple helper, with the status of newcomers in the KDE community contributors. Just to check how it goes.
Mario Fux (the organizer) didn’t fake his involvement to make this week a success, in a full open source spirit.
We’re reporting below a number of blog post that have been made during the hackweek.
And as the icing on the cake, you could just watch the video realized during the week.
I created packages for the nice KDM and ksplash theme Steampunk. For this theme a matching color scheme, wallpaper and mouse theme exist and those are packed in the same rpm. Youtube shows the theme in action for Kubuntu, the version in the rpm is distribution neutral. The rpm can be obtained from the home:rbos repository, I hope you enjoy the theme.
So in my head there’s a little Walter Sobchak beating on my conscience and shouting “This is what you get when you trust Facebook with your data, Will”.
The reason is that I upload photos to Facebook using KDE’s shared uploader and this has fallen victim to the whims of FB’s purge of its app biosphere. Unless the original developer can convince them that the app is not spammy, offering a bad experience or having the wrong attitude, the app, my photos (all archived elsewhere of course), but most importantly, all the kind comments from my friends and contacts that represent FB’s only value, get sent to the farm.
This is what you get when you trust one company with stuff you care about. Will.
With the release of GNOME3 I would assume that people are interested in seeing how YaST2 (suggestion: rename it to YaST3 !!) is going to take form with GTK3. Of course this means eventually writing another application in GTK3, hopefully different from the old gnome-control-panel ‘style’ which was actually pretty confusion from the user point of view as it was far too close to gnome-control-center, thus confusing new comers.
My suggestion (unaware if it’s possible or not) was probably to explore GNOME3 features to serve YaST integrated already with GNOME3. This could be an interesting approach as it would offer integration and some advantages:
* Better integration with GNOME3 without having to write(/maintain another application;
* Take advantage of YaST2 modular structure;
* Present YaST in a prime space in GNOME3, thus offering a openSUSE differentiation point;
* No conflicts with possible KDE existing front-ends for YaST2;
* Improve users experience.
My proposal would be something like (maybe to be served as an extension for gnome-shell). Please neglect my ‘lame’ photo manipulation skills:
I’m blatantly abusing GSoC for a project that I would like to see in openSUSE but that I’ve never had time to work on. But really it’s a worthwhile thing to have: a set of Plasma widgets that users and developers can add to their workspace to make it easy to see what’s going on in OBS in the projects that matter to them. If you want to work on a fun project with cutting edge technologies such as Qt, QML, Plasma then head on over to the GSoC 2011 Ideas Page.
Its Hackweek number six at SUSE as you might have heard. Hackweek is great as employees are encouraged to work on a free software project they want. I work on my project Kraft and really appreciate the time that I can spend on it.
What I intend to do can be summarized with Share your Kraft. Up to now, Kraft is working fine for a single user. But what if a team wants to use Kraft and share number cycles (which are base for the document numbering like invoice number), documents and template catalogs? Well, as long as they share the same database, it might work (I didn’t test deeply) but if they happen to be on different locations it becomes difficult. I try to make that possible.
My development target for Kraft is simplicity. For the user of course, but also for the setup. The server to share data, which is obviously needed, must work on a cheap hosting offer, and it must work with a weak internet line. So a database connect via internet is not possible.
I decided to investigate in ownCloud and enhance it with a plug-in called KitoC. ownCloud is a project started by Frank Karlitschek and implements a handy but scalable WebDAV Server beside more. Seems to fit my needs perfectly. Yesterday I implemented the number server function in KitoC after good conversation with Cornelius at breakfast in the office. Not very much achieved yet, but had to learn a bit of ownCloud first. I keep you posted.
Universidad Latina, Facultad de Ingeniería. “LibreSoft”. July 1st., 2010 from 6:00 p.m. To 10:30 p.m. (- 5 EST) several FOSS individual representatives held a meeting on 3rd floor of the main building, gave some talks about FOSS, software developments, open source, licensing, sharing code, community contributions, and applications to the general public, Telecommunications and Industrial Engineering students, professors, dean and lawyers. OpenSUSE Ambassador, Ricardo Chung, shared the space with Diego Tejera (Ubuntu LoCo Team), Alejandro Perez ( Fedora Ambassador ), Abdel Martinez ( Fedora Campus Ambassador), Adrien Scott ( www.fosdev.com) and others. Ricardo gave a talk about openSUSE 11.2 features and some sneak preview features on openSUSE 11.3 ( http://en.opensuse.org/Product_highlights_11.3), the openSUSE Build Service 2.0 ( http://en.opensuse.org/Build_Service) as software development and colaboration platform useful for any Linux distribution, SUSE Studio to customize our distribution on different enviroments, and KIWI to make an operating system image available on physical media ( http://en.opensuse.org/Kiwi ). Ricardo also, answer some questions about openSUSE community and local users group, installation, as well as some questions about Novell and Microsoft alliances were clarified. After the talk an openSUSE and Novell trivia was given and the winners got some openSUSE 11.2 CDs with Gnome Desktop by default.
Make a click on http://picasaweb.google.com/RICARDO.A.CHUNG/OpenSUSEAtLibreSoft# to watch some photos
A little more than two weeks ago we released Kraft version 0.40, the first version of Kraft based on KDE 4 software platform. The release went fine as far as I can tell, no terrible bugs were reported yet. Some work went into the new website since then, but in general I need a few weeks break from Kraft and spend my evenings outside enjoying spring time.
Today, Sourceforge posted a blog about Kraft after they kind of mail-interviewed me. It’s nice, it really focuses on the things also important to me. This might be another step towards a broader user base for Kraft. I say that because one could have the impression that the number of people actually really using Kraft could be larger. A high number of users is one of the fundamental criteria for a successful free software project and thus I am constantly trying to understand whats the reason for the impression or the fact.
The first idea is that the Kraft project simply does something wrong in the way a project should be driven. But there are releases, there is a so far ok website, there are communication channels with information on it and people answering questions. Of course, it always could be done better, but I hope and believe we are not doing too bad. Marketing could be more, that’s granted.
The next thing could be that nobody needs this kind of software. But there are quite some companies doing this kind of software in the commercial space. So there must be a market. Actually I think the market is huge. People are writing invoices all over the world and I bet many of them are not really satisfied with the way they do it usually which makes Kraft at least an option to try for them.
And this might lead to better path: Probably these people do not know that the option exists. They simply haven’t heard about Kraft yet and if they would there is a good chance that they would not believe that it is free etc pp. And this is probably not specific to Kraft but also applies, of course much more weaker, to larger projects like openSUSE or KDE: A lot of people from the ‘real world’ don’t know about free software communities, the ideas behind and the benefits for users of the software. That sounds strange to us, as this is our daily reality, but start with asking your parents or non computer related friends if they really understand what it is about. Imagine what people know who have no computer job nor -hobby nor know you!
What consequences can that have for us? Well, we could decide to skip this group of people. That would mean, beside some other effects, that Kraft would not make sense any more and I don’t like that. It probably should influence the way we see the ‘product management’ aspect of our projects. For me, ‘product management’ is often equivalent to “take care that the result is especially useful to non computer scientists” (which is probably not what PM really is about) and the focus on that is very important and the precondition for the next point.
We might have to take our projects even more out of the geek niche and go to places where the ‘real world’ happens. That is difficult for various reasons. First, it means that we have to start to explain again from start, and maybe also get questions where the answer is not obvious. Furthermore it might have practical issues, because for example fairs for handcrafter utilities charge seriously for software boothes which is not the case if we present projects on FOSS events.
On the other hand its easy because we all just have to spread the word even more and tell everybody about free software, our projects and free culture. And try to think as if we weren’t free software people. I know, most of us do already what they can and that’s great 🙂