ervin’s piece of web

Wednesday and thursday went nicely. We continued our work during BoF, some outcome will surely be interesting. In particular Adept usability will surely be improved, and the plan for powermanagement in edgy has been consolidated. This release will surely be quite interesting regarding both points. I’m confident that it’ll have some other improvements though.

Thursday afternoon, David Faure arrived and it was really nice to meet him again. It was a small surprise since we didn’t expect him that early.

We got contacted by Philippe Fremy that offered to meet in Paris center for dinner. All the KDE and Kubuntu attendance went in the center. We had some troubles to get there by train… apparently the police found a suspect baggage. We finally arrived but at least one hour later than expected. The italian restaurant was quite nice, we had a long table at the first floor and were almost alone during the dinner. It was an opportunity to strengthen even more the relationship between the KDE and Kubuntu communities. Thanks a lot Philippe for this good idea and the great evening.

Finally friday came after a very short night since we got back to the hotel early in the morning. After a few hours sleep we were ready to work again! A few more BoF took place… until some of us left one by one. It’s always sad to see people that you like are leaving: Ellen, David, Peter, Sebastian, Tonio, etc. This time I’ll also have a thought for Myriam Schweingruber, she’s a very kind person from the Free Software Foundation Europe. We had interesting discussions together and that was a great pleasure to have her around. I’ll miss you Myriam!

For this evening, I plan to stay away from the exciting stuff, which means that I won’t go to the “Au revoir Dinner” organized by Canonical in Paris center. I just don’t feel like going to sleep late and being in a hurry tomorrow to pack my stuff and go to the airport. So I’ll have dinner in a small restaurant nearby and I’ll surely be back early.

It marks the end of my report from the Kubuntu Developers Summit, see you later folks!

The Ubuntu Developers Summit is taking place near Paris since yesterday. I arrived in the hotel on sunday with two Canonical employees who work on Malone (afaik). They were quite friendly and we chatted a bit during sunday afternoon.

People came one by one, and we started to team up. I was glad to meet Jonathan Riddell once again, we shared some fun in a bumper car as one of his photos prove it. It was really nice to go into one of those after so many years, I was like a child for a moment. Thank you for this Jonathan!

During dinner we had the opportunity to wish Aaron a happy birthday, I hope it was a nice evening for him even if he was away from his home for this important day.

On monday, we had an introduction session. And then the BoF themselves… almost no kubuntu BoF were scheduled, so I attended other topics of interest, some of the discussions were really great. The idea of using TeamSpeak to allow people to virtually attend the submit is nice in theory, but proven to be difficult in practice (it tends to work badly on some computers, some people are missing headset, etc.). We’d surely need something to replace it.

Today, started a bit similarly to monday… A short introduction, and not many Kubuntu or KDE related BoF scheduled. It’s a bit unfortunate, but the KDE and Kubuntu people there decided to start to work on some of our topics today trying to fit in each others schedule. It was definitely the way to go, we’ve been really productive. At the moment sebas is even working on a prototype addressing the power management spec. “Strangely” we didn’t see Aaron much today… too much beer yesterday night?

It’s really a nice start for this summit, I’m looking forward to the next few days. We still have quite a few topics to address, but if we keep the productivity as high as today, I’m confident that we’ll finish in time.

Last but not least, I’d like to thanks again the Canonical crew and Mark Shuttleworth for the nice organization and the invitation, that’s really appreciated.

Past week I’ve done some KDE promotion. It was interesting because I did this using two radically different methods.

On monday and tuesday, I gave two talks in my university about Qt and KDE as a development platform. I gave Kubuntu CDs to the students and since they are in computer engineering they’ll hopefully install it. It seems that they enjoyed the topic. They started to wonder why they had to suffer with other non-free toolkits when I showcased Qt and QtDesigner. Then they were impressed about the niceties provided by kdecore, kdeui, and DCOP. After that, I explained them how to use the KParts and their jaw dropped when I showcased the small browser George Staikos wrote for OSDW. And finally having network transparency in their applications using KIO finished to convince them. I also took some time to present what will hopefully be in KDE4

The result? Several amazed students, that will surely want to experiment with Qt and KDE in the future. It even looks like some of them are really hooked and I had the opportunity to discuss more with them on friday answering some late questions.

On saturday, I participated in an event organized by Toulibre. I showcased a laptop running Kubuntu, there was also some boxes running Ubuntu. A talk took place, but I didn’t attend since I was involved in the booth with the rest of the team. People were really interested in the topic and we even had a journalist from the local press that came and asked questions for a paper. I think we were all impressed by the age diversity of the attendees (the youngest was under 10 and the oldest surely over 70). I find nice to be able to propose KDE to people that could be your grandparents for their daily use.

Really a nice week, I’d love to have more occasions to do this kind of things… I’ll surely try to invest more of my spare time for promotion.

First of all, for people complaining about the content… In the first two day it’s the Users and Administrators Conference. So well, it’s not that shocking if it’s not really hacker oriented. Now, here are my impressions :

Novell Desktop

Keeping in mind that it’s targetted for users interested in KDE (at least I hope so) it’s indeed strange to see someone coming and explaining they use no KDE application for the major tasks (mail, browsing, etc.) except Kopete…

Kolab - Groupware the KDE way

Nice talk about Kolab, this one was clearly for sysadmins, so we had some technical insights about how it works. Till seems to be a very good speaker, liked his style.

I admit that I didn’t followed this one very closely (shame), since I was chatting a bit with David Faure about some KIO related stuffs.

Deploying KDE Using The Kiosk Framework

Another one targeted to sysadmins in my opinion. Very good talk, raising the right points, answering the right question. Presenting the context of a successful deployment using Kiosk. Well done Aaron!

Ubuntu and Kubuntu

Clearly a misleading title… It was more about cooperation across opensource projects, and even more specifically between upstream and distro makers. Oh, and well Mark Shuttleworth is the first space tourist in case you was still not aware of this…

Linux migration success stories with KDE and NX

Another talk with misleading content, but with a very interesting content. Instead of real success stories (I was expecting enterprise deployments or something similar), we had a talk about NX itself, it’s current state and how to test it. Too bad the talk by itself was lacking some polishing in my humble opinion.

Anyway, I’m really glad to see that NX is making its way. Maybe it’s a bit slow since most of what has been presented was already reality last year, but it’s really taking shape now with more features. As Kurt hinted we still badly miss a free (as in speech) client. Too bad that it’s used a lot now so changing would be difficult, but I still think that the name of this is not fortunate. “NX” is quite cryptic to most users, they surely don’t even care that it’s related to X… that lacks sexiness.

After this one, I didn’t attend anything because of a headache… Too bad, I wanted to at least attend the Scripts with KDE feel talk. I’m looking forward to tomorrow talk… But well it seems that we have a party sponsored by Novell this night (thanks a lot for this) so I guess it’ll be hard to wake up. =)