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!

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!

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!

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!

Fedora 14 - KDE Plasma Desktop one

Wow,
another half year of our lives, another autumn out there, winter knocking on the doors, quite melancholy time, sickness all around - but don't worry, be open (and happy) - new Fedora is out! With Plasma lighting up your desktop. Yes, we released KDE version again, first time branded as Plasma Desktop one.



I'm sorry - our spin page does not reflect this change as we were unable to get website team to act (ticket sitting there for two months, last ping one week ago by Rex...) but now I have websites access and I promise to fix it asap. Even some pre-historic relict like "K Desktop Environment".



So what's new in our world? We ship 4.5.2 backed up by Qt 4.7.0 (wow, it was risky, we nearly missed release date here ;-) But thanks to all people who made this possible - Kevin Kofler, Rex Dieter, Than Ngo, Lukas Tinkl, Thomas Janssen and others (users, early testers...). This time I really liked Desktop Validation tests led by Adam Williamson - thank you!



Well, it's all - go to our download page! Do not try to use main "Get Fedora" as our spin is unfortunately hidden to your eyes - if you don't like it - report to websites team :(

PS: I'm preparing a few Fedora/Red Hat branded USB sticks with live version for LinuxAlt - biggest (and best) open source event here in Czech republic. So anyone interested in - just try to catch there and use magic password to get one ;-)

FUDCon 2010 EMEA

Ok, I'm back with another blog post from another conference, from another time and another dimension (or maybe parallel universe? maybe I'm dead?). FUDCon is always a nice opportunity to meet known faces. And I think it's really great if you are able to map IRC nick to real person. It makes communication much more easier.

As probably everyone knows - we were in Zurich, Switzerland. Nice city and nice country, taking the best from Europe (no borders check for example) and still living on their own out of Brussels control. And merging FUDCon with FrOSCamp was a just brilliant idea! I met my OpenSUSE friends, KDE & Amarok people again...



System configuration
It's not a funny but it's true - I had to travel around the world to meet people from one project/one company to find the right people there (or ideas). I gave my talk about the current state of system configuration tools, what we have, what we are working on and what we'd like to do. And of course called for ideas. It's what we miss. Input from other people, from community. Also I gave a quick overview of my another involvement in Fedora - the newly established WebKit SIG and KDE (the Plasma rebranding stuff).

Fedora Mobility
This was a great Barcamp session held by Peter Robinson, the man who did a lot to support smaller devices in Fedora. I'd like to blog about this session separately - really important stuff for me. As I'm fan of mobile devices, Plasma has now Netbook UI, MeeGo and I'm the founder member of Openmobility group (Czech and Slovak open mobility community group).

The party
Wait, it was le-gen-da-ry one. No comment. No sleep ;-)

The trip
We have visited three interested places - Bodensee on the road to Zurich and Rhine falls on the trip back + Rapperswil (not Rapersville :D) - a nice city near the lake. Of course Zurich is a nice city, with Marcela, we tried to find some typical Swiss kitchen restaurant but it was nearly impossible (we found one but we had to wait too long to be serviced, so we left before). Finally typical British pub saved our souls from starvation.



Summary
I really enjoyed FUDCon this year but I miss something. If I compare NA and EMEA FUDCons, I have to say - it's really sad we don't have one big event for all devels on the same place. And to have some smaller events for users and people who really need to meet for specific regions (but FAD should work for them). And save some money to bring developers to NA.

On the other hand - thank you guys, I really like you all ;-) And big thanks to orgs!

Dissents (just a quick reply)

This is not a blog post but more likely just a quick reply to Seth Vidal's blog as it's not possible to comment it.

Indeed - rules are needed on our highways - as drivers don't care about each other (that's just sad). So we have (better have to have) rules - but what would you say to speeding limit 5 mph (as cars are dangerous, killing people), only blue cars are allowed, drivers has to be provendrivers (as we can't trust normal drivers). That's nonsense, isn't it? Policies should not be just for creating policies.

Sorry - I've never considered myself as dissent, I'm trying to help Fedora project as much as I can (and not only because it's my job in Red Hat but I really want to do, I want to be part of one of best open source community), maybe I didn't create Fedora but that doesn't mean I should be quiet (in Czech - drzet hubu a krok). I'm not blaming anyone (and of course thanks for people who started Fedora, who are actively contributors, users, everyone) - but all, please care about others in community or we'll die. And, yes I understand reasons for some policies and rules we already have but...

I was born to be open (and now to be wild (dissent) :D).