Category: PlanetKDE

impressions from Cebit

I am back at home and have time and internet access again so I can finally blog about Cebit \o/ (Nothing beats coming home after a week with barely any internet access to a modem with an LED indicating no connection.)

We had a lot of fun at Cebit and it is always great to meet your favorite KDE people. But boy, the fairground is huge! And now you get to guess how much I saw of it during the week I have been there. 😉 Not much, right. I guess about 200m in each direction from the KDE and Amarok booth and a trip to the Novell and Microsoft booth which was in another building quite far away. Yea that’s about all I have seen I think. But who cares. I had fun and was able to show Amarok and KDE to a lot of people. I stopped counting how many times I answered the question “When will Amarok 2 be released?”. I think we will have to release something soon 😉

I was particularly impressed by a very clever girl (maybe 13 or 14 years old) who was at the Amarok booth asking questions. Nice to meet the next generation of geek girls.

It was a little sad to see how alien the concept of free software is to a lot of people at an event like this. (“And how do you make money with it?”). Well now they know what it is and why we do it. In the end I think it was a great success though since we were able to show a lot of visitors KDE 4 and Amarok 1.4 and 2, introduce new contributors to the team and got a few offerings that look very promising. Be prepared for some nifty new things in and around Amarok (assuming it all works out).

And of course some photos:

When we arrived and gave back our rented car my guys forced me to take a picture of another car at the car rental. Ladies and gentlemen, I present you the uber geeky car:
liscence plate

Eckhart, me and Franz at one of the booth parties:
Eckhart, Lydia and Franz at a booth party

Harald and me at the Novell and Microsoft party (with free hugs *g*):
Harald and Lydia free hugs

btw: Having internet access at the Amarok booth next time would rock 😉 Showing Amarok without it is a pain sometimes and takes away a lot of the wow effect.

distro mailinglist at freedesktop.org and Cebit

A few weeks back I requested a mailinglist at freedesktop.org for cross distro collaboration. (The original purpose was having a list to discuss with other distros how they handle the whole ~/.kde vs. ~/.kde4 thing.) Unfortunately I never got a response and just stumbled upon the now created list at http://lists.freedesktop.org by chance.
It didn´t really get any promo so not a lot of distro people are subscribed yet. Please change that now and make good use of the list!

If you are involved in a distro please ask the appropriate people to subscribe.
http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/distributions

(@ fd.o people: I am still interested in helping to take care of the list if needed as I think it is important.)

Next week is Cebit time. Say hello to your favorite Amarok and KDE people at their booths or check out some of the talks 🙂

what I learned at FOSDEM

After getting back from FOSDEM and sleeping for 10 hours I am finally back in the land of the living 😉

FOSDEM was great, I had a lot of fun and was able to connect some more IRC nicks to their real life faces.

So what did I learn this weekend?

  1. When traveling with Nikolaj always be prepared for something involving a bomb.
  2. Mike looks/is awesome.
  3. There was an awful lot of ambulances in Brussels compared to every other city I have ever been to.
  4. Kriek tastes delicious.
  5. Statistics on KDE commits can tell you a lot about its community. Thanks to Paul for showing me some of his work. It was insightful and will be very useful for me for Amarok.
  6. I need to get started again on packaging for Kubuntu.
  7. KDE people rock! (Ok right. I knew that one long before ;-))

Thanks to the KDE people for letting Amarok have a good share of the booth. We love you 🙂
Sorry I was not able to say goodbye to everyone yesterday. Big KDE-hug to all of you.

PS: Everyone who took pictures please share.

counting the hours…

Only two days left until Phil, Sven, Sput and I take the train to Brussels for FOSDEM. The Rokers will be at FOSDEM! Right now I am counting 12. So be prepared 😉
Come by the KDE booth and developer room to talk to some of our finest developers and Rokymoters and see all the cool new features of Amarok 2.

Oh and something very funky makes its first public appearance – don´t miss it. (But shhhh – super secret – not allowed to talk about it ;-))

I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting

slides for the talks in Stuttgart

Sven, Sput, Valerie, Jörg and I had a really nice day with lots of interesting talks at the Linuxday yesterday. It was nice to meet Frederik (I hereby promise to check out Parley ;-)) and others.

The slides for my talk are available now:

  • Linux Spirit: Rockin´ in the Open Source Community: odp and pdf
  • KDE 4: odp and pdf

1000 thanks to Inge for providing his slides about KDE 4. (Unfortunately I had to shorten them due to the time I had available for the talk.)

After the talks we had a nice little party and watched Aaron´s keynote in Mountain View. All I have to say: You rocked 😉
Back at home it was time to watch the talk by my fellow Roker Jeff. Again: You rocked and thanks for making Harald, Ian and me internet-famous 😛

As a little sidenote:
Not just since but especially after yesterday I really appreciate a community that does not give me a major headache for being a woman. Big thank you to the KDE community for being the way you are.
@ the guy in the IRC channel (you know who you are): For gods sake check if the person you are talking about is in the channel. Your comments were way off.

KDE 4 Release Event in Stuttgart

Planet KDE is filled with announcements for KDE Release Events all around the world already so I will add my little announcement as well 🙂

Sven, Ingo (Radio Tux) and I will be giving talks at the event at the Hochschule der Medien in Stuttgart on Friday. Check the program and join us for nice talks and a great party.

Our talks:

14:45 Linux Spirit: Open Source Community (Lydia)
15:15 Linux Multimedia: Amarok – Rediscover your Music (Sven)
16:15 Linux Desktop: KDE4 – Konquering your Desktop (talk by Lydia and demo by Ingo)

Hope to see you there.
Don´t forget: This is the start of something amazing! Be part of something amazing! Be free!

(As always I will make the slides available later for those who cannot attend.)

Dynamic Playlist niftiness

One of my most loved Amarok features are dynamic playlists. For those who don´t know how they work a little guide is availible.

I use a tweaked random for my dynamic playlist. Amarok is told to play music from a smart playlist which contains all the songs I rated with more than 3 stars or did not rate at all. I don´t want to listen to music I have listened to within the last month. So I exclude that as well. This makes my smart playlist. In Amarok it looks like this:

smart playlist

And now I use that as a seed for a dynamic playlist to make Amarok add and remove songs from my actual playlist and by doing this keeping it tidy, small and going on playing music for weeks if I want it to without me ever having to add or remove songs from the playlist (great for parties btw). If I feel like playing a certain song I can of course always just drag it into the playlist and play it. In Amarok my dynamic playlist looks like this:

dynamic playlist

And this is the result 🙂

playlist

I am pretty sure others out there use even cooler and more useful dynamic playlists. Please share. What do you tell Amarok to play for you?

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 markey´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.

apachelogger and Nightrose Sput and sven423 apachelogger and Nightrose