openSUSE 13.2 out: PARTY time!

It's the 5th of November, a date the Brits are told to remember - for me, it is the day after openSUSE 13.2 was released! It's a kickin' release, good reason for a release party tonight at the Belug in Berlin.

13.2

End users will probably notice the revamped YaST most during installation, but the integration of functionality like snapper, Dracut and Wicked is also quite significant. With Snapper, you can roll back upgrades of your system, configuration changes and so on - and if an upgrade made the system unbootable, you just boot from an older version. I haven't seen it in action yet, as unfortunately my btrfs filesystem broke just a week ago - which is of course the one thing snapper can't fix. Yes, bug is fixed, but annoying.

Dracut 'just' leads to faster booting, I've been playing with it on my laptop for a while and it is cool that it made it in now. And yes, 5 second boot is realistic, my new desktop at work does that easily. It also reduces the huge scripted mess that the old mkinitrd system was with something distributions can work together on - that is a good thing in itself, I like collaboration.

I can't say anything smart about Wicked, to be honest. It's network management, but where it fits and what it does exactly somebody else would have to explain in normal-human-terms ;-)

Of course there's much more, including the latest kernel, GNOME, KDE and 5 more desktops (including a preview of Plasma 5.1!), the best selection of what Free Software has to offer and so on. Find a nice overview of openSUSE 13.2 on the info page.

party time

The Party part is easy to explain. The Berlin LUG (BeLUG) has offered their place as party space tonight, I'll give a quick intro into what is new in this release, we'll have some time for debate and then it's all up for grabs. The BeLUGgers promised there would be beer, so what can go wrong?

See you at:
Belug e.V.
Lehrter Straße 53
10557 Berlin
Be there at 18:00 for some informative fun and a beer!

If you aren't in Berlin, check if there is a release party close to you or organize one yourself!

Where KDE is going...

In my blog about conf.kde.in, I promised I would blogify my talk about KDE's future but failed to publish it until now. I thought the content might be a good fit for on paper. It took a while, but the upcoming Linux Voice should feature an extended version of these blog posts about where KDE is going, with quotes from a variety of KDE folk providing some background.

Meanwhile, on the dot I have published an updated version of the first blog post about the technical side of things: KDE software. It is mostly aimed at people not intimately familiar with KDE but curious about what is coming. Users, for example...

If you find a bug, report it to me or the dot editors! And: spread the article around for users and interested people to read...

LinuxTag 2014 Fun

Thursday, Friday and Saturday last week, LinuxTag took place in Berlin. A few months ago, in a moment of temporary insanity, I had proposed to three projects to organize their booths: KDE, openSUSE and ownCloud. As that wasn't challenge enough, I wanted to experiment with doing workshops at the booth, specifically aimed at attracting and training potential new contributors.

How it came to be

Music outside!

I proceeded to register a booth, promising the LinuxTag exhibition manager (Elke Moritz), the KDE e.V. board, the openSUSE Board and my brand new boss at ownCloud that we would set up a great show. As I wouldn't be able to separate ownCloud (PHP) or KDE (C++, QML) code from text in a openSUSE .spec file nor can staff three booths at once, you can imagine I promised more than I could ever deliver on my own. But that's where friends come in, right?

And they came through - the result was great.

Re:Publica area

The new LinuxTag

First, a short introduction. LinuxTag is one of the oldest European Linux events, operating under the credo: "bringing .org and .com together". That is, they feature both commercial and community booths and a big selection of talks.

LinuxTag has been taking place at the Messe in Berlin in the last years, and this has not been a hugely successful location. But this year, there was change: a co-location with the immensely popular Re:Publica event as well as collaboration with DroidCon was meant to bring a lot of new energy. The new location, Station Berlin, gives a more fitting Linux feeling: much more raw. If you ask me, it worked out, LinuxTag was a much better event than it has ever been in the Messe.

What did we do

openSUSE, ownCloud and KDE

As I noted, our plan was two-fold. We, that is KDE, openSUSE and ownCloud, would have a combined booth. We would use the combined space not for a traditional table+swag, instead set up an area for workshops. In short, 1 hour slots, visitors would learn the basics of working within each of the three communities. For example:

• writing ownCloud apps
• developing KDE applications
• packaging for openSUSE.

We wouldn't plan for a big audience: the workshops would go deep and be personal.

Daniel giving a workshop

So, we got together speakers and defined a program (see my blog). I received the ownCloud and openSUSE booth materials home and the day before LinuxTag, drove it all to the venue, picking up KDE stuff from Lydia Pintscher at the wikimedia office later in the evening. Due to some snafu's with the booth area preparations we had to set up the booth in the morning - which happened even before Danimo and myself arrived with some more materials (thanks booth team!).

The booths

Our booth area (all the way to the left!)

We planned for little space (essentially one combined booth) but the LT team had given us so much space, we had to set up three big booths! openSUSE got the big table, ownCloud took two round ones and a third round table was covered in the KDE tablecloth, with a huge KDE flag hung up next to it. Behind it all 12 chairs and a table with a projector. All this was quite a bit more than we planned, so the initial idea (we'd only need 1-2 people at a time to do 'booth duty' for the 3-in-1 booth) didn't work out very well: all three booths had to be staffed most of the time. We did have some overlap at quiet times, but full house during especially the breaks.

I had printed posters with the schedule, one for each day as we had slight schedule changes every day. We hung them up all over the place, after which we put down openSUSE, ownCloud and KDE flyers wherever there was space. The openSUSE Beer coasters did particularly well - we had put them on the tables in the eating/drinking area and we had to 'refill' several times a day.

Us vs them?

The posters and most of the flyers I had created for ownCloud pointed people to the booth (I stole the concept of the 'consume vs create' poster from the openSUSE Conference in Dubrovnik, btw!). We should have asked people how they found out about the workshops, from posters, blog, workshop or being told at our booth. I have no idea how effective each of those is...

Let me now point to this blog by Danimo about the owncloud presence, the KDE blog by Sebastian is out too. And I expect the openSUSE team to publish their blog(s) very soon.

Booth fun

Give some balloons to Frank, and...

For me, there was some fun synergy: meeting KDE-on-openSUSE users interested in installing ownCloud. Or, after starting a conversation with somebody about one of these projects, continuing the conversation about one of the others. Several times, I got users interested in all three at once: Server Linux (openSUSE/ownCloud) and Desktop Linux (openSUSE/KDE).

I also noticed that many visitors already knew ownCloud, or had at least heard of it. At some point, I was talking to a visitor, explaining ownCloud, while a second visitor joined the conversation. He already knew about ownCloud and took over, while I talked to a third visitor, answering some questions. Then a fourth showed up, who begun answering their questions while I turned to a fifth, explaining ownCloud... Great to get in conversations like that!

During a quiet moment, a visitor came to me, complaining he had been 'in line' to talk to me several times, but it was so busy, he didn't get a chance before! Indeed, we had busy times, especially Thursday. But that's awesome, right?

I also gave two talks - one at the evening program of LinuxTag about where the Linux Desktop is going (it didn't go very well, I'm afraid) and one about Community Governance at the first European Community Leadership Summit, that did go quite well. Shame I couldn't stay too long for the CLS as we had friends over and I had to go home...

All in all, for me, it was a great event.

Re:Publica Hippies

The team

Let me also not forget to introduce the team at LinuxTag to you:

• Daniel Molkentin (ownCloud)
• Arthur Schiwon (ownCloud)
• Georg Ehrke (ownCloud)
• Frank Karlitschek (ownCloud)
• Sebastian Gottfried (KDE)
• Christian Boltz (openSUSE & PostfixAdmin)
• Bernhard Wiedemann (openSUSE)
• Marcel Külhorn (openSUSE)

We had several people come by and help out a bit, as well as three others giving booth workshops:

• Maik Aussendorf (Bareos)
• Gratien D'haese (REAR)
• Jörg Schilling (fraunhofer, cdrecord)

Sebastian's KDE workshop

The workshops

During the booth work, we had the workshops going on. It had a bit of a slow start on Thursday morning, but quickly, the workshops started to attract some more people. At one point did I see Sebastian surrounded by six visitors interested in KDE development... I think, on average, the workshops attracted about 3-6 visitors each. Which is quite good, considering they were primarily aimed at introducing people to contributing to our projects.

Despite the amount of work preparing the booth workshops, I'd do it again. Imagine if only a third of the visitors decides to join the respective communities!

openSUSE booth team in action

Feedback

If you visited one of these booth workshops or our booth at LinuxTag, I'd love your feedback! Knowing how we did, if we were friendly, fun, interesting, or what was missing and what you'd like to see next time - it all helps us improve in the future!

In any case, everybody who contributed to the booths and presentations as well as everybody who visited us: thank you very much!

Of course very special hugs to the booth- and presentation team.

Get-involved workshops at the KDE/ownCloud/openSUSE booth at LinuxTag

Tomorrow, 9:45, LinuxTag and DroidCon open the doors in Berlin. The even presents a staggering number of sessions (see LinuxTag on Thursday alone featuring 57 talks). This is in part due to the addition of evening sessions, which are open for the public (no ticket needed). My own talk about the relevance of the Linux Desktop is one of these evening sessions. This is in parallel with LinuxNacht so we'll have to see how many people will choose talks over beer...

Workshops

At the combined openSUSE/ownCloud/KDE booth I've organized short workshops, given by contributors to these projects, designed to help you get involved with these (and other!) Free Software projects. There is only room for about 10-12 people per workshop so you will get some real attention from the developer doing the workshop. It also means you should make sure to be there on time to secure a spot!

We try to give the workshops tree times so if one is full, you can come back the next day (due to availability of people this didn't work for all workshops).

The program

Thursday

10:00	Testing Linux with openQA (Bernhard Wiedemann)
11:00	Introduction to hacking ownCloud file synchronization (Daniel Molkentin)
12:00	AppArmor Crash Course (Christian Boltz)
13:00
14:00	Build your first ownCloud App (Arthur Schiwon)
15:00	Writing your first KDE application (Sebastian Gottfried)
16:00	Packaging with the Open Build Service (Marcel Kühlhorn)
17:00	Internal security mechanisms used by the German eID card (Joerg Schilling)

Friday

10:00	Testing Linux with openQA (Bernhard Wiedemann)
11:00	Introduction to hacking ownCloud file synchronization (Daniel Molkentin)
12:00	Hacking PostfixAdmin (Christian Boltz)
13:00	Bareos Backup - Rear Disaster Recovery workshop (Maik Außendorf and Gratien D'haese)
14:00	Build your first ownCloud App (Georg Erhke)
15:00	Writing your first KDE application (Sebastian Gottfried)
16:00	Packaging with the Open Build Service (Marcel Kühlhorn)
17:00	Internal security mechanisms used by the German eID card (Joerg Schilling)

Saturday

10:00	Testing Linux with openQA (Bernhard Wiedemann)
11:00	Introduction to hacking ownCloud file synchronization (Daniel Molkentin)
12:00	AppArmor Crash Course (Christian Boltz)
13:00	Bareos Backup - Rear Disaster Recovery workshop (Maik Außendorf)
14:00	Build your first ownCloud App (Georg Erhke)
15:00	Writing your first KDE application (Sebastian Gottfried)
16:00	Packaging with the Open Build Service (Marcel Kühlhorn)
17:00	Internal security mechanisms used by the German eID card (Joerg Schilling)

Participants to the workshops get a Club Mate to keep them awake and quench their thirst.

Our booth space is in Hall 6, Number D11 - next to the LinuxTag info stand. See you there tomorrow!

oSC14 and LinuxTag coming!

It's becoming conference season again... Tomorrow morning I'll fly to Dubrovnik for the openSUSE Conference. I give no less than 5 talks and one workshop. Don't worry, I'm not DDOSing the event, the talks are restricted to 30 minutes (even though I have about 1 hour of content for each, let's see how that goes). My sessions:

• Social skills for geeks
• Presenting awesome (workshop about giving presentations)
• How to run a booth and present your project
• Where KDE is and where it is going
• Cloudy experiences at home (about ownCloud!)
• Community building in 10 steps

That's quite a bunch, I know, but it'll be fun! I look forward to Dubrovnik, although I see it will be rainy and not that warm. Ah, sad...

LinuxTag 2014 - all change

A much bigger deal, for me, is LinuxTag. This year, it is considerably different from the previous few years: no more in the Messe! Instead, the team is collaborating with DroidCon and Re:Publica. That, combined with the location (Station in Berlin), could potentially be awesome! Here I give one talk about the future of KDE. I'll also be speaking at the Community Leadership Summit Europe about Open Governance.

But more importantly, I'll be organizing the LT booth for three projects: ownCloud, KDE and openSUSE. Yeah, ambitious again! Not only that, we're not going for the traditional booth. Instead, I've proposed to do something different: have a track of technical mini-workshops at the booth. 45 minute talks, small, hands-on, about the technology of these projects. So, think about building packages with the Open Build Service, writing an ownCloud App or developing a QML based Plasma widget.

Needing some help

The idea seems generally liked but I haven't found anybody for any of the three above potential talks - so if you can and want to do that or something like it, please let me know! We won't have too much traditional booth space, just enough for a bit of stuff and one or two ppl answering questions. The talks will repeat every day so as volunteer, you give your talk 3 times, once every day. Otherwise you are free to enjoy the talks as well as the Re:Publica booth area. As the tickets are not cheap (Eur 149!) this is a nice way to get into LinuxTag for free (I have only 2 tickets per booth, though). You'll get hugs and Club Mate as much as you want. And there's travel support available for all these projects!

Help me out, please! And if you can't - at least, be sure to visit the booth at LinuxTag or come say hi at the openSUSE Conference!

Rocking India

Last week in Gandhinagar, India, conf.kde.in finished. As Free Software conferences go, this one was more than decent! Thanks to a single track of high quality talks, all ~300 visitors were in the same room and in the breaks were discussing the same subjects. Of course this presents a challenge to the team picking the talks as they have to fit the entire audience, but the fact that the majority of visitors to this event are ICT students makes that relatively easy. That does not mean the talks were all beginner level: the talk by Peter about how to integrate Simon's voice abilities in applications (demo-ed on Amarok) and the 'Language renaissance' C++11 talk by Kevin certainly don't fall in that category. Yet, seeing the number of questions, most students were able to follow and learn from these talks.

My own talk was about where KDE, both technically and socially/organizationally, is going, also resulted in quite a few questions. They ranged from "what does RTFM mean" to discussions about involvement of startups and decision making processes. Much of what I talked about won't be new for KDE people who follow what is going on in our community quite closely. I mostly extrapolate from trends which have been visible for quite a few years. But for those who are new or less close to our community, I plan on putting it in a blog post or two over the coming days/weeks.

pictures or it didn't happen

I took quite a few pics and made some videos out of that. It basically goes from the first to the last day...



India certainly is a nice country to visit, I greatly enjoyed the warm welcome of our Indian KDE community!

Basic Usability Testing at Home - notes from the workshop at Akademy 2013

In the weeks before Akademy 2013 I convinced KDE Usability Guru Björn Balazs (from User Prompt) to lend his experience to a usability workshop I wanted to organize at the conference. The goal was to teach developers how to do 'basic usability testing at home' by guiding users through their application and watching the process. To help developers who didn't make it (and those who did but can use a reminder) I hereby share a description of the process and some tips and notes.

User Application Testing

The goal of this exercise is to get input from a user about the applications being tested. The test works by putting the user in front of the application, giving them a task and letting them execute it, guided by the developer asking questions.

Process

The process works as follows: The user is put in front of the opening screen of the application/tool. The developer or usability expert guiding the process gives them a goal, something like 'play a song from Cold Play' or 'connect to the wireless network'. You can use this nice guide by the Canonical usability team on picking tasks for the users to execute.

Then the following protocol is executed by the person guiding the process, asking the user:

1. What is your first impression?
2. What do you think you can do here?
3. What would you do to reach your goal?
4. What do you expect to happen when you do it?
5. Please do it... (let user execute action)
6. Did it do what you expected?
7. if not: was it better or worse?
8. If task is not completed yet, go back to 1 

Important:

• Make clear that the user is ONLY to execute a SINGLE action in step 5. This means that most of the time, you are checking the expectations and ideas of the user instead of watching him/her clicking around.
• As guide you're not supposed to give any hints as to what button the user should click or what he/she should do, other than perhaps remind him/her of the end goal he/she has been given
• Despite the above point, there is of course no reason to let the user helplessly waste his/her time. If the user get stuck, help them to get unstuck. 
• Try to closely stick to the protocol, not skipping questions. Of course, if a user has already answered question two in his answer on question one, there is no need to ask that question again...

If the task is finished, asked what the user thought of it all, discuss improvements etc.



Note that this kind of testing is very good to find grave issues in applications; it is not very good at fine tuning the interaction with your application. You also have to be a bit wary of the feedback from a single user: repeat the process at least once with somebody else to make sure that what is an issue for one person is really a problem. Ideally, run the test a few times with various people to increase the reliability of the feedback.

Extra tip: it is very valuable to record the sessions. Often you see things later on that you were not aware off during the session..

Results

In practice, it can be a bit hard to stay disciplined, not giving hints or telling the user what to do... And to stick to the protocol instead of just quickly letting the user click to the end. Try to keep to the structure anyway, it works best.

This process works incredibly well at showing which things are unexpectedly non-obvious for users. For your enjoyment, here is a youtube video of the Network Manager session with myself as subject:
Part 1:

Part 2:


I think the results speak for themselves and you can probably imagine the frustration on the side of the developers.

I've put the notes of the workshop also on the wiki.

Thanks to User Prompt for supporting the travel and support of Björn and Heiko Tietze as they were running the actual workshop, I was just there as participant ;-)

openSUSE at LinuxTag 2013

As I wrote last week, openSUSE was at Linuxtag. We didn't have a huge team like last year, nor did we bring all the beer - but we had some fun nonetheless.

Awesomeness

For me, the most awesome thing was the openSUSE Jeopardy done by Christan Boltz, it was SUPER cool. Of course, part of that was because I won, mainly due to the quotes section - my fellow participants had no idea who wrote them. I even recognized my own quote and it looks like I still can agree with myself. Must say that the Jeopardy thing was really, really fun.

For those wondering what the heck I'm talking about: we have small booth talks at our booth at LinuxTag. I believe Henne Vogelsang once started doing this (even before I joined openSUSE), teaching people how to fold paper Geekos and stuff like that. I'm not that creative, so I only gave KDE tips and Tricks on Wednesday and Saturday. Strange enough, nobody even seemed to have noticed that I gave that session in my favorite GNOME shirt... Luckily Christian had a way better idea for these booth talks: Jeopardy!

He has a cool html web thingy for it, complete with tracking scores and all that and I had arranged Club Mate for the winners (and, often, for the losers too). There were questions in areas like security, coding and development languages. Some worked with pictures, others had text but they were all quite ingenious. The '/etc/firstline' was cool although I didn't know any of them: it shows you the first non-comment line of a random file in /etc and you have to say what file it's from. Many of the questions were rather not openSUSE-specific, only the quotes from the Factory mailinglist (quote, you guess who said it) and the openSUSE Releases (screenshots of openSUSE login screens, you guess the version) were. I even learned a thing or two ;-)

Bernhard Wiedemann also joined the booth team, I even have to say he formed the core of it, being the most steady force as Christian didn't make it on Wednesday and I wasn't there on Thursday and Friday. He talked about OBS packaging which also attracted people interested in packaging.

The booth

Meanwhile, I've been working on the new openSUSE Merchandising program and that includes making a 'list of stuff to bring'. I decided to try and use LinuxTag to test out a few things! The booth pictures you see include some (but not all) of the goodies we plan on including in booth boxes. We learned some valuable lessons about the materials at the event. Our booth was at the entry of the event, for good or bad. The area was a bit small (although we shared some space with the ownCloud team next to us) but mostly people simply walked by to the main hall with booths and I'm not sure if they ever came back...

We had no beer this year but openSUSE Conference flyers and posters as well as a batch of 500 openSUSE flyers based on a design we've been working on in the last 2 years (until now they were only printed in the US). It seems not too many are interested in going to Greece (can't imagine why) but it was still good to point the existence of the conference out to people.

For the openSUSE flyer I had the explicit goal of seeing if it could help kickstart a conversation. I am not sure if that really works, but of course our booth team was so experienced they don't really need talking points.

The 'we believe' poster got some very valid criticism from the ownCloud team which was next to our booth: it has too much text on it and people simply won't read it. Having that design as small (a6 or so) hand out might work far better, or as a slide in a presentation. And having a big one with images or somehow else more, hum, easily (lazily) processed might be a good combination. Anybody has any ideas on how to put our philosophy as expressed on this poster in the form of a more graphical image? I'd love to see some ideas ;-)

Also, if you visited our booth and are reading this - I would love feedback, both good and bad. On the looks of it, the posters, flyers, DVD, people - all of it!

Talks

We also had a few 'big' (as in, not at the booth) talks. Bernhard and Sascha spoke about OpenStack / SUSE Cloud / crowbar in the main track and I myself talked for about 30 min on what happened to openSUSE in the last year and gave a 2 minute lightning talk about our booth as well. All talks went well but LinuxTag isn't the most crowded event and seems to be getting smaller - talking for 20 people is perhaps more fun as you get to have more close contact to the audience but it's hardly worth traveling for.

The booth talks I gave about 'advanced KDE usage' where big fun. They usually had just a handful of visitors which meant we all sat together around my laptop and could discuss things quite nicely. Fun!

Edit: and I forgot to mention the talk Bernhard gave on "openSUSE on ARM" including our cross-compilation tricks with qemu-linux-user. And sorry for the appearance of some old blogs on planet.KDE, I have no idea how to convince blogger not to do that stupid thing - I only updated the tags. The dates are correct :(

talk about openSUSE

Yes, this will be all about me. Sometimes I need to whine a bit.

First of all, last Tuesday I endured the ritual stabbing that seems to be required for travel to Brazil (I'm going to Lationware). I'm rather proud of the fact that I didn't feint or anything (I did last time I had an injection) - less happy with the fact that I still have two sour arms and am expected to get flu-like symptoms over the weekend. Which have already started - I feel worse and worse by the hour. Yay. Expect delays in communication with me this weekend, sorry...


But such is life. On a more interesting note, I gave a talk about openSUSE yesterday - my first openSUSE talk, in fact. It was fun. Always good to have a room of people pretending to be interested in what you have to say, even if there are only like 15 people there...

For those who want to see my slides, I uploaded them here (click image with kitten for direct download). Translators welcome :D Paul Adams summarized the presentation by saying it was all about pussy. If you know Paul you will now realize that the rest of the day, subsequent dinner and the drinking afterward was all about kittens and anything related. He can be a little... Focused. Of course you could blame the others at the dinner & beer for not distracting him enough but they were just to busy supporting him in a train of thought that we should have never followed through.

How to present openSUSE

Anyway, enough about that - the presentation. It was surprisingly easy. Initially I wanted to talk about marketing, but decided that the topic of openSUSE would be better justified if I included a significant proportion of OBS and other technology. It basically means you won't have to convince anyone about anything. You just repeat words like "awesome" "cool" "incredible" and don't forget about "easy" while showing a series of screen shots (here) of the OBS build process. By the time you're at the end, most people will be stunned enough to believe anything you say.

Open Build Service

During the slide show (again link in image on right), be sure to mention things like "yeah I upload a tar-ball here but you can simply point to a source repository as well" and "so you could package software for all major linux distributions from a Windows workstation!". While of course repeating the magic words "awesome" and "easy" and so on. Oh and at some point there is a screen shot showing KIWI - if you feel people are resisting your 'leet marketing skills, talk about it. KIWI can create an always-up-to-date LIVECD, auto-regenerated from the OBS packages if something changes. As OBS can pull directly from Git or other SCM's and you can set up a cron script to kick OBS into rebuilding the package, you have a LiveCD which automatically daily rebuilds. With error messages send your way by OBS (and OBS ensures it rebuilds whatever needs rebuilding - if something doesn't work, the CD will stay the old one and thus hopefully working). Everyone will be impressed. Easy as kicking a puppy that's already down!

SUSE Studio

At the end, the more cynical in our audience will still be standing - so move on to the this SUSE Studio screen shot tour. The big finale there is the testdrive - please mention that any changes there (like creating files or changing settings) will actually be saved in the appliance. Oh and you can SSH into the running OS as well. Name a few of the Virtual Machine formats supported - EC2 (Amazon's cloud!), VMware, Xen, KVM...) and you're done.

Project Bretzn

Of course, there are always hardliners who won't be impressed still. Give em a good pounding with Project Bretzn. Tell them that the whole process of building can and will be automated from within the IDE (Eclipse, Visual Studio, Qt Creator, whatever gets 'em off) with a few mouse clicks; then the resulting binaries can be submitted to a number of App Stores like MeeGo's Garage, gtk-apps/kde-apps.org and (in time) the Ovi Store. The Bretzn plugin will spread the word for the developer on facebook, twitter and other social media (iow it will do the boring stuff). Then the users can comment on the app and rate it and such - the developer can ignore this feedback if he likes but unlike the usual feeback it won't consist of 90% "how do I build this", "it doesn't build", "do you have packages for XYZ" and other annoying stuff - so it might actually be worth reading it.

Finishing it up

Keep on repeating "awesome" in real Steve Jobs style! By the time you're at the end of your presentation, everyone will be completely brainwashed and cheering you on. Bow, thank them for their attention and get out before they recover and start asking questions.

Actually the questions probably will go fine too - just make sure you've spend a few hours clicking around in OBS and SUSE Studio, read a bit of the tutorials and it's very unlikely anyone will ask something you don't know. Easy as pie!

I know I promised that this post would be all about me, hence not worth reading - sorry. I hope at least it'll be useful for anyone who wants to talk about openSUSE and OBS ;-)



* note that anyone who dares to take this blogpost too serious will be chased down by BloodHounds. Wait, no, BloodKittens.

talking about Nokia and KDAB

Yesterday I gave a talk at a seminar at Mediaplaza about the cooperation between a community and commercial ventures. To prepare, I conducted an interesting interview with Till Adams from KDAB, contacted Qt Software and read up on some stuff. I must say I enjoyed taking time to really prepare this talk and dive a bit into the subject.

The way KDAB and Nokia/Qt Software work with us is very interesting - they strongly believe in close collaboration, and act accordingly. Great examples of good FOSS citizenship.

I did have a hard time complying to the 30 minutes schedule. I normally talk about KDE for 45 minutes. Now I had to introduce KDE in <15 min to this rather 'green' audience, and then talk about the cooperation between company/community. Interesting challenge, but I think I did a decent job at it.

The amazing pictures created by the KDE India community were incredibly tempting, but I had to resist. Talking about the pillars themselves would take too much time. Would've been too technical as well, I suppose. I did mention Nepomuk and Phonon, but that's because they are cool examples of cooperation of KDE and other organisations. I will use those for my future slides, though, as they're just stunning.

BTW the talk I gave last week at Linuxworld in Utrecht was nice, as I got some intestesting feedback. Still have to think more about that, and integrate it in my future talks. One good point somebody made: yeah, KDE created this great architecture to be able to move faster & incorporate more user input. But currently, many users don't feel KDE is listening. Others agreed with him, so this isn't something we can cast aside. Of course we know why this is - we already KNOW (mostly) where the issues are, and we ARE listening - we're just not always replying to their questions, bugreports and comments...

The distributions shiping stuff we don't think is fully ready for the enduser (everything after KDE 3.5.x and before 4.2) didn't help us much either. They had good reasons for that, of course. Many users wanted to see KDE 4.0, and distributions had to spend a lot of resources on shipping both 3.5 and 4. The unfortunate effect was that many users lost precious features compared to their previous desktop, and the switch didn't go smooth either. But seeing how much time for example the Plasma team has spend on doing what the users requested from them (delaying the cool stuff they'd probably rather be doing) makes clear this is an issue with how we are percieved. Not how we are.

I wouldn't know how to solve this in our communication. Maybe we should just let KDE 4.2 talk for itself...

Anyway. I'll try to get the presentation in KDE SVN as soon as I can. Just in case anybody wants to see it asap, send me an email... firstnamelastname at kde.org should do the trick.