GUADEC-ES
Came back yesterday from the II
GUADEC-ES in CoruÃ&plusmm;a, so here’s a somewhat long summary of all we
did.
I arrived on Thursday afternoon, so missed most of the talks of the first day. I
got in time to attend the end of the BOF about Free Software migrations that
Fernando
was conducting. Missed most of the context, but when I arrived there was some polemic
discussion about the corruption of hackers by hiring them for companies,
which I didn’t understand very well. Then, to the last talk of the day, How
to become a GNOME person: gnome-love, by Fernando (Herrera).
After this last talk, we went to the Castro de ElviÃ&plusmm;a, for a guided
visit to this pre-romanic town, which was built (in around 900 BC to the Ist century AD)
by the people that lived in CoruÃ&plusmm;a at that time. It was a very nice visit indeed, with
a perfect guide: the director of the site excavation, who taught us a lot of things.
After that, we went to a folk concert, although a group of us didn’t watch it at all, since
as hungry as we were, we went to another place for some food. The dinner took a long time,
talking and having some beers, after which me and other people just went to the hotel to
sleep. Others stayed for a few hours more of crazy drinking and naked bathing in the sea.
On the second day, the talks started with Alex’s, from Igalia,
about ORBit2 and how they have used it in their Fisterra
ERP. After that, I gave my talk about extending Evolution with E-D-S backends and
EPlugin’s. I wanted to make it more practical, and have people working on plugins after it,
but the short time I had made that almost impossible. I also explained Novell’s policy
on requiring Copyright assignment for contributions to Evolution, and seems
some people got upset, I guess because they didn’t understand what I said.
Then Marcos Mazoni, polititian from Brazil famous for his involvement in the Telecentros
project in that country. Was pretty good overall, only one bad thing, which is that the
party that won the last elections in Paraná (different party than the one that made the
Telecentros) has closed all of the Telecentros, I guess because it’s hard for polititians
to recognize publicly that their rival party did the things correctly. After this talk,
Fernando
gave his talk about the PyGestor project and his experience in migrating a whole company
to GNOME. Then a Freedesktop talk from Alejandro, the KDE guy, and after that
Carlos Garnacho
gave his talk about the latest developments in the GNOME System Tools. Very nice indeed, since
he has created a C
library that allow access to the GST’s backends from any application, which can
help a lot in many applications. Then, Diego Torres, from Argentina, gave a talk about
PXES, a tool for easily installing
and using thin clients with any OS. Very nice project indeed which, as Diego said, can
help a lot as an intermediate step in the migration from other evil OSes to GNOME
desktops.
When the talks ended, it was time for the first annual meeting of the GNOME Hispano association, which
is, since a few weeks ago, officially incorporated to the Ministry of Interior in
Spain. It is indeed very nice to see the ideas that flourished a year ago in the I GUADEC-ES
around many beers and other spirits become true one year later. Now, looking forward,
we have started a detailed plan of action. First of all, we needed to clean up the
financial situation (a deficit of 20 Euros), so we decided, with the support of most
of the attendees, to have a yearly fee by all associated people. Since we are
not going to be many, the money will be not much, but I guess enough to not have the
current board pay some things from their pockets. It was so decided to have a 30 Euros
fee per year, 15 for students, and we had the first members signing in (until then, only
the current board were members of the association). Also, it was decided to try to
get more universities involved in the organization of hackers meetings, like the 2
we did last year (in Pamplona and Madrid), and to try to get the necessary people
(like organizations for disabled people) together for some accessibility, translating
and hacking sessions. Once finished, people went to the official dinner of the event,
which I didn’t attend, as I went for dinner with Yolanda and our friend Conchi,
who lives in CoruÃ&plusmm;a, and who we always visit while in the region. We went us three
to the old part of the city, which at night is plenty of open bars and people,
so had lots of tapas and lots of beer, to end up going to sleep at 3 AM.
On the third day, I was a bit exhausted, so slept till 10, and showed up at the
conference at 12, enough to miss Fernando‘s talk
on accessibility, which we were all joking about the day before, saying that after
the crazy Friday night, almost nobody would show up. Unfortunately, it seems we
were right, and only a few people showed up early. I also missed Alvaro‘s talk on hardware
integration in the desktop. But had time to attend Lorenzo’s talk on Kiwi2 and
Gazpacho, which,
together, offer a very good framework for rapid development of management
applications. After that, Alvaro,
Alberto and
myself conducted a BOF on present and future of GNOME. We did a short introduction
on what GNOME 2.10 included and what 2.12 will include, apart from some other
parallel projects (like Beagle,
Luminocity and
Cairo) as
well as some ideas from the 3.0
planning page. Then, we left people comment on how they think GNOME was
missing, and this is the list I wrote down:
-
Problems with the distribution of multimedia CODECS.
-
Remove the need for the terminal, maybe by writing lots of Nautilus plugins that
give access to many operations that are still done in the terminal.
-
More applications: management, CAD, video/audio edition.
-
Better IDEs.
-
Improve already existing applications. This is obvious, but people gave some examples
which I didn’t write down, and now can’t remember.
-
A frontend to xvidcap, which I just found out already exists: gvidcap.
-
Better support for graphic design, SVG, CMYK support in Gimp.
-
Better API documentation. Simplification of the tree view, for simple cases
when you just want to show a list of strings. GTK# offers some simple ways
to do so, so for those simple cases, people don’t need to deal with the model
directly.
-
Database-bound widgets. This is already available in libgnomedb.
-
A decision on the IPC mechanism, either continue with CORBA or switch to
D-BUS, needs to be made. This would allow, at last, to create a set of
generic interfaces that applications can implement, as well as a way for those
applications to install actions in the system that could be called from
scripts and other applications. Something similar to AppleScript, that would
provide us with a better integration of the applications, as well as a very
powerful way for users to write their own high level scripts.
-
Better application integration, like connecting the network applet with the
online/offline modes in Evolution and other applications.
After the BOF, we had the opportunity to see Miguel
videconference, which was possible after many tries. Miguel had to wake up pretty early
(as you can see in his face) to talk to us, so we really appreciated, even though we did
not have much time for the conference, since food was waiting for us and, after that,
the bus that took us to Santiago,
where, again, we had a guided tour to a museum, and a visit to the cathedral.
Then we went near Santiago for dinner, to a very nice place, very old and with typical
Galician food being served. Alcohol started running like crazy, and we ended up dancing some
Galician folk, as well as drinking a very nice queimada (a drink made of
almost pure alcohol, with coffee grains and some fruit, which is burnt for a while to reduce
the alcohol), accompanied by the typical conjuration, made by a local person, in Galician.
From then on, better not to talk about what we did, because that would make lots of users
switch to other desktops. I’m just going to talk about the good abilities of Jose and
Alvaro for singing folklore.
As soon as we came back to CoruÃ&plusmm;a, I went with Yolanda to the hotel to sleep, and woke up
on Sunday with a little hangover, that made the 7 hours trip to home a bit harder.
Overall, I’d call this II GUADEC-ES a complete success, something that the Spanish-speaking
GNOME community should be proud of, and something other local communities should copy. We
are indeed planning the III GUADEC-ES, to take place next year in Las Palmas, in the
Canary Islands. Also, to come more hacking meetings, like the two we had last year. Only
one bad thing, which is that even though the conference was in a university, there were
very few students, which is a pity, since getting the computing students interested in
Free Software in general and GNOME in particular would be a great thing. But well, let’s
hope at least a few of them got interested.
