CLS, DS, COSCUP... Plasma Active, ARM, ...

It's been quite a while since I wrote a decent blog and it might be a while longer until I really get to it. I do have a lot to write about, however. First about the Community Leadership Summit - the notes of which I'd like to turn into a few blogs. Second, the Desktop Summit, which was awesome. And third my trip to Taiwan. Finally the upcoming openSUSE conference which is going to be awesome. But let me get the most important stuff out of the way first.

Desktop Summit Awesomeness

At the Desktop Summit (which imho was a great success) I organized 3 food cooking parties where we made some Asian-inspired curries. I've put the recipes on-line for those who asked for it. Find them on the Desktop Summit Food page.

At those cooking evenings we had between 25 and 30 people join us each night. It was big fun, we had good food (and beer and more) and I really intend to do it again next time. As a matter of fact, I hope to do the cooking again at the openSUSE Conference. And remember - if you don't use openSUSE that doesn't mean you can't come and enjoy the company, food and discussions about all kinds of things. See for yourself in the detailed program. You can also learn how IO travels in the kernel, how to use the mtux console multiplexer, the sessions about GIT, cross-cultural communication, GCC and Kernel stuff and more. And that's just stuff from day one, we have about 100 sessions in 4 days.

Talking about cool stuff, on Tuesday we'll have an 8-bit music workshop... Seriously, I look forward to that. If you want to join, hurry up, the conf takes place September 11-14!

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Taipei and Plasma Active

Last week I made a trip to Taiwan to meet the openSUSE community there. There's quite a bunch and they did awesome at the booth at COSCUP. Really cool. We had lots of interesting stuff there, flyers, geeko's, stickers, USB sticks and Aaron left his Plasma Active tablet (runs openSUSE, of course) at the booth a few times. That thing drew quite a crowd - and rightly so. I hadn't seen that much of it but Plasma Active is really something very interesting. It's a unique touch tablet UI, yet easy to use and intuitive. Build in just a few months it's amazing to see how well it works already. The team aims to stabilize it in the next few months and I'm absolutely certain it will result in a pretty darn impressive product.

Aaron spoke quite a bit about how well the Open Build Service works for them during development. The team works closely with an interaction designer and obviously she's not such a hugely technical person. With a traditional development process someone would have to do packages for her - or she'd have to learn how to check out a repository and then compile and install stuff herself. Thanks to OBS, packages are build continuously and very easy - a dev checks some code in and the next day the designer can give feedback! Continuous build services are not unique of course but they usually don't come easily, don't produce packages, etc. build.opensuse.org has an easy web interface, can build for all major Linux distro's and architectures (yes, including ARM) and is of course entirely free.run it in-house,

I'm quite proud that openSUSE proves to be so successful for the Plasma Active team. They also build packages for MeeGo, as they want to support ARM systems. I know several openSUSE contributors want to have ARM in openSUSE, well, Plasma Active is at the openSUSE conference so we can meet and talk about it there...

Anyhow. So Taiwan was fun. You can find some pics of COSCUP on flickr and I have an image of two of my hosts as well as fellow visitor Aaron below :D

You'll probably find all three of them at the openSUSE conference too, btw.