Summit, Con, Release...

The last weeks before my holiday have been quite crazy for me. SUSECon, openSUSE Summit and of course the openSUSE 13.1 release. Meanwhile, the openSUSE Board Elections have started... I decided to really try and stay away from things for two weeks. I'm not particularly good at that and I did a few thingies but I managed not too shoddy. Saw a museum, did pick up running again, watched some movies...

Now, back to SUSECon, the Summit and the release!

SUSECon,oS Summit

First things first, SUSECon and the openSUSE Summit were awesome. It is always wonderful how much energy these events give - so many enthusiastic people, ideas, plans...



On the press side during SUSECon, I kept myself busy with talking to 7 of the journalists, doing and arranging interviews or finding answers to their questions about openSUSE. And with Robert Schweikert I presented a session (twice) about the collaboration between SUSE and openSUSE. ITWire reported on this talk. We ran a booth at SUSECon as well and it was, as always, great to talk to people there.

On Wednesday was a Pirate Party, Thursday a visit to the Epcot park. I'm not a huge fan of such parks but it was entertaining enough to get food there... And I had great company!



At the Summit I presented two sessions, one about handling a booth and one about building local communities. In both cases, there was a lot of awesome feedback from the room and at the Orlando airport and further during the trip back I worked the suggestions in the presentations for further sharing. Thanks! I also really appreciated the private conversations about these topics which took place later on.



But the most important thing, for me, was meeting old friends again. Andi, Drew, the openSUSE Forms guys, the Greek delegation and many more. And bumping into new people like Navid and Christopher, two guys who run a media production company and want to help out openSUSE with web things. That's where the inspiring conversations happen. There were discussions about how to proceed with the Summit, how to handle community building in the Americas but also the great town hall meeting where I presented the 'Karmafication' idea for our infrastructure. This is something I might blog about later.

After the openSUSE Summit was over, Alex, Stella, Ludwig and myself went for a beach trip, video below. It was fun - although we drove an order of magnitude longer than that we actually spend on the beach ;-)

The release

Then the release, on the day I landed back from the US of A (and yes, they lost my luggage, luckily it is back). I think it went great, and seeing the response from the press I think others agree.

Now, we're debating changes to our development process on the mailing lists. Let's see how that goes!

kwin screencast

Hi everyone,

For a presentation I gave last saturday I made a KWin screencast showing off KDE beta 2 stuff. Quality in Youtube is rather low, but viewable (with annotations). Here you go.

And here's blib.tv (better quality & oggfile available).

Enjoy.

edit: blip.tv is still transcoding the video to a flash-format, so you can now only view the ogg file if your system/OS is capable of viewing that format. I wouldn't know why it wouldn't be as the video format doesn't have any associated costs or royalties and has been around for years. But if it is not available for you, you just have to wait for the flash version to be ready...

Now in better quality...

Hi everyone,

For those interested, here some locations were you can get the full-sized full quality videos I made a few days ago:
Niels v Mourik was nice enough to provide me with some diskspace and bandwith. Kudos!

Plasma video (22 mb)
KWin video (32 mb)
Dolphin video (27 mb)
Gwenview video (11 mb)
video with other applications (40 mb)

And another (clearly very) nice person, Mel Mazzone, put them here.

Further, here the videos on Youtube in much better quality (thanks to Quintesse:

Plasma


If video does not work try this link

KWin


If video does not work try this link

Dolphin


If video does not work try this link

Gwenview


If video does not work try this link

Other applications like Konsole, systemsettings, Dragonplayer, Skanlite, KSysguard and more.


If video does not work try this link

New screencasts

Next week will be the Dutch Ubuntu Release Party. Not sure where that link points too - it shows the dutch release party page for me, but being a rather generic URL - www.releaseparty.eu - I guess one could expect to get a local page served or something. If that's true it would be both neath and annoying.

Anyway. I also gave a talk about KDE 4.1 at Guademy in Valencia (Spain) a couple of weeks ago. It went relatively well, except for the live preview. Shouldn't have done that - not only didn't it work very well, it also destroyed the whole 'flow'. Got lost, so to say. That's why for the Ubuntu Release Party I've spend the last 2 days making screencasts of what I want to show. Took a lot of time so I began uploading them to Youtube. They were made in 1024x768 resolution (My little laptop uses that res natively, and I hope to encounter beamers with the same resolution) for a sharp image.

Guess what Youtube did to them... Yeah, they look horrible.

Now I want to put them online somewhere. But they are - well, what is big? 100 mb together. So, first I decided to create a torrent. Which can be found HERE. Please seed, and ehm - I have a horribly slow upload so it's gonna take a while...

I will also try to find a location to put the files online for faster and easier download, but for now the torrent is all I have.

If you insist on viewing the Youtube videos (or just can't wait a couple of days until the torrent is done downloading :D) just go to my profile on Youtube.

Edit: that was quick - already 4 ppl on torrent. One even KTorrent 3.0.2, I wonder why that person wants to see the videos ;-)
Anyway, if they all share, speed might not be that bad.

Edit2: apparently, it's videos not video's ;-) And screencasts would be even more correct, right?
Downloading the screencasts should be pretty fast now, btw, 25 seeders...

demo videos

We had a booth at T-DOSE, yesterday and today. I made a bunch of movies, to put them in a playlist and let it run.

Unfortunately, my laptop's videodrivers act rather weird, so xine gives a blue screen to many of the movies, vlc crashes, and mplayer can't properly resize the movies, so it leaves the previous one on the screen. KMplayer does a great job, but I've not been able to get it to just PLAY (let alone loop) the frickin' playlist (WTF is it for?!?). It just stops immediately after each video. Blegh, spend a lot of time on these issues :(

So however useless these video's where, I'm putting a few of them on youtube for your viewing pleasure. Here is the first one, showing off Kalzium.



Edit and another one, KSudoku.


Indeed, the edu apps and the games make for excellent videos ;-)