I took a few pictures of KDE people and the area around the hotel most were staying in. Click for the rest:

I'm doing my last preparations for FOSDEM right now. Together with the other SUSE guys I will go to Brussels later today.

On Saturday at 17:00 there will be a presentation about SUSE Studio in the openSUSE Track. Daniel Bornkessel and me will show you how to create openSUSE based software appliances with just a few clicks. As special guests we will have Andrew Wafaa and Jordi Massaguer Pla at the talk. They will tell a bit about what they have done with Studio so far.

We also will show Studio at the openSUSE booth and have some DVDs and USB sticks with us, so you can get your own customized openSUSE live media created there.

I'm looking forward to the event. See you in Brussels.

Björn and I sat down (or rather mailed around) to get the FSFE Fellowship Meeting and KDE 4.2 Stuttgart Release Party going.
Of course that involved talking to people around here.
Ingo of RadioTux was on my list of locals, so I contacted him.
What I didn't expect was to be interviewed on RadioTux just a few days later.
I had a short interview on RadioTux.
So if you are really brave, you can listen to me (in German), stuttering here.
After some technical problems they got me on the phone at around 65 minutes.
And d'oh, could I think of many things to say when skipping through it afterwards... I guess I still need to work on my promo skills.
But it turned out much less embarassing than I had originally feared

Regarding the release party, I'm quite happy that we'll be a strong team to represent FSFE and KDE.
Now I'd be happy to know who else is comming... (yes, please drop me a mail at my lastname@kde.org if you plan to come).
I'm looking forward to meeting Björn and the FSFE Fellows, Ingo (RadioTux), Daniel, Frank, Vallerie, Jörg and Lydia (KDE all)

In totally unrelated other news...

As usual, KDE will have a presence at this year's FOSDEM. If you're coming, be sure to check out our KDE devroom schedule for Saturday, and the CrossDesktop devroom schedule for Sunday. I expect that within a few days the whole schedule will be available, instead of only a few devrooms (importantly, there will be a KDE-related talk in the Debian room). If you're around on Saturday, don't forget to come to the group picture!

I'm pretty sure there will be something of interest for everyone, if not in the KDE room, then perhaps in another room. And let's hope that for your range of interests, the scheduling overlaps arent't as painful as for me (the 3-way split between Ext4, Paul Adams, and Gallium is particularly sad to me )

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 Helger 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)

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.

After that, I went to the talk on KDE 4 done by Jos Poortvliet and Sebastian Kügler: lots of (interesting) bla bla ( ) about KDE 4 concepts, ideas, etc, with Jos - instead of demo'ing kdeedu, kdegames and kdegraphics - tooking more than 10 minutes just to show the universe (with KStars, of course ) to the people
Then I decided to "relax" a bit, and placed myself into the KDE booth to catch up with emails and news from the world, until lunch.

After lunch, other three talks followed:

• Knut Yrvyn's talk about Skolelinux and its importance for education («Spreadsheets away from 8 y.o. kids!», could not agree more)
• Alexander Neoudorf presented CMake and some of the stuff the new 2.6 version will bring, especially for testing and simple packaging of applications
• after a small break, Jonathan Riddell's "Debian/Ubuntu packaging for dummies". Note unrelated (not that much, to be honest) to the talk: wondering _how_ 'GNU hello' reached version 2.3...

Then at 5pm, almost the whole crowd of the FOSDEM started packing all their stuff, and KDE people as well.
I was one of the last four KDE guys to leave the building, together with Bart Coppens, Peter Rockai and Holger Freyther (that managed to lose himself around the city two days out of two ).
I slowly reached the train station via bus and metro, and took the train (when I wrote this blog entry) that brought me back in The Netherlands (where the usual Dutch rain was there waiting for me, duh).

Many thanks go to the KDE people, to the Debian Qt-KDE guys (and gal, hi Ana!), and to my room mate, Marijn Kruisselbrink: all of you made me enjoy the two days at my first FOSDEM

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.

Personal impressions on some talks of day 1:

• Linux in Hollywood: interesting how all the modern graphics for movies is all based on Linux, even if just for the rendering farms. A long-ish list of proprietary computer graphics applications for Linux is a nice way to tell the world that Linux can actually be used even for serious stuff
• Interesting update on the current status of FreeBSD an its community, and how they still use CVS (sigh), but using Preforce to work more reliably with branches and such
• Status on software patents: another good occasion to stress on the topic, recaling that the real issue is the patents _on software_
• Linkat: an OpenSuSE-based distribution, targetting catalan schools (its primary language is catalan), and providing many services around it. It is interesting how they provide catalan documentation for the distro and the applications; I'm taking contact with them so they can hopefully share their material about KDE-Edu applications with us (KDE-Edu)
• Sadly lost Enrico Zini's talk about Xapian, the room was damn full, not even the space for throwing the head in the room...
• Followed MadCoder's talk about using GIT to fully maintain a Debian package, for all original sources, debian directory and patches to it

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!

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 weekend it's time to announce it. Finally: klik2 development has reached our internal "Milestone 2".

Remember klik? That project that aims to make Linux end-user software installation and usage more easy than on any other platform? "Grandma-proof", if you like? By making to 'install' an application as easy as copying a single file to a USB thumbdrive or to a different computer? By implementing application-level virtualization, encapsulating each end-user program into a single file, following the 1 application == 1 file principle?

For Milestone 2 we originally had set very modest goals:

1. Number of tested applications: 5 (xvier and 4 Gnome apps only: xchat, gobby, glade and hardinfo)
2. Number of tested distros: 3 (Ubuntu Gutsy, Fedora Core 8, Mandriva 2008)
3. Number of tested klik CLI sub-commands: 2 (klik get, klik run)
4. Number of tested desktop environments: 2 (Gnome, KDE)
5. Number of Screencasts: 3 (gobby, glade, xchat)

Well, if we took it literally, we failed. Because we could not find someone to thoroughly test on Fedora (it also turns out we have most problems currently to get klik2 to work on Fedora), and we could not find anybody for Mandriva. We also don't have the screencasts yet...

But we don't take it literally. Since we found people to test it on openSUSE and on Debian/Sidux, we're happy enough nevertheless and declare Milestone 2 reached. And as for the screencasts... why don't you step forward and create some for us??

This Milestone 2 achievement means that we have most of the "pillars of klik2" in place now to make big progress in a very short time. With some more finetuning, we hope to have a few hundred tested applications working and also showcase them pretty soon... However, for Milestone 3 we still do 'only' aim for 15 -- but!, we'll add Qt- as well as KDE-based applications, plus, we want 2 more distros tested...

What is even more exciting: our old friend Niall "bfree" Walsh is currently putting lots of efforts into two totally unexpected additions which we would very much like to see ready for addition to the current Milestone 3 goals:

• transforming the klik2 client source code into a properly done .deb package
• getting klik2 run on the tiny EEE PC

If you want a glimpse at bfree's work look at the screenshot on the right (click thumbnail to see full size).

Next stop: Milestone 3! If you want to help, here is what you can do:

• Install and test the klik2 client from our SVN repository (and ask questions in #klik IRC channel on Freenode)
• If you happen to run Mandriva, test the Milestone 3 application set for that distro (and fill in the gaps)
• Test the Milestone 3 application set for your distro (feel free to already start testing some more too)



• Use the openSUSE Build Service to create proper RPM packages (also for Fedora, CentOS, Redhat, Mandriva,...) for the klik client (and tell us about it)
• Help us create some nice screencasts about klik2

Make sure you send us back the automatically generated feedback (see screenshot on the right -- fill in some additional comments too), when that dialog pops up after running "klik get someapplication"...

I want to bring to your attention the fact that the deadline for scheduling FOSDEM's devrooms is coming up soon. There are as of yet only very few talks proposed, I'd like to see some more ideas! We'll be sharing the room with the GNOME people on Sunday, where we'll have some talks that will be related to issues that are interesting to both of our audiences. That also means that if we don't have enough KDE talks, they'll easily fill in the gap for us
So, hurry up and add a talk proposal on KDE's FOSDEM Wiki Page (or mail me, or query me on IRC). More information about KDE's FOSDEM presence on the dot article.

Now that OpenOffice.org does make some splashes in the IT press for the sole achievement of having created a "portable" version that can run from an USB stick (on Windows only, that is) -- isn't it time for klik to get ready for gaining its own share of public fame sometime soon? That's because klik does not only turn OpenOffice.org, but many thousand Linux applications into "PortableApps". And does not need painstakingly recompiling portable binaries from modified source code, one by one. But will re-utilize the marvellous work and special knowledge of all the dedicated Debian, RPM and Slackware packaging heroes out there and repackage 95% of its supported klik bundles fully automatically, including dependency resolution...

Have I ever mentioned that klik will be featured as one of 3 (invited) talks in the FOSDEM 2008 main track about "Packaging"? (The other two talks will be given by the Conary and the PackageKit developers.)

probono and myself will be presenting and showing off the (then) state of klik2 development, which will (hopefully) have reached a major milestone by February.

Last evening I re-tested how well (or not) klik2 does deal with applications that have no GUI at all. Though general CLI support is not even part of our preliminary February milestone plan, that one does start to work already pretty well.

Even though I finally did find an ipcalc package on the openSUSE build service repository, my personal coolness factor for running a Debian-born, klik-ified ipcalc on my (oldish) openSUSE-10.2 notebook feels considerably higher.

I hit [ctrl]+[alt]+[f2] to go to a non-GUI console and started:

   klik get ipcalc

The process to download and run the XML-based (and largely Zero-Install compatible!) klik2 recipe, which in turn fetched the ipcalc_0.41-1_all.deb from the official Debian repository, and converted this single ingredient into our .cmg format that suits klik's "1 application == 1 file" principle took less than 12 seconds.

As usual, the resulting .cmg image file was placed into the $HOME/Desktop folder. I tried to run it to see if it worked:

   klik run $HOME/Desktop/ipcalc_0.41-1.cmg

which brought up the usage output. Next, I ran a calculation for an existing customer's site that I had done earlier the day, but manually/mentally, since the notebook didn't have an ipcalc RPM installed (also, I hadn't found the one in the build service repository yet). This time in a KDE Konsole, to be able to provide a screenshot proof to you:

   klik run $HOME/Desktop/ipcalc_0.41-1.cmg 10.49.46.146/255.255.255.192

Now that this worked so nicely, I moved the .cmg to my standard folder of working klik bundles (BTW, which standard naming convention for the klik .cmg files would you prefer: bundle? container? image? archive? AppFilesystem? capsule? packet? package? BoxedApp? PortableApp? What else can you come up with?).

Then I created an alias in my ~/.bashrc file:

   alias ipcalc='klik run ~/Desktop/klik2-work/ipcalc_0.41-1.cmg'

Works like a charm. To recognize the difference from a "normally" installed ipcalc running, you'd need to know exactly what to look for.

Kudos to Jason "killerkiwi" Taylor and Lionel Tricon for doing most of the recent work to make the current klik2 state of development true!