GNOME – Page 7 – muellis blog

GNOME @ FOSDEM2012

Is this time around again and the FOSDEM happened in Brussels, Belgium. Probably the biggest gathering of Free Software people was a lot colder than last year. It was covered in snow. So badly, that we had big troubles coming into Brussels. It took us almost twice as long to arrive than usual. The streets were packed with cars suffering from the severe conditions.

But all that didn’t stop us (GNOME that is) from having a nice presence. If you know FOSDEM you’d expect the booth to be in a packed and smelly area because all the people try to move along in the tiny hallway. But this year was different because we got a spacious place in a new building. That was cool, because it gave us much more area to move than usual but unfortunately it made the conference much more disconnected as there was yet another building involved. I didn’t even try to visit each and everything.

Anyway, from what I’ve seen, we had quite a good stand. Our friends from OpenSuSE received the most attention though. Rightfully so. Not only because they had almost free beer and nearly free other goodies, but because they had nice hardware, nice demos and nice people to present. Fortunately, we were located just next to our friends from KDE which enabled us to chit chat with well known people and to plan conspiracies for upcoming conferences in 2013. So stay tuned for that.

With the help of local GNOME people, we had our EventsBox which is well equipped. But well, since we had only one Box, we weren’t as well equipped as last time at LinuxTag. We had loads of T-Shirts from the Desktop Summit though which we tried to sell. I especially like the name tags we had. Somebody just got them printed so we looked much more inviting, I guess. Also cool were the posters that we got provided so we could pimp the glass wall behind us. It’s cool that we have people that provide such things just like that. We didn’t have the appropriate tools to handle the posters well. We used regular adhesive tape (which we ran out of in the middle of the day) which kinda destroys the posters. From our KDE friends we got some “blue-tac” or “patafix” which was really really great. Apparently it’s well known in the western end of Europe. I didn’t know it at all, but I now know that we definitely want to have this for the next time.

We also didn’t have blank sheets of paper to write stuff on which was a bit annoying. But well, we didn’t have markers either so we needed to get both first before being able to inform the people about the t-shirt prices.

Needless to say that our demo machine got upgraded to the latest Fedora and that that broke at least the web-cam. I mean it was supported in the last Fedora version so it’d be boring it was supported now, too. But the Fedora people had a nice gimmick to give away: A cheat cube which is just a well cut piece of paper that you can fold up to build a cube. You’re supposed to put that on your desk and use it to retrieve information quickly. I was wondering whether we could make something like that for GNOME Shell. Oh and while we’re at it: Many folks had roll-up displays which look very nice. They are around 1m wide and 2m high and you can have your big design on it. It doesn’t cost all too much but we’d need a proper motif first. So if you have any idea, feel free to discuss that in the wiki. And another thing that was annoying were our flyers. While it’s good that we had some, they were quite outdated. So we badly need some flyer material. Again, in the wiki is the place to show up.

So a big big thanks to the folks that helped out at the booth to make it rock. I hope we can make it work next year again.

There was also, again, a massive keysigning going on and I have to drop a quick rant about all that mess. caff on Fedora is kinda weird. It seems like the defaults in the man page don’t match the code, i.e. keyserver defaults to a different server than the man page states. And very annoying: It’s also different from GPG settings! So while trying to use caff it failed downloading the keys. I guess the server just hit a timeout or blocked my request altogether because it’s so many keys (/.-)
After having that sorted out, gpg asked to hit “y” all the time whether I was sure to sign the keys. Goddamnit. It’s about 100 keys and I sign with 4 private keys or so. Now I have to press 800 keys to get the fork()ing keys signed and mailed. Jesus Christ. It’s fricking 2012 and not 1972 anymore. I just want to conveniently sign the whole damn thing and not buy a new keyboard after each FOSDEM. Not only because I have to type so many keys but also because I feel the urge to smash it into someone face. But not only did I need some shell-fu to get the keys imported, I also needed to fiddle the fingerprints of the official key list because caff wouldn’t accept the fingerprints. The format though, is the format gpg uses to display fingerprints… So I had to do something like

cat /tmp/ksp.txt | tr -d ' ' | tr '\n' ' '

to get the proper format… And yeah, I’ll patch everything.. tomorrow…

Although I haven’t seen much of Brussels this time, I liked it being covered in snow and ice. I hope to be able to get more out of Brussels next time, especially improve my French 😉 So yeah, I’m looking forward to next year.

LinuxCon Brazil 2011

I was lucky to be invited to LinuxCon Brazil, taking place in *drumroll* Brazil! Sao Paulo to be precise. The conference centre was very spacious and the conference itself seemed to be much bigger than in Japan.

My talk on GNOME 3 (actually 3.2 and 3.x) was well received and I hope I was able to entertain a bunch of people and make some of them try the new GNOME. Fortunately, our friends from OpenSuSE just released their new version a couple of days ago and brought some machines and media to try it out. Needless to say that it features the latest and greatest GNOME release. We had a good discussion during the talk and I talked to many people after the talk. There was more interest that I expected. I was told that even Linus and Dirk Hohndel commented on it in the speaker’s room when I was not there.

I couldn’t really attend the other talks as I wanted because they were held in Portuguese :-\ There was translation but only for the foreign speakers not talking in Portuguese. So sadly I had to stick to talks that I either knew or didn’t interest me that much. But there were a couple of interesting ones, nonetheless 🙂 My favourite was Jan Kiszka talking about “Developing Linux inside QEMU/KVM Virtual Machines” because I learned how to actually be able to pass data from my host system into my guest QEMU machine.

So the conference could have made more effort to actually indicate whether the talks were held in English or not. Other than that, it was a good conference which was held in a pretty good conference centre. As the other South American conference I attended a couple of weeks ago, it slipped behind schedule. But only for half an hour 😉

It wasn’t all too easy to get to Brazil though. I had flight troubles in Amsterdam with KLM again. The security at the gate wanted to search my bag but I refused. I was told to either let them search the bag or wait for the supervisor. I chose to wait as I had quite a bit of newspaper left. Eventually one of the security guys called me out and told me to go out of the gate area to talk to the supervisor. We talked and came back to the gate where I was about to put my stuff into the xray machine. But then the guy came and told me that the flight attendant told him that I couldn’t fly. So I asked the woman directly whether I was denied boarding. She said yes because I caused a queue. I demanded a list of my rights because I was denied boarding and she sent me to the Transfer desk. Then she left… When I went to the transfer desk, I figured out that I was not referenced as being denied boarding but No-Show, i.e. I just wasn’t present. But that’s ridiculous as I sat in the gate except for three minutes when the supervisor called me out. For that reason, I wasn’t provided a list of my rights and the transfer agent wasn’t friendly at all. A second transfer agent managed to get me on the next flight though. I thought I’d like KLM, at least for them flying to South America not crossing the US. But I probably have to go with Iberia the next time.

I’m looking foward to come back to Brazil, either for GNOME Forum or for LinuxCon 🙂

Desktop Summit 2011 in Berlin

This years GUADEC^W DesktopSummit took place in Berlin. Sure thing that I attended 🙂 Due to loads of stuff happening meanwhile, I didn’t come around to actually write about it. But I still want to mention a few things.

It was, like always, pretty nice to see all the faces again and catch up. The venue was almost excellent and provided good lecture halls and infrastructure, although the wireless was a bit flaky and spots to sit down and get together were sparse. Anyway, I have never seen so many actual users or wannabe users. Being in the heart of Germany’s capital definitely helped to make ourselves visible. Funnily enough, I met some folks who I chatted up during LinuxTag while I was presenting GNOME. I invited them to come to the DesktopSummit and so they did \o/

There were many talks and I didn’t see most of them. In fact, I was volunteering and meeting people so I couldn’t attend many lectures. But there was nothing I regret not having seen. The ones I did see were interesting enough, but not ground breaking. There’s a good summary over here.

We tried to record the talks but for some technical reasons it didn’t work out of the box. The network was too slow and no disks were available. We convinced the guy in charge to make us buy disks which eventually got used but I actually don’t know whether the lectures will be released at all.

A nice surprise was Intel giving away ExoPCs. In return they required you to sit and listen to presentations about their Appstore thingy called “AppUp“. Apparently a technology that tries to resemble OBS (because of distributing software via the web) and .debfiles+Synaptic (because of distributing software with a native GUI) with an additional payment layer in between. But it fails big time to do so. Not only can it not build binaries out of the sources that you give it, but it also can’t track dependencies. Welcome to 2011. Needless to say that it’s heavily targeted for Windows. Double fail that you can’t build Windows software for their store thing without having a Windows platform (and development tools) yourself.

The PC itself is neat. It’s a full tablet with only one soft key. The MeeGo version that came with it was out of date and updating was a major pain in the afternoon. It involved getting a USB keyboard because the OnScreenKeyboard would of course not show up if you open a terminal. And you needed a keyboard, because you can of course not update the software with that MeeGo version. There is no software management application at all. And most certainly, Intel’s new AppUp thing is not included in the latest and greatest release. In fact, it’s not even easily installable as it involves googling for the RPM file to be manually installed. By now I talked to Intel engineers and it seems that an actual vendor is supposed to integrate their version of the AppUp thing in the rest of the OS. So Intel doesn’t see itself in the position to do this. Other weird glitches include the hardware: While the ExoPC has a rotation sensor, it would be way to boring if it worked; so it doesn’t. And the hardware turns itself off after a while. Just like that. It feels like we have at least 3 years of engineering left before we can start dreaming of being able to ship a tablet platform that is ready for a day to day use. I have to note that the content centric UI approach is definitely very handy. Let’s hope it improves by fixing all those tiny things around the actual UI.

The discussion about a joint conference was bubbling up again. Of course. The main argument against a joint conference seems to be that it is considered to slow GNOME’s development down if we meet together, because we have to give time to the other people and cannot do our own program meanwhile. There are probably many variations of that argument, including that we do not collaborate anyway, so let’s rather not invest time in a joint conference.

While I do agree that the current form of the conference is not necessarily optimal, I don’t think that we should stop meeting up together. At the end of day, multiple (desktop) implementations or technologies are just pointless duplications. So let’s rather try to unify and be a unity (haha, pun intended) instead of splitting up further. I am very well aware of the fact that it’s technically unrealistic right now. But that’s the future we endeavour and we should work on making it possible, not work against it. So we don’t necessarily need to have a fully joint conference. After all, our technologies do differ quite substantially, depending on how you look at it. But let’s give each other the opportunity to learn about other technologies and speak to the key people. We might not fully make use of these opportunities yet, but if we design the conferences in a way that the camps have enough time to handle their internal issues and before or afterwards do a joint thing, then no harm is done if opportunities weren’t taken.

Another hot topic were Copyright Assignments. There was a panel made up of interesting people including Mark Shuttleworth. The discussion was alright, but way too short. They barely had 45 minutes which made it less than 15 minutes each. Barely enough to get a point across. And well, I didn’t really understand the arguments *for* giving away any of your rights. It got really weird as Mark tried to make another point: It would be generous if a contributor donated the code to the company and the participants should take into account that generosity would be a strong factor contributors would strive for. I haven’t seen that point being discussed anywhere yet, so let me start by saying that it is quite absurd. What could be more generous than giving your code to the public and ensuring that it stays freely available?! Just to be very clear: The GPL enables you to effectively do exactly that: Release code and ensure that it remains free.

I was delighted to see that the next GUADEC will take place in A Corunha. I’d rather have gone to Prague though. But maybe the Czech team can be motivated to apply again the next time.

eMobile, NetworkManager and You

While being in Ireland I happened to have access to an Irish eMobile SIM card and USB modem. The modem was a Huawei e173 and it worked perfectly well on a recent Ubuntu installation. Even the USB modeswitch worked out of the box 🙂

However, I couldn’t dial up with any of my Linux machines while I double checked that it worked on Windows using their software. The NetworkManager wouldn’t list the settings for eMobile and every other setting from Meteor didn’t work. The NetworkManager in debug mode revealed that the connection got cut just after the PPPd requested configuration settings. I tried to change the PPPd settings for hours with no success.

Funnily enough, not even my N900 could connect to the Internet using the predefined connection. That was named “Meteor DATA” and used “data.mymeteor.ie” as APN.

Also very interesting, that I couldn’t find the neccessary dial up information *anywhere* on the web. The eMobile.ie site is utterly unstructured and didn’t allow me to find any sensible information at all. I sent them an email but I still haven’t receive any answer.

After having had access to a Windows box with their software again, I found out that it uses the APN: “broadband.eircommbb.ie“. Putting that into the NetworkManager makes it dial up *yay*!

So I hope this information is useful for anybody wanting to use their eMobile SIM Card with their Linux based system. I also prepared a patch for mobile-broadband-provider-info so you should be able to click the connection via NetworkManager easily 🙂

LinuxCon Japan 2011

Thanks to the Linux Foundation I was able to attend LinuxCon 2011 in Japan.

I used the opportunity to distribute GNOME 3 DVD Images and leaflets during my talk about GNOME 3 which was well enough received I’d say. While I collected a lot of experience approaching people and telling them about all the niceties that GNOME 3 offers over the last few month, I really had too little time to tell all the brilliant things about our new GNOME. Anyway, it was nice to be on the very same schedule as the very important Linux people like Greg KH, Linus or Lenny.

The conference itself was hosted in a very spacious building: The Pacifico in Yokohama. One could see that impressive building from our hotel room. Just nice. The conference was well organised and the provided amenities such as food and drinks were good enough. I was particularly impressed by the simultaneous translations that were done by two elderly men.

The talks were generally interesting, probably because I haven’t been to a kernel focused conference and I found it interesting to get new input. My favourites were the Kernel Developer Panel were one could pose question onto the Kernel people face to face and the talks about the social aspect of Kernel development.

Despite all the trouble in Japan, we had a very good time and in fact, there weren’t many indicators to the earthquake or the nuclear catastrophe. The most annoying inconveniences probably were the turned off elevators. Other than that, we didn’t really see any disrupted services or chaos or problems at all. Traveling in Japan is a real pleasure as the train system is gorgeous and the cities are very well mapped. You encounter a city map just about every other corner and it’s very detailed and helpful. Japanese people are extraordinarily friendly and although there is a language barrier, they try to understand and help you. The downside is, that Japan is quite expensive. Especially the train system, but also lodging and food. However, the quality is very good, so it’s probably worth the money.

I’m looking forward to attend the next LinuxCon, maybe even in Japan 🙂

GNOME at LinuxTag 2011

Last week, I had the pleasure to attend LinuxTag and manage the GNOME booth. All in all, the GNOME booth went quite well. We had loads of visitors wanting to see the new GNOME Shell and discuss its design. But it was such a busy time that I didn’t even had the opportunity to leave the booth and look at all the other projects. It was, however, pretty nice. It took me a day to recover though. Being at the booth for all the four conference days in a row from (ideally) 09:00 until 18:00, always smiling and entertaining was quite exhausting.

To help the GNOME presence: I printed flyers and posters all day before LinuxTag. It was a pain to do, because we are lacking good material. We do have some Brochures to print out, but they are either outdated or in a miserable quality. It definitely needs some quality brochures for GNOME. We have more Posters and some of them are really nice. But I couldn’t render some of them because of bugs somewhere in the stack. Anyway, I managed to print posters on A4 paper which meant that they had to be glued together… To ease poster printing in the future, I uploaded the PDFs I generated to the wiki.

What worked well was our booth setup: We had Posters, Sticker, Flyers and (thanks to openSuSE) GNOME 3 Live DVDs to give away. Also our booth looked nice with GNOME banners hanging from the walls. Also, the ordered furniture looked nice to the outside, i.e. a presenter desk, a long cupboard and a bar table together with bar chairs made it look inviting. However, we lacked a small table and some chairs to cater for the many friends that were in the booth and not in front. Thanks to all the helping people. It was really awesome how quickly our booth looked nicely.

And fortunately, there is room for improvement. It would have been nice if we brought, i.e. T-Shirts to sell or Posters and Flyers for the GUADEC. But everything was still really okay. I hope we manage to do so well next year, too.

So thanks to Canonical for the EventsBox and openSuSE for the DVDs! If you happen to be in the need of some of the DVDs, give me a shout and we’ll arrange the shipping.

GNOME3 Release Parties

Oh, I almost forgot about the GNOME 3 Release Party that we had the other week. In fact, I had two times the pleasure of showing off GNOME 3 to the people. The first and official Release Party was held in the Attraktor. We even got mentioned by Heise. The second time was in my university during a self organised seminar.

On both occasions, I had to entertain a good bunch of people (around 15 and 30) and, well, it went at least alrightish, I’d say 😉 The second time was a bit confusing, because my Laptop didn’t want to as perform well as I expected so a good bit of improvisation was needed. But it was great fun overall. The goodies, that were provided by the GNOME Foundation, were well received, esp. the T-Shirts.

I showed off the really brilliantly done videos that Jason produced. We demoed and discussed those features and discovered even more stuff on the way. I haven’t really worked much with GNOME3, esp. GNOME Shell before and it’s kinda awkward in the beginning, but I got used to it very quickly. I really like much of it now.

Thanks to the Attraktor for having hosted us. And thanks to the attendees for the nice discussions. I’m looking forward to do some more GNOME3 presentations at coming LinuxTag and other occasions.

Happy GNOME3 everybody!

GNOME 3 Launch Party in Hamburg

For the new GNOME-3 love we will have a release party in Hamburg, just as many places over Germany and the whole world!

If you want to join the fun, be in the Attraktor, the local hackerspace. The address is Mexikoring 21, 22999 Hamburg, Germany, Europe, Earth, Solarsystem. Find more detailed instruction on how to get there here. The party starts on Friday, 2011-04-08, at 18:00 and runs open end.

We have a page in the local wiki to describe the event and further planning will take place there: http://wiki.attraktor.org/Termin:GNOME-3-Launch-Party. As for the program: We intend to have a small introductory talk to show off what new user experience GNOME-3 will bring to the people. Afterwards, we will distribute GNOME-3 images to be put on pendrives to be able try GNOME-3. Finally, we’ll sit around, have some beers and snacks and discuss about the new and shiny GNOME 🙂

Besides the GNOME-3 images, we’ll have GNOME-3 goodies to give away! Thanks a lot to the GNOME Foundation making that possible! So show up early to claim your goodies!

So I expect you to be there 🙂

GNOME @ FOSDEM 2011

I am very excited about having attended this years FOSDEM. Unfortunately, times were a bit busy so I am a bit late reporting about it, but I still want to state a couple of things.

(I wonder how that image will look in 2012 😉 )

First of all, I am very happy that our GNOME booth went very well. Thanks to Frederic Peters and Frederic Crozat for manning to booth almost all the time. I tried to organise everything remotely and I’d say I partly succeeded. We got stickers, t-shirts and staff for the booth. We lacked presentation material and instructions for the booth though. But it still worked out quite well. For the next time, I’d try to be communicate more clearly who is doing what to prevent duplicate work and ensure that people know who is responsible for what.

Secondly, I’d like to thank Canonical for their generosity to sponsor a GNOME Event Box. After the orginal one went missing, Canocical put stuff like a PC, a projector, a monitor and lots of other stuff together for us to be able to show off GNOME-3. The old Box, however, turns out to be back again *yay*!

Sadly, we will not represent GNOME at upcoming CeBIT. But we will at LinuxTag. Latest.

Anyway, during FOSDEM, we got a lot of questions about GNOME 3 and Ubuntu, i.e. will it be easily possible to run GNOME 3 on Ubuntu. I hope we can make it possible to have a smooth transition from Unity to GNOME Shell. Interestingly enough, there isn’t a gnome-shell package in the official natty repositories yet 🙁

It was especially nice to see and talk to old GNOME farts. And I enjoyed socialising with all the other GNOME and non-GNOME people as well. Sadly, I didn’t like the GNOME Beer Event very much because it was very hot in the bar so I left very quickly.

So FOSDEM was a success for GNOME I’d say. Let’s hope that future events will work at least as well and that we’ll have a strong GNOME representation even after the GNOME 3 release.

MeeGo Conference 2010 in Dublin

The MeeGo Conference 2010 took place from 2010-11-15 until 2010-11-17 and it was quite good. I think I haven’t seen so much money being put into a conference so far. That’s not to be read as a complaint though 😉

The conference provided loads of things, i.e. lunch, which was apparently sponsored by Novell. It was very good: Yummie lamb stew, cooked salmon and veg was served to be finished with loads of ice cream and coffee. Very delicious. Breakfast was provided by Codethink as far as I can tell. The first reception in the evening was held by Collabora and drinks and food were provided. That was, again, very well and a perfect opportunity to meet and chat with people. In fact, I’ve met a lot old folks that II haven’t seen for at least half a year. But with the KDE folks entering the scene I’ve also met a few new interesting people.

The venue itself is very interesting and they definitely know how to accommodate conference attendees. It’s a stadium and very spacious. There were an awful lot of stadium people taking care of us. The rooms were well equipped although I was badly missing power supply.

The second evening was spent in the Guinness Warehouse, an interesting museum which tells you how the Guinness is made. They also have a bar upstairs and food, drinks and music was provided. I guess the Guinness couldn’t have been better 🙂

Third evening was spent in the Stadium itself to watch Ireland playing Norway. Football that is. There was a reception with drinks and food downstairs in the Presidents Suite. They even handed out own scarfs which read “MeeGo Conference”. That was quite decadent. Anyway, I’ve only seen the first half because I was at the bar for the second half, enjoying Guinness and Gin Tonic 😉

Having sorted out the amnesties (more described here), let’s have a look at the talks that were given. I actually attended a few, although I loved to have visited more.

Enterprise Desktop – Yan Li talked about his work on making MeeGo enterprise ready, meaning to have support for VPNs, Exchange Mail, large LDAP address books, etc… His motivation is to bring MeeGo to his company, Intel. It’s not quite there yet, but apparently there is an Enterprise MeeGo which has a lot of fixes already which were pushed upstream but are not packaged in MeeGo yet. His strategy to bring the devices to the people was to not try to replace the people’s old devices but rather give them an additional device to play with. Interesting approach and I’d actually like to see the results in a year or so.

Compliance – There is a draft specification but the final one will be ready soon. If you want to be compliant, you have to ensure that you are using MeeGo API (Qt, OpenGL ES, …) only. That will make it compatible for the whole minor version series. There will also be profiles (think: Handset, Netbook) which well define additional APIs or available screen estate. In return, you are allowed to use the MeeGo name and the logo. Your man asked the audience to try the compliance tools and give feedback and to review the handset profile draft.

Security – There will be a MSSF, a Mobile Simplified Security Framework in MeeGo 1.2. It’s a MAC system which is supposed to be in mainline. So yes, it is yet another security framework in Linux and I didn’t really understand, why it’s necessary. There’ll be a “Trusted Execution Environment’ (TrEE) as well. That will mean that the device has to have a TPM with a hardwired key that you can’t see nor exchange. I don’t necessarily like TPMs. Besides all that, “Simplified Mandatory Access Control” (SMACK) will be used. It is supposedly like SELinux, but doesn’t suck as much. Everything (processes, network packets, files, I guess other IPC, …) will get labels and policies will be simple. Something like “Application 1 has a red label and only if you have a red label, too, you can talk to Appilcation 1”. We’ll see how that’ll work. On top of all that, an Integrety Protection “IMA” system will be used to load and execute signed binaries only.

Given all that, I don’t like the development in this direction. It clearly is not about the security of the person owning the device in question but about protecting the content mafia. It’s a clear step into the direction of Digital Restriction Management (DRM) under the label of protection the users data. And I’m saying that they are trying to hide it, but they are not calling it by its right name either.

A great surprise was to see Intel and Nokia handing out Lenovo Ideapads to everybody. We were asked to put MeeGo on the machine, effectively removing the Windows installation. Three years ago, when I got my x61s, it was a piece of cake to return your Windows license. By now, things might have changed. We’ll see. I’ll scratch the license sticker off the Laptop and write a letter to Lenovo and see what happens. Smth like this (copied from here):

Lenovo Deutschland GmbH
Gropiusplatz 10
70563 Stuttgart

Rückgabe einer Windows-Lizenz

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

hiermit gebe ich die gemeinsam mit einem Lenovo-Notebook erworbene Windows-Lizenz gemäß des End User License Agreement (EULA) von Microsoft Windows zurück.

Das EULA von Windows gewährt mir das Recht, beim Hersteller des Produkts, mit dem ich die Lizenz erworben habe, den Preis für die Windows-Lizenz zurückerstattet zu bekommen, falls die mitgelieferte Windows-Lizenz beim Start nicht aktiviert und registriert wurde und das EULA nicht akzeptiert worden ist. Ich habe der EULA nicht zugestimmt, da sie zahlreiche für mich inakzeptable Punkte enthält, beispielsweise:

– Die Aktivierung der Software sendet Hardware-Informationen an Microsoft (Punkt 2 des EULA).
– „Internetbasierte Dienste“ wie das „Windows-Updatefeature“ können von Microsoft jederzeit gesperrt werden (Punkt 7 des EULA). Dadurch existiert de facto kein Recht auf Security-Updates.

Ich entschied mich stattdessen für das Konkurrenz-Produkt Ubuntu, da dieses eine bessere Qualität aufweist und ein verbraucherfreundlicheres EULA hat.

Sie haben anderen Lenovo-Kunden in der Vergangenheit die Rückgabe der Windows-Lizenz verweigert mit der Verweis, dass es sich bei dem mit dem Gerät erworbenen Windows-Betriebssystem um einen “integrativen Bestandteil” des Produkts handle und man die Windows-Lizenz nur mit dem gesamten Produkt zurückgeben kann.

Diese Auffassung ist aus den folgenden Gründen nicht zutreffend:
– Windows-Lizenzen werden auch einzeln verkauft, eine Bindung von Software an ein bestimmtes Hardware-Gerät (OEM-Vertrag) ist nach deutschem Recht nicht zulässig. [1]
– Das betreffende Notebook lässt sich auch mit anderen, einzeln erhältlichen Betriebssystemen (u.a. Ubuntu) produktiv betreiben. Insbesondere Ihre Produkte laufen mit Ubuntu (mit sehr wenigen Ausnahmen) ganz hervorragend.
– Jedoch lässt sich das vorliegende Notebook nicht ohne Windows-Lizenz oder ganz ohne Betriebssystem erwerben.

Mir sind desweiteren mehrere Fälle bekannt, in denen Sie erfolgreich mit dem von mir verwendeten Formular Windows-Lizenzen zurückerstattet haben.

Ich bitte Sie deshalb, mir die Kosten für die Windows-Lizenz zurückzuerstatten und die erworbene Windows-Lizenz einzeln zurückzunehmen.

Hilfsweise teilen sie mir mit, wie ich das Geraet als ganzes zurureck geben kann.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen

[1] Vgl. dazu das Urteil des BGH I ZR 244/97 vom 6. Juli 2000
(http://tiny.cc/IZR24497 sowie http://www.jurpc.de/rechtspr/20000220.htm).

The performance of MeeGo on that device is actually extremely bad. WiFi is probably the only thing that works out of the box. The touchpad can’t click, the screen doesn’t rotate, the buttons on the screen don’t do anything, locking the screen doesn’t work either, there is no on-screen keyboard, multi touch doesn’t work with the screen, accelerometer doesn’t work. It’s almost embarrassing. But Chromium kinda works. Of course, it can’t actually do all the fancy gmail stuff like phone or video calls. The window management is a bit weird. If you open a browser it’ll get maximised and you’ll get a title bar for the window. And you can drag the title bar to unmaximise the window. But if you then open a new browser window, it’ll be opened on a new “zone”. Hence, it’s quite pointless to have a movable browser window with a title bar. In fact, you can put multiple (arbitrary) windows in zone if you manually drag and drop them from the “zones” tab which is accessible via a quake style top panel. If you put multiple windows into one zone, the window manager doesn’t tile the windows. By the way: If you’re using the touchscreen only, you can’t easily open this top panel bar, because you can’t easily reach the *very* top of the screen. I hope that many people will have a look at these issues now and eventually fix them. Anyway, thanks Intel and Nokia 🙂