Author: Bastien Nocera

In July 2005, Murray Cumming was on the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors and brought up the idea of an events box that would travel around Europe. At first, Murray took it upon himself to host the box personally, then through Openismus where Ekaterina Gerasimova helped out with the administration. But with the recent loss (and more recent recovery) of the events box, and its “replacement”, we now have two EU events boxes.

Murray felt that it was time to pass on the responsibility of hosting the box to another party, having hosted the box for more than 5 years in Berlin, Germany.

The GNOME Foundation is happy to say that Collabora, based in Cambridge, England, will be handling the box from then on.

If you’re participating in an event for which the GNOME events boxes could be useful, please get in touch with Dorée at Collabora. Full instructions are available on the website.

Many thanks to Openismus, and Murray and Ekaterina in particular, for hosting the events box, and many thanks to Collabora, Robert McQueen and Dorée Carrier for their help in hosting them now.

When news came about that the Foundation wanted to replace the EU Events Box, Litl contacted us to let us know that they would give us a Litl Webbook to showcase at conferences and expos.

A Litl Webbook

The webbook uses much of the same technology as GNOME 3 will, such as gobject-introspection, Clutter, and Javascript, so will be a good showcase of GNOME technologies.

The machine will make its way to the Events Box very shortly, so watch out for it at upcoming GNOME events.

You might remember that the EU Events Box went missing a couple of months ago. While we’re still working on getting that box back from the nice folks at UPS, the EU conference scene was left without a GNOME presence because of the lack of material to present to visitors.

v2

But not anymore! The nice people at Canonical helped the GNOME Foundation out, and purchased a new Events Box in time for this year’s FOSDEM.

The box contains:

• A nice new ASRock computer, dual-booting Ubuntu and Fedora 15 pre-release, to show off GNOME 3 (with a top-of-the-range CPU, and a Blu-Ray drive, rather than cheaper equivalents)
• A 19″ LCD screen as well as a good-quality projector
• A wireless router running DD-WRT
• Wireless keyboard and mouse, an inkjet printer (currently stuck in London…)
• A money box, gaffer tape, a log book, pens, paper, power adapters and power strips and many more stationery items I forget.

I will also note that the box itself is nearly as expensive as the more expensive items inside it. Let me show you some nice pictures of the kit purchased for us.

The whole box

More stacked contents

The ASRock small computer

A whole load of cables

Upside down sticker, huh.

Thanks again to Canonical for stepping up to the plate, and giving us a way to present GNOME 3 to our users.

The GNOME Foundation Board is happy to announce that following the call for bids for MeeGo/GTK+ integration work, Igalia was selected as the preferred bidder to perform the work set out.

We received a number of very interesting bids for the project, but Igalia’s bid was the one that focused the most on integrating elements of Hildon into GTK+ upstream. This should mean easier porting of older Hildon/Maemo applications to the new MeeGo Handset platform, as well as easier porting of existing desktop GTK+ applications to the handset.

Claudio Saavedra and Carlos García Campos will be the main developers working on the project, so expect regular updates on the advancement of the project on their respective blogs.

The GNOME Foundation Board would like to thank the bidders again for their interest in the project. Special thanks to Danielle Madeley, Murray Cumming, and Robert McQueen for their technical knowledge of the MeeGo Handset platform.

Deadline is today. We’re expecting your bids very soon!

Following our call for bids less than a month ago, it turns out that most people work better under pressure [1]. So we have set a deadline date for the bids to come in.

The date is Friday 19th November 2010. We’ll likely start going through the bids the following week, so we’re pretty flexible for what time we’ll receive the bids, so you don’t need to worry about timezones.

Looking forward to receiving your bids!

[1]: Note the tongue-in-cheek.