The program for GUADEC 2012 got published yesterday! Okay, it has been online for a week already, but there were some small adjustments to force the layout of the talks (due to some Indico bug, or maybe some misconfiguration on our side).

If you were still wondering if you should come, now you have no more excuse: great talks and cool keynotes (The History of GNOME will surely be full of fun stories!) during the core days, two slots of lightning talks, the Foundation AGM to get the latest update on the Foundation, our now traditional sport games (football, but possibly other sports too), and several BoF and hackfests... GUADEC will be quite busy!

So go check out the full GUADEC program! And many thanks to the sponsors who help us make this event happen: Canonical, Collabora, Google, Igalia, OpenShine, Open Innovation Network and the Linux Foundation.

I arrived this morning in Geneva, for the RMLL 2012, the biggest french-speaking community-oriented event every year. It's the first time the RMLL move out of France, and it's also my first time where I actually stay in Switzerland for a few days instead of being there just for a flight connection. Good to go to foreign countries and still speak French, but it'd be even better if we could use euro to pay ;-)

This year again, I'm co-chairing a Communities track with Michael Scherer. We wanted to restrict the track to two days, but we had to add a third day to accept all talks we wanted to see in. In this track, we obviously have talks related to several french-speaking-specific organizations or projects, but we also have talks about communities and freedom in general, as well as talks presenting some theoretical approaches to communities.

The first day is nearly over, and I'm pleasantly surprised by the content: it's even more interesting than what I expected, and there is good discussion between the audience and the various speakers. Some highlights:

• The presentation about Sigmah, for instance, showed some fascinating work in the world of NGOs.

• Learning more about the challenges faced by LinuxFr.org (very popular free software news website) was also eye-opening, as it reflects on the evolution of the free software community in general: difficulties to get people to contribute, people getting older, social issues, etc.

• I was also interested in what EnVenteLibre is doing: sharing the infrastructure needed for online shopping so that free software organizations don't have to each reinvent the wheel can make a big difference for those organizations.

Unfortunately, co-chairing a track has a side-effect: much less time to chat with people or stay in booths. If you want to discuss GNOME or openSUSE, though, just come and say hi!

Oh, and thanks to SUSE for letting me go to this event: it's really amazing to have an employer willing to help you contribute to the community world!

Ζεσταθήκατε;

Ήρθε η ώρα να κανονίσετε τις καλοκαιρινές σας εξορμήσεις!
Το 2ο openSUSE Collaboration Summer Camp πλησιάζει και φέτος στο γνωστό μέρος (ξενοδοχείο Grand Platon στην παραλία Κατερίνης) στις 20-22 Ιουλίου 2012!

Όπως και πέρσι θα μαζευτούμε στην πισίνα και θα συνδυάσουμε μπάνια και μπύρες με παρουσιάσεις και workshops (μην ξεχάσετε να φέρετε τα laptop σας!)

Η εκδήλωση δεν αφορά σε καμία περίπωση μόνο χρήστες του openSUSE!
Σκοπός είναι η συνεργασία μεταξύ ανθρώπων που απολαμβάνουν να προσφέρουν στο Ε.Λ/Λ.Α.Κ και η γνωριμία με τους διάφορους τρόπους που μπορούν να το κάνουν.
Σας περιμένουμε όλους ανεξαιρέτως από τη διανομή σας για να συζητήσουμε, να ανταλλάξουμε απόψεις και φυσικά περιμένουμε και τις δικές σας ομιλίες ή/και workshops πάνω στα θέματα που σας ενδιαφέρουν!

Όπως και πέρσι θα υπάρχει ποικιλία θεμάτων που θα παρουσιαστούν τα οποία θα ανταποκρίνονται σε όλους, ακόμα και στους πιο νέους και όχι και τόσο έμπειρους χρήστες.
Όλοι μπορούν να συμμετέχουν ενεργά, να παρακολουθήσουν τις παρουσιάσεις και να πραγματοποιήσουν workshops!

Τι πρέπει να γνωρίζετε:

1. [CfP] Η υποβολή ομιλιών/workshops έχει ανοίξει και περιμένουμε και τις δικές σας προτάσεις!
Το μόνο που χρειάζεται να κάνετε είναι να συμπληρώστε τη φόρμα: http://www.os-el.gr/content/submit-talk-collaboration-summer-camp-2012

2. Για δήλωση συμμετοχής & κρατήσεις δωματίων (καλό είναι να το κάνετε εγκαίρως για να μας βοηθήσετε να κρατήσουμε τα διαθέσιμα δωμάτια που θα χρειαστούν στο ξενοδοχείο) στείλτε τα στοιχεία σας στο reservations@os-el.gr
(Για κράτηση δωματίου απαιτείται η καταβολή του 50% του κόστους – περισσότερες πληροφορίες για την κατάθεση θα σας δοθούν μέσω email)

Το κόστος για τα δωμάτια είναι (συμπεριλαμβάνεται πρωινό & βραδινό):

• Μονόκλινο – 35 ευρώ/βραδιά
• Δίκλινο – 45 ευρώ/βραδιά
• Τρίκλινο – 60 ευρώ/βραδιά

3. Έχετε άλλες ερωτήσεις ή απορίες;

• Περισσότερες πληροφορίες μπορείτε να βρείτε στη σελίδα www.os-el.gr/summercamp
• Για οποιαδήποτε ερώτηση, επικοινωνήστε μαζί μας μέσω email: summercamp@os-el.gr
  Διότι αγαπάμε αυτό που κάνουμε & περνάμε ωραία συνεισφέροντας στο ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ ακόμα και το καλοκαίρι!

  ΣΑΣ ΠΕΡΙΜΕΝΟΥΜΕ ΟΛΟΥΣ ΕΚΕΙ!

Hi

here’s a small summary of the 6th (coding) week. Last week I
continued working on the build module and developed a concept
for the package fetcher (and discussed some parts
with darix:) ).
The main idea is to modularize the fetcher code, verify code etc.
Thus we have a fetcher class which takes care of retrieving the
packages. The fetcher class utilizes a “cache manager” which takes
care of storing the fetched packages on the filesystem. The goal is
that at some point in time one can exchange the “simple” cache manager
with a more “clever” cache manager (which for instance cleans up the
cache from time to time or only allows exactly one version of a
package in the cache etc.). In order to achieve this no code in the
fetcher has to be touched – instead it’s sufficient to pass a different
cache manager object to the fetcher.
Additionally the fetcher provides some hooks like pre, pre_fetch,
post_fetch and post. For instance a post_fetch hook can be used to
verify the just fetched package etc.

TODO:
– write testcases and implement the concept from above

If you have questions, suggestions etc. feel free to contact me:)

Marcus

I am happy to announce the upcoming book of my dear wife. A must read for all interested in intellectual property, in access to copyrighted materials and in development issues.

This book originates from a PhD thesis defended at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland. It has been awarded "summa cum laude" mention.

Check, please, with your libraries whether they know about the book and advise them strongly to purchase it for the biggest good of the humanity :)

An announcement for GNOME users in openSUSE: the repository GNOME:Contrib is now dead. This used to be the development branch of GNOME packages living in Contrib. Packages previously in this repository have all been pushed to Factory. If this is in the list of your subscribed repositories, please remove it now (using zypper rr <reponame> or from YaST, etc.), because the repository itself will be deleted from the download.opensuse.org server shortly.

I get to hang out with several awesome developers this week in Boston to work on f-spot and other GNOME and Mono related projects.  It will be great to meet many in person and help improve these awesome apps.  GNOME & Mono Festival of Love 2012

Also, a huge thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my travel to this event!