free software – Page 24 – life at the end of the universe

KDE 4 rocks or how I learned to love my laptop again

After several people said KDE 4 is sutible for low end hardware and works just fine on it I had to give it a try on my laptop which I use when I travel. It is a second hand Sony Vayo PCG-Z600LEK, about 6 years old, super slow and I called it gna since it is giving me headaches repeatedly. Working on it with KDE 3 is doable but not a nice trip to the Caribbean if you know what I mean 😉

Today I installed RC2 on it and damn I am impressed. It is so much faster. Everything works just snappy. Windows switching happens instantly. And so on…

I already loved KDE (and KDE 4 especially because of all the awesome new stuff) but this is fantastic.

Thank you everyone who put work into it. We rock!

#amarok.de channel party

What a weekend :p

Some Amarokers (apachelogger, Mamarok, markey, sven423, basti, Sput and me) came together in Karlsruhe (the Amarok HQ to be ;-)). We had a great time partying, talking and chilling.

Friday evening we started with a visit to the Christmas market including some delicious mulled wine and ended with cheese fondue by Mamarok and dancing to good music.

Saturday started late with driving into the city and having a pizza. A part of us went there earlier to do something I am not supposed to talk about just yet. But you will find out soon in markeyÂ´s blog :p Then we had fun at a karaoke bar singing great songs like Moonlight Shadow and Mr. Jones by our favorites Mike Oldfield and Counting Crows. Recordings of this are better kept confidential ;-). The day ended very late in a club (playing music that I did not quite like but wth *g*).

Sunday was our last day and apachelogger had to leave early :(. When I got back after taking him to the train station we had chilli con carne. Sadly it was time to leave for the rest as well after that.

I miss you guys and girl already :(. Hope we can do this again next year.

Ubucon recap

Woohooo, we are back from Ubucon. Was nice to meet you folks once again.

It was a small but nice event and we had a great time.

Our talks went pretty smooth and I think we represented the gearheads pretty well 😉

The slides for the talks:

Amarok: odp (for Kpresenter) and pdf
Kubuntu: odp (for OOo) and pdf

Once again a big thank you to Czessi for filling in for apachelogger as my cospeaker.

And now some nice photos of the Krew by sven423:

awwwwuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuooooooo!!!!

btw: Kpresenter was giving me and a few others quite a headache when I wanted to print the pdfs of the slides. I still can’t get a pdf of the FrOSCon Kubuntu talk only a ps. I would really appreciate hints on why it fails.

Ubucon and end of Roktober ahead!

Less than 13 hours left until Sven (sven423) and I are taking the train to Krefeld for Ubucon to meet up with Mark (markey), Myriam (Mamarok), and Marcus (czessi) and give two talks.

Our talks will be:

“Kubuntu :: Collaboration To The Core” on Saturday
“Amarok :: Forming the Core 2″ on Sunday

So get out to Krefeld this weekend and join us on the first German Ubuntu conference!

Harald (apachelogger): Sorry you can’t make it to Ubucon. We will miss you there and hope things turn out well.

And since I didn’t post a proper FrOSCon photo yet – here is one of markey, gnux, me, sven423 and apachelogger:

You just have to love this team 😉

And don’t forget to donate to Amarok. It is ROKTOBER, folks! Only 1287 Euro left to reach our goal right now. Please help us make Amarok even more awesome next year (pssst: you can win a Cowon iAudio7). The money will be used to pay for developer meetings, travel costs of the booth staff and server costs.

Hel, Gna and Syn

Inspired by Aaron’s postings about his and others network naming schemes I finally decided to drop the boring names in my own network (lydia-desktop, lydia-laptop and so on). I went for Norse goddesses.

So as of today my desktop is called Hel (hell of a machine), my laptop is Gna (makes me say gna* a lot) and my Fon Access Point is Syn. I love it 😉

What would you have chosen from the list? And what naming scheme do you use?

* gna = argh

We rocked @ FrOSCon

We rocked! Well, we always do 😉 But “Party animals of Open Source ’07” is the best title we got so far *g*

I had a great time talking to all of you. Was nice to meet another great part of the Amarok team and of course people from other projekts as well. Hope to see you again soon.

A very big “thank you” goes to the FrOSCon team for organizing this great conference. And OMG Ponies, they even had a bouncy castle!!! Perfect for the kid in every grownup geek *g*

The slides for our talk “Amarok :: Forming the Core 2” are available now. I think the talk was well received and hope it helped to give a little insight into our community and eventually will make people think about their communities and what can be done to make them even better.

FrOSCon Baby!

Bags are packed and everything is ready for FrOSCon.

Come and say hello to your gorgeous Amarok Team that will be there in all its glory *g*. Visit us at our booth or come to one of our Talks:

Amarok :: forming the core 2 (Sunday 14:00) by Mark Kretschmann, Harald Sitter and me
Kubuntu in Deutschland :: gestern, heute und morgen (Sunday 16:00) by Marcus Czeslinski, Harald Sitter and me

Hope to see you (and the rest of the team of course) there 😉

Oh and one last thing: Don’t forget to bring your USB-stick. We have got a little surprise for you 😉

best of confessions and more photos

Some of the Amarok-lovers left notes at our booth. Here is a best of:

– I can’t live without it.
– Thanks for the best player ever.
– Amarok RULEZ. The best musicplayer I know. Keep it up.
– Very nice musicplayer with GREAT GUI.
– Amarok is the reason my girlfriend wants Linux on her computer.
– Amarok is cool!
– I use Amarok with Gnome! 😉
– Amarok is the best musicplayer. Thanks for developing.
– Amarok rocks!
– Aouuuuuuuuuuuu…!! 😉

And a boothphoto (by sven423) for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet:

And another photo (by Carlos Diener of kubuntu-de.org) taken at the Ubuntu-BBQ on friday:

(Monika, Myriam, Jono, Lydia and Gerry)

back from Linuxtag

Linuxtag is over and it was amazing. So many amazing projects with enthusiastic people. For example the German kubuntu-team. You can feel the love for Kubuntu.

Of course we (apachelogger, gnux, sven423 and nightrose) do love Amarok and I think we were able to show that as well *g*.

We had visitors at our booth who had never heard of Amarok and were amazed when we showed some of the cool features of Amarok (lyrics, wikipedia, search in lyrics, moodbar, intelligent and dynamic playlists, …). Then there were people who have used Amarok but had problems. We were able to solve lots of them and I hope we were able to give a better understanding of how Amarok works. And then of cause the real Amarok-lovers. It’s amazing how many stepped by and expressed how much they love Amarok. We love you too, guys 😉 (sidenote: there was an impressive number of Amarok-lovers among the VINs on Linuxtag *g* ). We gave people the opportunity to show their dedication by posting a note on the wall of the booth. This are photos from friday:

Unfortunately I didn’t have a lot of time for the talks but I did attend a few. Jonos talk about the Ubuntu-community was one of them. It was really funny and you should definitely see him live. Sebas gave a talk about KDE4. One word: Impressive. So many cool new features and concepts. Can’t wait for the release in october. And the last one was the Ubuntu-grill where the audience was able to ask questions about Ubuntu. Unfortunately a big part of the questions was rather boring and some seem to have thought that this is the right place for bugreports.

The social event for the community on wednesday was perfect. Yummy food and drinks and long conversations. Perfect to get to know each other. Same at the Ubuntu-BBQ on Friday.

Everyone tries to make you feel welcome. This is what Linux is about. This is the Linux-community at it’s best.

Hope to see and hear (“Awwwwuuuuuuoooooooooo” ;-)) some of you IRL again.

(photos by Carlos Diener/emonkey of kubuntu-de.org)

Linuxtag

We are heading to Berlin in just a few hours. I have to confess I’m a little excited. 😉
We will show the latest stable Amarok and a Preview of Amarok 2.0 with lots of nice new features. Ah and we’ll sell shirts of course. *g*
So stop by the Amarok-booth, say hello and don’t forget to attend Svens talk.

Pictures will follow soon I hope.