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.