The first two days were really tough: many of the concepts behind KDE4 are totally different from Gnome and Mac OSX so I had to get adjusted to it. As a former Gnome user I really like the idea of having not hundreds of configuration options per application. In my opinion the distributor should provide reasonable defaults for the desktop and it’s applications. Having tried the latest Fedora 10 preview and Kubuntu 8.10 I must admit, that openSUSE 11.1 delivers today the best KDE4 experience. Kudos to my colleagues from the KDE desktop team - you do a great job!

Nevertheless KDE4 has some disadvantages over the existing desktops: some parts of it, especially KWin, Plasma and Kontact are relatively unstable and crash regularly. On the other hand many features from existing KDE3 applications are still missing or do not work as expected. But you have the choice: all KDE3 applications are still available and of course you can mix them. For this reason I respect all KDE developers that work during the major version transition on two different versions of their application.

I am right now using exclusively KDE4 applications - even Kontact for my calendars (private Kolab, Google Calendar, Novell Groupwise and several iCal-based calendars) and Amarok2 for my huge music collection. The only thing that I did not migrate yet is my messenger. Despite the fact that one of Kopete’s developers is one of my room mates I am still using purple, which integrates well into KDE4. The only thing that does not work is compositing: KWin does not like my graphics card or its driver.

Concluding my first KDE4 test week I must say it changed my mind: I really like my new desktop and it makes fun to work with it. For me it is absolutely unacceptable now that people, which did not give KDE4 a fair chance by testing it at least a full work week, raise their complains that KDE4 is generally unusable or totally unstable. Everyone has to decide on his own if he wants a stable, well maintained KDE3 desktop or support the development of the future desktop. KDE does a great job making the transition as comfortable as possible and I think users should thank them for providing two desktop alternatives.

PS: I prefer using sudo instead of su. To configure this behaviour in kdesu you have to add to your ~/.kde4/share/config/kdesurc the following line:

    [super-user-command]
    super-user-command=sudo

Thanks to André & Tom for this hint!

Subject: Aufruf zur Beteiligung an der Perspektive Open Source auf der SYSTEMS in München
From: Wolfgang Drotschmann

Liebe Projekte,

auch dieses Jahr wird die “Perspektive Open Source” (POS)
http://www.perspektiveopensource.de/
im Rahmen der SYSTEMS (vom 21. - 24. Oktober) in München stattfinden. Das Thema “Freie und Quelloffene Software” wird seinen Schwerpunkt in Halle B2 haben, wo sich wieder Aussteller einem vorrangig businessorientierten Publikum präsentieren werden. Was wäre aber Open Source ohne die Beteiligung der Freien Projekte? Der Veranstalter, die Messe München, hat für sie darum eine Fläche reserviert, und den LinuxTag e. V. gebeten, deren Verteilung zu koodinieren.

Wer von Euch Projekten möchte also als Aussteller bei der POS dabei sein? Bevor Ihr alle “JA!” ruft, lest bitte erst weiter.

Ausrüstung für ein ausstellendes Projekt auf der POS

Für jedes Projekt steht im wesentlichen ein Demopoint zur Verfügung. Strom, Internet, Standbau und Fläche werden von der Messe bereitgestellt, genauso wie eine sinnvolle Anzahl von Ausstellerausweisen für das Standpersonal.

Technische Ausstattung (Computer, Notebooks, Monitore etc.) und Informationsmaterialien (Postkarten, Flyer, Poster u. v. a. m.) bringen die Projekte mit. Aufgrund der begrenzten Fläche wird es eher nicht möglich sein, mit einem Beamer arbeiten zu können.

Läßt sich diese “Grundversorgung” nicht mit Eurem Standkonzept in Einklang bringen, so versuchen wir unser bestes, Eure Anforderungen mit dem Standbau der Messe München zu koordinieren, bitten aber schon jetzt um Verständnis, dass dies nur in begrenztem Maße möglich sein wird. Die konkrete Aufplanung findet direkt mit dem Standbauer der Messe statt, wir als LinuxTag e. V. sind hier nur die Vermittler.

Da der bereitgestellte Platz leider limitiert ist, müssen wir gemeinsam eine Lösung finden, die allen Beteiligten möglichst gerecht wird. Wir bitten alle interessierten Projekte daher, ein kurzes Feedback zu den beiden Fragen zu geben:

a) Zielgruppe der POS
Wer soll mit dem Stand angesprochen werden? Wir möchten darauf hinweisen, dass wir mit der POS explizit und im Unterschied zum LinuxTag eine fokussiertere Zielgruppe ansprechen: Wir erwarten schwerpunktmässig IT-Leiter und Entscheider hauptsächlich aus kleinen und mittleren Unternehmen und Behörden. Die Vorkenntnisse dieser Teilnehmer hinsichtlich Linux und Open Source ist vermutlich mitunter limitiert, umso größer ist jedoch das Interesse, Informationen über konkrete Lösungen zu erhalten.
Projekte, die auf diese Zielgruppe mit ihrer Darstellung besonders eingehen, haben bessere Chancen auf einen Stand.

b) Projekt-Präsentation
Gerade die Präsentation ist ein wichtiger Faktor, um Besucher von den positiven Eigenschaften von Open Source zu überzeugen. Auch wenn wir davon überzeugt sind, dass technische Gesichtspunkte sehr wichtig für das Verständnis des Projektes sind, so sollten wir auf diese nur wohldosiert eingehen. Um Besucher anzuziehen und mitzunehmen, sollten
die vielfältigen Möglichkeiten genutzt werden, um die Idee des Projektes anschaulich zu erklären. Dazu gehören:

• - Poster und Standdekoration,
• - ein Rechner oder sonstiges Ausstellungsstück, das den Inhalt des Projektes in den Mittelpunkt stellt, und vor allem
• - ein Standteam, das aktiv auf Besucher zugeht und eine Kurzvorstellung des Projektes vorbereitet hat.

Projekte, die sich besonders kreativ in der Darstellung ihres Themas zeigen, haben besondere Chancen auf einen Stand.

Als Projekt bei der POS mitmachen

Wir bitten alle interessierten Projekte, sich informell via Mail an projects@linuxtag.org so rasch wie möglich zu melden. Bitte beschreibt dabei kurz, was Ihr zu den beiden Punkten Besucheransprache und Projekt-Präsentation machen würdet.

Da die Perspektive Open Source und die SYSTEMS in zwei Monaten beginnen, freuen wir uns über eine kurzfristige Rückmeldung, sei sie positiv oder negativ.

Dazu benötigen wir einen Ansprechpartner (Name, E-Mail, Telefon), der als verantwortlicher Standmanager für das jeweilige Projekt auftreten würde.

Wir freuen uns, dass wir zusammen mit der Messe München und den anderen Partnern der Perspektive Open Source die Möglichkeit haben, das Potential hinter Open Source zu zeigen. [...] Ermöglicht wird das alles allerdings nur durch Eure Leistungen in den Projekten und Initiativen, denn diese bilden die Grundlage von Open Source. Dafür möchten wir Euch und allen Euren Projektmitgliedern danken.

Über Euer Interesse und eine Teilnahme an der Perspektive Open Source würden wir uns sehr freuen - wir warten auf Rückmeldung!

Viele Grüße,
Wolfgang

First I would recommend reading ‘Cupcakes take the Cake‘ at Blogspot. They are very creative and I hope the cakes are also as delicious as they are beautiful. Eventually we can design a special LinuxTag design as desert for next year’s LinuxNacht?

After a much entertaining Keynote by Chris DiBona (open source programs manager at Google) I was able to choose from six concurrent sessions. I decided to attend the Android related talks to see how serious Google is on creating an free and open platform for cellphones. After half an hour marketing bullshit bingo there was an Q&A session. Interestingly every second question started with “Apple’s IPhone has …. How can I achieve this with Android?” There have been some critical questions which have been answered with “This is a quite good question. Bla, bla, bla.” and my question concerning a Roadmap till 2010 and when the full source code will be released was just answered with “soon”.

After this unfruitful first presentation I had to readjust my expectations and as expected most of the talks only scratched the surface and rarely showed interesting code. Fortunately Google cared really good for their guests, besides refreshments, lunch and many snacks the event specialists created a geek-friendly environment in the foyer of the ICC. I spent much time there talking to friends and Google engineers.

To my complete satisfaction the Advanced Gears session by Dion Almaer has been exactly the presentation I was expecting from the whole event: for each component of the Gears framework  the presenter gave a short introduction, presented use-cases and some good readable, sometimes advanced code examples along with quite impressive demonstration videos. Thank you Dion, I really enjoyed your talk.

Not totally surprising there was a live stream from the joint T-Mobile, Google press conference announcing G1, world’s first public available cellphone running Android. Whilst I did not watch the media event, I took a first row seat in the final wrap-up session. Again Chris did a quite good job. Android’s astonishing features were present very funny and also competently.(Unfortunately this part of the presentation has been tagged as a private video an YouTube.) Later on I was able to play a little bit around with the device. In my opinion it looks more like a developer prototype than a market ready product. The keyboard feels much better than others of this size but my concluding result is that I will have to wait for the next generation of Android devices to fulfill my requirements for a up-to-date cellphone.

Aside from the fact that I luckily was able to fiddle around with the device, there are now more open questions than before. My biggest concern is how open this platform really will be. Hopefully Google fulfills its promises accompanied by frequent releases of the Android SDK including the whole source code of the Android platform under a really free license.

(Eepybird on Vimeo.)

So why are you still reading, go and get your copy. Find the article on page 76.

There we aggregate blogs of the makers of Europe’s leading exhibition and conference on Open Source and Free Software. With our planet we want to introduce you the persons behind LinuxTag and give you some insights in the organization.

FrOSCon is a two day conference on Free Software and Open Source, taking place for the third time on August, 23rd/24th 2008 at the Fachhochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin near the cities of Bonn and Cologne.

I was asked to give a presentation on my research I am doing for my thesis. Please join me on Sunday at 11:15 in lecture room HS5 on my talk “Who can you trust - a trust metric for the openSUSE build service”. I will present my concept for integrating a community contributed user rating into the OBS to support collaboration and improve security in this distributed package building system.

Besides this you can find me most of the time at the openSUSE community booth in the exhibition area. I am looking forward to see you there!

Update: many LinuxTag core team members will be around. As far as I know you also can meet Elke, Florian, Guido, Michael, Oliver and Wolfgang this weekend in Sankt Augustin.

It has become a tradition that this meeting takes place at Linuxhotel, a gorgeous hotel in a private park situated half way between Essen and Bochum. For those who do not know Linuxhotel: during the week there are trainings on free and open source products and during weekends the hotel is open for these projects to meet and get some work done. I wish to express my gratitude to the whole Linuxhotel crew for inviting LinuxTag every year. Furthermore I would like to thank Reinhard for creating such an inspiring place dedicated to free software and open source.

The weekend started with a retrospective round so everyone got the chance to bring out the things he liked and disliked most at LinuxTag 2008. This filled the whole Friday evening and I must say that most of us have been very critical with our selves. In my opinion we did many things much better this year but we have a long way to go. I do not wish to emphasise concrete issues, instead I would like to emphasis   that free software has grown up and got more professional. But for all that the people behind this stayed the same, got more support by new project members and probably moved forward to new projects.

I think the same counts for LinuxTag: it has got much more professional not only with its relocation to Berlin. Simultaneously to the professionalization we have to create a much more relaxed spirit and add many more fun events to our conference. Fortunately we did this year some good first initial steps in this direction by having guided city-tours, the developer-lounge, the Mom-and-Pop grocery store and the projects’ lunch. Whilst our barbecue we have had several new ideas like  a warm up party, a soccer-cup in Messe Berlin’s Sommergarten or a badminton tournament in one of the empty exhibition halls. We also would like to have every evening a supporting programme. This year we have had LinuxNacht and Antigone 2.0 - a quite interesting play. So there are still two evenings free. If you have a good idea and would like to join us, get in touch! This brings me to the next point: even our core team got many new members for the crew and free projects teams, the conference team is lacking fresh blood. I would really like to see a fresh conference team with two new conference chairs breaking new grounds. Of course these guys would need the support from the former chairs but maybe the time has come for a generation change. If you are interested in participating in the organization of LinuxTag, please drop me a few lines. LinuxTag is organized like an free software project, meaning after meeting some initial requirements you can participate in any internal project.

Nevertheless I am strongly convinced that next LinuxTag will be a success. It will be our third event in Berlin, the cooperation with Messe Berlin works out for my ressort very well and we have never started organizing the upcoming event this early. So my team hopefully will have much more time for additional fun stuff to serve you a magnificent fifteenth LinuxTag on June, 24th-27th 2009 in Berlin!

I would like to thank especially all system administrators which support my work and keep the stuff running. For my work at SUSE/Novell this mainly is the SUSE R&D-Admin team. Kudos to Thomas and his crew for being available all the time and handling all kinds of requests very fast, efficient and straightforward. I deeply appreciate your work! Of course I also would like to express my thankfulness to all people at Novell’s IS&T.

As a user of the openSUSE Build Service I also depend on the work from some of my colleagues from my team and department. I am grateful for being able to use such a fast, reliable and innovative service.

The LinuxTag-Admin team, which is completely volunteer driven, also deserves my gratitude. I would like to mention our team lead Kester and moreover Stefan and Michael from Speedpartner for sponsoring infrastructure and joining our team.

Furthermore I am fortunate to have Emme as my friend - it is highly reassuring to know you have someone to ask in cases you need a dam good tip or just another crazy idea to find another approach to a problem. The hack-nights with you have always been very inspiring!

Last but not least I send my greetings to my former colleagues and friends at the MPII.