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!

Akademy and me (and you)

Yes, I'm going too - I've just printed down all information we'll probably need, e-tickets (flight, bus), luggage prepared, secondary battery for my N900 charged... And today later in the evening, the trip for me and Lukas Tvrdy (Krita star developer) begins.



I'd like to meet a lot of people, especially Ryan Rix - a Fedora fellow. So all people interested in Fedora and our Fedora technologies (Polkit-qt for example), feel free to stop me (this year probably the only guy wearing the red fedora hat :((()! I'm looking forward to see you again!