Software Freedom Day Brno

Well, as I can see several Software Freedom Day 2012 blog posts around, why not to write another one.

Our  SFD consisted from talks (in LvB we call it Tower Talks as we use Red Hat's Big Tower meeting room), 3d printing, free TV-show, discussion and of course - beer. Marcel Kolaja, the Czech Pirate, begun with Free Culture talk - from the beginnings of the free software movement to the free currencies as Bitcoin.

Petr Kovář continued with free software localization talk - mostly from Gnome and Fedora Project perspectives and I hope he has attracted more people to join the effort :)

But everyone was waiting for RepRap 3D printer talk. Guys got lost in Brno on the trip from Prague (thanks guys for coming!)... Miro Hrončok and Marek Žehra from 3D print lab @ Czech Technical University shown the printer, explained basic principles and printed two hooks designed during the talk (actually during the trip to Brno :D).

After printing there was a time for relax - Your Face is a Saxophone is a very nice public domain TV-show - parody to the all kinds of marketing. Free to watch, download, share, remix, repurpose, or do anything else.

I talked a little bit about open and free software life cycle. And of course Fedora as an example one :-)

Later we moved to the pub nearby to have a few beers. Yep, we couldn't celebrate with stronger alcohol as it's currently banned in Czech Republic and there is prohibition in effect... Al Capone's resurrection!

I'd like to thanks everyone for coming and helping with the event (Jiří Eischmann, LvB, Pirati.cz and all speakers). I really enjoyed the whole day. And I hope you too. Everywhere around the globe!

May, the LinuxMonat

May was an amazing month. Two big open source and Linux related events in Europe. Both in German speaking countries (Germany and Austria) and both with Linux prefix in the name. First I tried my memory, to remember the word for month in this language. I was studying it for a long time but also long time ago (elementary school) - so I had to use a dictionary, cheat a little bit and here we go - it was my LinuxMonat!

LinuxWochen Vienna

The first one was LinuxWochen in Vienna, co-hosted with Libre Graphics Meeting. If you understand Czech, you can read our report (with Jiri) from the event - Fedora na konferenci LinuxWochen. We had a very nice Fedora booth and even the real flying Fedora! Also the talks I was able to attend were nice (and because of LGM a lot in English ;-). Especially Krita one, I'm looking forward for another Krita created comics (check the last one - Wasted Mutants/Wisdom Mountain with DVD how to create one - your own)! Also Sirko (gnokii) managed to put hughsie and Kai-Uwe together and I'd like to invite people interested in open source colour management to join Linux Color Management Hackfest 2012 in Brno (hosted by Red Hat Czech office). It's scheduled for this fall.

Photo by Nicu

LinuxTag Berlin

Berlin is not as close as Vienna (Vienna is even the closest capital city to Brno) but there's a direct train and it costs only a few euros with special SporoTiket Evropa ticket. And it's the real trade fair. With real booths and real everything (even real security guys - and some people were already hacking tickets;-). That means we had much more bigger place, shared with CentOS guys, next to OpenSUSE and Beefy Miracle hot dog shop! We've got to Phoronix! A lot of fun (and free hot dogs and chameleon  free beer:-). From talks I saw only one - the over optimistic Qt 5 by Lars Knoll :( You know what's happening in Nokia...

Best combination ever!

And the LinuxNacht - main social event sponsored by Microsoft, Oracle and Nokia... With a music band playing on iPads... You know, we do not have money but we have spirit and also we ate as much as possible to use this generosity as much as possible too!

Well, thanks Sirko for Vienna, Christoph for Berlin - it's great we have such a great events we can spread Fedora and I hope to see more Fedora everywhere!

Reminder: the Future of Fedora release names meeting tmrw!

Hi, we are planning the first meeting on %SUBJ% tomorrow - so Friday 15th 5PM UTC (1PM EDT, 7PM CEST for us Central Europeans ;-). You can find it on Freenode - #fedora-meeting-1 channel.

What's the goal of this meeting? I hope not to have a meeting for meeting but to move forward with the discussion started by Toshio (as it got stalled). I think the best thing we can do for now is to try to get interested people to meet together, to check if there's real demand for the change and if so, to start with the real proposals to create a new naming scheme.

The meeting is open for everyone, if you're interested in - please join us! Btw. it's still a discussion and the result of this discussion is an advisory for Board

Fedora 17 KDE Plasma Workspaces Test Day today!

This blogpost is just a quick reminder for people who knows about our Fedora 17 Plasma Desktop Test Day but also invitation for the "rest" - users, testers and developers - you're welcome to join us ;-)

The main goal is to test Plasma Desktop integration in Fedora but I expect users will be reporting not only Fedora related issues. We will try to redirect these issues upstream but the test day is open for upstream developers too and would be great to have more hands to help.

The main topics are Desktop Effects enabled by default (as upstream already enables it by default, Gnome Shell is also accelerated only desktop and we think it's time give it a chance :) We disabled the initial LLVMpipe software rendering support.), Fedora KDE spin theming support, GDM integration - GDM switched from ConsoleKit to systemd, we have an initial support by Kevin Kofler (to be upstreamed) and hardware integration (Solid, Power management, bluetooth). Also the freeform essential applications testing.

It's held today (2012-04-10) at FreeNode #fedora-test-day channel!

Test Day Wiki with the recommended LiveCD image (with 4.8.2), brief overview and actual test cases and results.

Btw. if you are going to use KVM as found in Fedora 16/17 - change the video options to qlx/spice as cirrus/vnc is currently broken by the cirrus change to 16 bpp - see rhbz#810161.

See you today :)

Be Active - KDE SIG FAD at DevConf Brno

The last week and the whole weekend was really demanding but also one of the best of all while being Active in Fedora community. The Developer Conference is for developers and it was held by developers - the Red Hat, Fedora and community ones. A great opportunity to meet very nice (looking) people. You could meet one third of current Fedora Board, one (now former) FPL, the base OS guys who serves you a lot of Fedora updates, the core system developers and of course - nearly the whole Fedora KDE SIG (me, Rex Dieter, Lukas Tinkl, Kevin Kofler, Radek Novacek) with special guests (Christopher Wickert, Martin Klapetek, Dan Vratil and Lukas Karas). It was nearly impossible to talk to everyone, to attend every hackfest/sprint, to listen to all talks. And over six hundred people arrived the first day! It was Active.

Well, this is my quick summary - mostly from our Fedora KDE SIG lands and the Activity Day. We set quite high standard and level of achievements for the FAD (see the plans on FAD wiki) and I'm really glad we met them (at least partially).

• Christoph was working on LightDM packaging for Fedora, he started at FUDCon EMEA Milan and after the real fight he was able to get the beast log him in, even with Qt greeter and I'm really looking forward to try the KDE greeter with all the neat QML stuff there!



• Me and Radek Novacek were finishing the Plasma Active stuff - so that's all the Be Active stuff in this blog. We hit several build issues and we were trying to figure out how to integrate PA2 to Fedora. Finally we decided that we will aim on a Fedora Active spin, containing only touch enabled applications (the core PA stuff, Bangarang with touch support etc.) as on tablets the desktop stuff is not very usable and on the other hand - we don't have enough space on Plasma Workspaces spin to include the touch bits in. Also we will skip the Fedora 17 as a target for spin, we will try to prepare unofficial images during the development, waiting for Plasma Active 3 that should be consumable by end users (as it targets the Spark tablet release). Imagine Fedora on Raspberry Pi with touch screen and Active on top of it (yeah, I know, it's ARM so more work will be needed, for now we aim on Atom based tablets like WeTab/ExoPC and check the photo of Lenovo IdeaPad running it) :)





• Rex was working with Martin, the KDE Telepathy upstream guy, on the packaging with the aim to replace Kopete and make Telepathy bits default in Fedora 17. We will see but the progress is nice, Kopete is not anymore maintained... Rex also committed the package splits to comps.





• Martin finished the sprint with the Firemuk, check his blog post to see nice Nepomuk coolness.





• Kevin was working on his colorized system tray icons, yep, I should get them soon! and updated of git-cola in Fedora to latest upstream.



• Lukas was finishing his uDisks 2 support in Solid and the first batch of patches is already upstreamed! Great achievement! Hero Trophy earned.

I also gave a talk about Qt 5 - the Qt Project, now under open governance, what's new in the fifth version, with a quick QML and Qt Quick tutorial and the response from KDE community. And it wouldn't be me without some wow effect - so the whole talk was written in Qt Quick using QML Presentation System on top Qt 5 using OpenGL Scene Graph. With all examples embedded in slides. Even Kevin thinks it's abuse of QML I still like it - there's no easier way how to create interactive presentations, one minus is export. I'd try to capture it and publish it somewhere. Also check my branch - I'll commit the changes needed to get it running on current Qt 5. And as winter already came, and alpha is coming from the north and behind the wall - we were talking about how to provide the packages for Fedora. Stay tuned!

And spending the Sunday's afternoon with Red, Jared and Dennis was ... priceless...



So I'd like to thanks to all people, all developers who were working really hard to get this event ready, thank you!