Thank you (for release party)!

I have to say, Fedora 16 Release party was a huge success - at least for me. But I expect everyone who attended it, can agree. This time it was impossible to count all people. We had only 65 seats as our Tower Big meeting room is not as big even with Small one together. And all there held with about another 65 people staying around, eating, chatting etc. For Beefy Miracle Jirka was joking about renting the first league football stadium next to the office ;-)



We had some refreshment and junk food. As always - we feed people first to make them happy and to complain later ;-)



There were several talks scheduled - aiming mainly users - so desktop ones, we were asked for Fedora Cloud offering one. Also I should mention Fedora QA and systemd.



I'm really happy how Jirka Eischmann restarted Czech Fedora community after the clinical death (caused by lack of ambassadors here, Ubuntu hype) - especially in the country, where all the old true Linux guys started on Red Hat Linux. You can read his article in Czech on our new Fedora.cz portal. And I'm really happy I can help him :)

Fedora 16 Verne, the Plasma one and marketing

Fedora 16 Verne is out for more than one week now and of course it contains the latest Qt and KDE Plasma bits. And when I say latest, I mean really THE latest. This time we were probably too overhyped with Qt 4.8, so you'll find RC1 and you know, the nerves waiting at least for it (rc1).... I hope it will change with Open Governance and we will get public release schedules. There are also zero-day 4.7.3 updates available for F16. It's something you can expect from Fedora. But Lukas Tvrdy reminded me one thing we usually fail, especially our KDE SIG team. Marketing. Yeah, I know - we can't compete with you, Krita guys - the Comic book with DVD is really awesome (/me wants more, thank you Timothee!!! Btw. your website is broken, no links are working). But we should work on it, make more KDE Plasma appearance in release notes, announcements, over Internet, reviews and blogs ;-) Well, let's make it better.




The Fedora KDE SIG team and Jules Verne are proud to announce Fedora 16, the KDE Plasma Edition is available for download (for over week now :). Please, visit the spin homepage.

The most visible change for users and the most notable one is probably change of our packaging schema - as we want to stick to upstream as close as possible, we provide split packages now.



I've found one review, nice reading, called "Fedora 16 KDE: Improving Perfection". Please, if you like Fedora and Plasma, write more, help us with marketing. Also I'd like to react to this review - why two media players? We'd like to have only one - most of people prefer Amarok and we think it's the one everyone is looking for. For now we gave an excuse to JuK. Or should we try Bangarang?

Also we're preparing Fedora 16 release party in Brno, everyone from this area is welcomed to join us. It's also being my birthday party - 23rd November at Red Hat's Tower Meeting Room. Please, sign up. I'll show you again the shining Plasma bits. Hopefully with Plasma Active running on top of Fedora (we're currently working on).

Run for Fedora chair!

Take this blogpost more as reminder than urging you ;-) but as probably many of you know, there are another (the years and Fedoras are passing faster and faster...) elections coming, with nominations opened. It's going to close soon on Nov 5 (the midnight) and it seems there's a lack of interested. At least for Board and FESCo - more seats free than people nominated... And listening to some people complaining how bad FESCo or Board is, it makes sense to do your part!

Well, visit http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Elections and you'll see what to do!

Fedora Booth @LinuxCon Prague

Just a quick blogpost and another LinuxCon Prague reminder (thanks Lennart for knocking me to publish it)...



There will be Fedora Booth too!!!

What will you see (and get)?

• Exo PC running Fedora 16 with Shell on top of it

• Lenovo Ideapad S10-3t running Plasma Workspaces, both Desktop and Netbook (Fedora 16 too)
  

• talk to Brno's Fedora/Red Hat guys (Jiri called it "Ask an Expert", there will be a schedule and these people will be available only for you)

• a free stuff - like (still) Fedora 15 medias

I think both examples are great and proves, that Fedora can be used on desktops, has a nice netbook offering and is capable running on tablets too!

So, if you're coming to LinuxCon/ELCE/whatever ;-), stop by at our booth!

PS: as an Openmobility member, I have to remind you, that almost everybody from our group is attending too!

Openmobility 2011

This weekend was really very challenging and hard, not only for me, but for all people around our small and dedicated group of open mobile technologies fans. We were running our Openmobility conference (sorry, web is Czech only but I hope soon we will publish more English pages), this year it was held in Brno and so a lot of organization duties fell on my head (and smashed it around ;-). I slept over 12 hours when I finally came home!



Openmobility is all about open source sw and hw and I think Saturday's program was really amazing one - Martin Kolman, the upstream author of modRana, talked about navigation in Linux. František Horínek shown publicly for the first time the new Arduino competitor - the STAX platform, citing him "release early, release often". Aleš Láník talked about Android and NFC and prepared Android NDK workshop. Another Android was shown - B&N Nook, with Qt hacks. Bedřich Košata talked about WebOS development, it's very nice Linux based platform as it uses real Linux user space (but still closed web UI on top of it) more than Android (read Ryan's blogpost). Even Qt is distributed there! Pavel Šimerda is a huge fan of Clutter - both talks and workshop were interesting.



And of course - I had to show younger brother of Clutter - Qt Quick and QML. It's cool technology and I prepared the presentation in QML itself (thanks to QML Presentation System - I'll try to package one day). It's great when you can show all examples and you don't have to move the mouse from your slides. Just you want to talk about Qt Mobility's mapping capabilities? Just embed Map object to your slides, add a few buttons, zooming and nice example is born!

Dan Horak represented Fedora and his work on secondary architectures. He gave well prepared talk - full of interesting stuff and he had a lot of nice hw running Fedora! I hope to see more Fedora ARM devices soon.



And this is only small portion of the whole conference. We had a showroom (showtable;-) with bunch of interesting open source ready hw - NotionInk Adam, Panda Boards, AI Touch Book, Arduiono, Efika Smartbook etc.



On Sunday - we had a FreeRunner hw bugfixing part with Navigation board add-on soldered in. And the meeting of our group with two new guys! Welcome Pavel and Martin!



I'd like to say big thanks to our local Fedora fellow Radek Vokal and Brno's office for support. And to everyone. It would be really very difficult without you and you made at least one guy really happy! All his dreams (in this tweet ;-).

Fedora 15 KDE Plasma Workspaces celebration ;-)

Last time, I was presenting the newest and freshest Fedora, it was autumn, nearly winter time, cold, everything was grey. But this time - I'm showing you Fedora 15. Maybe there's some symbolism in release name - Lovelock - because spring, the season of love is here and actually outside our air-conditioned office there's summer.



KDE Plasma Workspaces
And what we're going to offer you now? You can have 4.6.2 and fresh 4.6.3 already available in updates.



And even it's spring, nearly summer (or summer already as I said and I feel it that way ;-) - the leaves are falling down the tree like in fall! And personally - I'm waiting to play with QML based KSplash as it's not easy to force them to fly in current splash.



Overall desktop look and feel you can see in Ahmed's blogpost. Thanks!

Release party
Yesterday, we held a release party at our Brno's Red Hat office. We expected a lot of Red Hatters to show there up but we were really surprised (in a good way!) by external visitors attendance. It was fifty-fifty. Exactly - as in our statistics we identified about one hundred unique visitors (unknown browsers and resolution varied). We had some food, snacks and soft drinks for free and especially talks - again for free - for our loving users and devels.



Tomas Bzatek talked about Gnome 3 and as I'm in pair with him (as a mate, to rate his talks etc.) for our Presentations skills course, I have to admit, it was very nice talk. Then I tried to explain our, a little bit different approach taken in Plasma. Especially while showing Plasma Netbook. I talked also about Fedora governance structure as I'm Fedora Board member - it's one thing I can do for Goal #1 ;-) There were also systemd, ext4, Spice and Power Management talks. I think, it was great event for people who came!



So, what are you waiting for? Go to our download page and enjoy!

Two (three) capital cities in one week - LinuxWochen and LinuxTag

As Marcela (and Kevin) pointed out - I've been to two European capital cities in one week. Actually - three - we have to change our bus at Prague (if you count 10 minutes for quick visit of local toilets). And why? It's easy - Fedora and my new duties as Fedora Ambassador.

At first - I've been to Vienna - it's about two hours by car from Brno, so nice place for one day trip/vacations. The schedule for Friday was awesome - Qt Quick Everywhere (now almost everywhere, not on WP7) but I spent most of the time on Fedora booth with Zoli, so no luck to see one. It's always wonderful to meet people face to face, even people who does not know what Fedora means. "Is it something similar to Ubuntu?" is probably most frequent question - that's task for us to make it "Is Ubuntu something similar to Fedora?". Sounds better, doesn't it?



Also we talked a lot with Zoli about how to make Fedora the best distro for Qt/MeeGo development - without need to distribute the whole Qt SDK. We have high quality Qt stack with Qt Creator but we still miss some pieces from mobile world. Latest Qt Mobility waits in Bodhi. Problem is QMF - there's review in Bugzilla - but as one upstream developer commented it - it's actually the meego-qmf version, not pure qt-qmf. My solution is to rename it to meego-qmf and provide qt-qmf (as it's subset in MeeGo version). This should work and I hope they'll merge again soon (it's the plan as I understand). So I think - it's possible to provide best MeeGo development experience within Fedora. Also - I had a luck with the first try make MeeGo Tablet UX working in Fedora - I'll blog about it later.



The next capital city was Berlin and much, much more bigger event - LinuxTag. Christop said - you'll be there. Period. So I and Jiri Eischmann - the new and amazing Fedorian/Red Hatter - visited it. We arrived on Tuesday and after lunch, we helped guys to set up the booth. One small note - you can understand German if you are working on booth construction :) Unfortunately we stayed in Berlin only for one and half fair day. But again - tiring but awesome. To meet our users. Even from Ubuntu booth.



We were showing several nice technologies - I played a lot with Gnome Shell - it's quite nice on touch screens, on my tablet/netbook we were showing Plasma Netbook (even one Mageia guy was surprised they are shipping it too) - very usable but for tablets only I'm waiting for Plasma Active to package it in Fedora (wait a little - not yet ready and depends on newest KDE Libraries). Of course we had the XO with Fedora.



Well, to make it shorter and to end this blogpost - thanks Zoli, Christoph, Thomas, David, Robert, Jirka (and others) - you're doing a great job as Ambassadors and the whole community should be proud of you! Hope to see you soon again.

Fedora Booth at OSCON/LinuxExpo Prague

Wow, yesterday, for the first time, we were running Fedora booth at OSCON/LinuxExpo in Prague and I hope I can say it was successful first time! Actually, I don't remember anyone was running Fedora booth in Czech Republic for the last few years (what I know). But now, as we are growing here, we are trying to present Fedora as much as possible and break Ubuntu/OpenSUSE event's dominancy (nothing against you, you're doing a great deal of work guys!!!). The booth team consisted from Jirka Eischmann, Kamil Paral and Vita Humpa with help of local Fedorian - Matej Cepl, who had to woke up really early for two LCDs (I owe you coffee and mouse;-). And of course - a few other Red Hatters/Fedorians attended the event as guests and talkers at Open Source Conference.



You can ask why do I think it was a huge success - it's simple, after the first hour we ran nearly out of free medias and in absolute numbers (as Jirka told me) we gave away more medias than Ubuntu did! Also a lot of people stopped by at our booth, to chat, to ask questions or just to say hi. We also had stickers, Fedora buttons. We shown both Gnome Shell and Plasma Desktop.



And the booth next to us was showing Unity ;-). They were selling Ubuntu book, written partially by our booth staff (Jirka and Kamil) :D. The whole day ended in the nearby pub - the event was called "Distro party" - all booths together (Fedora, Ubuntu and OpenSUSE) and I really like these people, we are only a few guys here but we're working together to show how great open source is!



For more photos, check Jirka's gallery (I used a few).

Building a gift

Well, it's Friday afternoon and we're just finishing Rawhide's Plasma 4.6.2 builds, codenamed "Congrats". And why congrats? As you can see, Fedora Planet is full of Gnome 3 release blogposts. So it is KDE community congratulations to finishing it and my gift for tomorrow's Gnome 3 Launch party @Prague I'm going to attend. I hope to meet a few friends from Gnome, other distributions (OpenSUSE guys, party animals are alive!) etc. The schedule looks awesome, even Unity is going to be presented there!

Gnome Live! event info page if you're interested to join us. Tom Bzatek and Jirka Eischmann have some small gifts for visitors :)

So congratulations Gnome guys! And see you tomorrow! Unit(y)ed (TM) - Gnome, KDE, RH, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE - celebrating.

PS: 4.6.2 build took some time, Rex being @Camp KDE, /me was working on presentation skills for the last two days... Expect F14/15 builds soon!