So, after Saturday's FOSDEM KDE Group Picture, perhaps it's now time to give a slightly fuller account of FOSDEM 2008 (with pictures). Since most of my pictures from the main tracks were too blurry anyway, I'll just focus on some of my pictures related to the KDE FOSDEM 2008 presence (leaving out some pics of individual persons and overview shots). Photos have only been resized and cropped where somewhat appropriate. Perhaps to do for next year: buy a lens which captures more light, or a bigger flashlight (Shooting at ISO 1600 is rather noisy )

Let's start with a picture of the KDE stand, featuring Adriaan and his fancy box (btw Adriaan, another piece of consumer electronics that people willingly pose with would be the OLPC).

The first KDE talk was by Nikolaj Hald Nielsen about Amarok 2, and introduced a live mascote for Amarok. I noted that Amarok 2 really should try to get the ability to download and manage live performances and other music available from the Internet Archive. Let's hope they try that again (given that he actually looked into it already).

The following talk was by me about KOffice 2, but since I did that talk myself, I don't have pictures of that I was followed by Sebastian Trüg talking about Nepomuk. I could really have used his proposed feature of using FOSDEM speaker information to find mails from them

Knut Yrvin then talked about Free Software in telecom. Not only did he pass around a Greenphone (unfortunately no decent pics of that), but he also gave away a free book to the first person in the audience that could answer a tough question about what code TT GPLed at some point last year. It was so hard that he had to ask an easier question to be able to give away the book

Unfortunately I had to miss most of Holger Schröder's KDE on Windows in order to meet someone, but I was still able to snap some pictures of him in action (actually I made more decent pictures of him than of most other speakers, intriguingly enough).

The last talk on Saturday was done by Josef Spillner. He talked about multiplayer gaming for KDE4 games, which apparently exists already even though the functionality is hidden somewhat. I can't really check that because I don't actually compile KDE4 games, but it's still interesting to know about.

The first talk on Sunday morning (way too early for my taste ) in the Crossdesktop room was done by the dynamic duo Simon Peter and Kurt Pfeifle (Simon doing the talking, and Kurt demonstrating Klik on his laptop/the projector while Simon discussed it, very nice interaction). They talked about Klik (2). I guess their target audience was me, because they showed a Klik error dialog about Krita not working

Unfortunately I had to leave early during their Q&A session, because I wanted to see part of the Xen main track talk. I arrived late, and the room was completely packed and rather hot. So instead of staying in that room for the next talk about VirtualBox, I left in the break to go to the other main track about build tools, just in time for the SCons talk. (I was planning to meet a friend of mine during the CMake talk anyway, so now I just met him slightly earlier.) It was a lot less crowded there, and even a bit too cold (but that might've been because there was a draught). While I moved rooms, I was still able to quickly make a picture of the questions section of Jos Poortvliet and Sebastian Kuegler's talk on KDE4.

After the CMake talk I had to leave early again (and miss the next devroom talk), because we had a small meeting on the grass field next to the devroom about the upcoming aKademy 2008 in Belgium. That meeting finished just in time to catch another talk by Knut Yrvin, this time on Free Software in Education (he gave a total of 3 devroom talks, but his other talk about Free Software and phones was scheduled at the same time as the Klik one). No free books this time, but he did tell us about how teaching young kids how to use an office suite is a bad idea. I guess Inge won't like the sound of that

After the main track CMake talk by Bill Hoffman, we also had our own version of a CMake talk, this time by Alexander Neundorf. I guess I should really try if that excluding of unit tests also works with the Krita unit tests, since that does sound like a nice feature to use. Bill attended the talk as well, and gave a free CMake book to a happily surprised Peter Rockai (mornfall) during the questions section, after Peter asked a question about integrating Java in CMake projects.

After that, we first had Øyvind Kolås (pippin) talking a bit about GEGL (we had to switch his talk and the Deb Packaging Jam, unfortunately). It seems that the current development version of Gimp has a checkbox in the main GUI to 'Enable GEGL', which is rather interesting (amongst other things, it provides them with live previewing of filters, a feature the current Krita development version has as well, and which I also demonstrated the day before). As seems to be typical with talks by pippin, he used a custom presentation interface to do his presentation (this time it appeared to be a graphically 'enhanced' file system browser )

Following that I had another scheduling conflict: there was both the Deb talk, and another Klik talk (this time as a main track). I resolved it by quickly visiting Simon and Kurt to take a picture, and then go back to the Crossdesktop room where Jonathan Riddell explained us all about making Debian Packages. He did this by using the rather amusing example of packaging the GNU Hello World program.

Unfortunately, due to circumstances, we had to cancel the last devroom talk, so no pictures from that. After that, I hung around a bit with mornfall and Pino Toscano (who doesn't like me taking pictures of him, yet is on the group picture ). After Holger talked a bit with us, FOSDEM 2008 was unfortunately over already. Let's hope next year's FOSDEM will be at least as good as this one

PS: I bought a Debian T-Shirt at FOSDEM, I guess that makes up for my rant about them I actually wanted to buy one last year already, but they were sold out then. I made sure to buy one on Saturday this year, and indeed they still had some (FYI: like said in the comments there, that issue has been temporarily fixed in their kernels now. I tested it, and it indeed works, yay ) (And generally speaking, I really like Debian, and that's mainly why I get angry at it sometimes: I care about it)

Edit/PS 2: Seems like Jonathan Riddell put up all of my KDE related FOSDEM pictures on his Flickr account, so now you can have a more extensive view of them

Another day, another set of interesting talks out of the over 200 here at FOSDEM.

First, I had a look at what the KDE guys at OpenSuSE are doing for KDE 4: plans to ship KDE 4.0.1 (or better, .2 as soon as it is released), whith some concerns about eg KDE PIM. Was also nice to know that they are working on porting the KDE 3 applications developed by their developers to KDE 4: KNetworkManager (using NetworkManager 0.7), Kerry (using a Xesam interface, thus more generic), KPowerSave, etc.

So, as I said previously, I'm at FOSDEM right now, sitting in the KDE boot, with some Amarok guys, Joos demo'ing all around, Marijn working on KDE and Adriaan hacking on the KDE4-branded SOLARIS thin client.

So, not only is it FOSDEM this weekend, I also organized a group photo for the KDE related people who are here. We went to the small field of grass in front of the KDE devroom. Luckily, the sun just started breaking through the clouds, so there was nice lighting (unfortunately I forgot to switch my ISO back from 1600, so it's a bit noisy nonetheless).
Here's a very small version (WiFi is a bit slow here, so no big version yet)

Just so that you won't all forget: next weekend there's FOSDEM in Brussels. You can find the complete schedule in a handy grid layout here. For KDE people, I guess the most interesting non-main track talks could be those in the KDE devroom and the Crossdesktop devroom.

Due to reasons beyond my control, I find myself yet again doing a talk in the KDE devroom about KOffice 2 (the original speaker is unfortunately unable to come). I hope you'll enjoy it (for those keeping track: I'm a big fan of LaTeX-beamer for making presentations, though the brainstorming plans I saw for KPresenter2 might make that appealing for me as well in the future).

For the KDE and GNOME people attending: we'll be doing KDE Group Photo on Saturday noon (presumably followed up with a picture together with the GNOME people, if they come: it's not advertised on their track's schedule), it might be fun if you'd drop by!

Edit: this one is for pino: *hug*

The FOSDEM 2008 organizers now have published their 'speakers interview' with probono and myself.

If you are interested in some background about the current klik2 development, it may be serving as a good general introduction into the concepts.

This is a screenshot of the current feedback table of our Milestone 3 testing. (Unfortunately I can't publish the URI for that table, because it would put too much load onto our web server if too many people used it).

Hence this screenshot only for now.

The goal is to fill in all the gray fields with some real results and to make most of the red fields turn into yellow or red.

probono is currently working on the new web interface for the klik server presenting klik2 applications to the end user. Unfortunately, we can't yet publish the exact URLs, since the server may not yet be prepared for even a mild version of slashdotting, and this is still very much work in progresss...

Here is the page for "gobby", one of our 15 "Milestone 3" test cases. A lot of the content of that page is dynamically created.

probono is currently working on the new web interface for the klik server presenting klik2 applications to the end user. Unfortunately, we can't yet publish the exact URLs, since the server may not yet be prepared for even a mild version of slashdotting, and this is still very much work in progresss...

Here is the page for "gobby", one of our 15 "Milestone 3" test cases. A lot of the content of that page is dynamically created.

probono is currently working on the new web interface for the klik server presenting klik2 applications to the end user. Unfortunately, we can't yet publish the exact URLs, since the server may not yet be prepared for even a mild version of slashdotting, and this is still very much work in progresss...

Here is the page for "gobby", one of our 15 "Milestone 3" test cases. A lot of the content of that page is dynamically created.