Sunday, November 28, 2010

LinuxDay in Dornbirn, AT ... or an extraordinary day of success stories

It is 11pm and I am on my way home from LinuxDay in Dornbirn, Austria. It was a long but amazing day. Myriam, Mark and myself were at the KDE and Amarok booth. Surprisingly Christoph (a local KDE on Gentoo user/hacker) supported us rather the whole day.
We were demonstrating our software to potentially new users talked about upcoming awesome
features with more experienced users; we were selling some KDE merchandise articles and were giving a way a lot of openSUSE 11.3 CDs. Furthermore it was an excellent possibility to intensify the cooperation with other projects.

Thomas, Christoph, Myriam, Mark

KDE EDU Applications
We showed and explanied KDE software to many visitors. The best feedback we got after presenting KDE EDU applications to a student was: "Hey, this way education really makes fun!"
We did at least one thing right. YES!!!

Christoph explaning KDE software

Linux4education
I meet Helmut and Matthias (from Austrian desktop4education and server4education project) at openSUSE conference in Nuremberg before. We got in contact there and discussed the brilliant stuff they are doing. Install a school server (based on openSUSE) with just two clicks (enter the IP address and the root password). The school server provides a LAMP server including authentication for all teachers and students (openLDAP), Fileserver (Samba), Webserver (incl. Joomla), Teaching tools (Moodle), etc. For the desktop I think you need about 4 questions to answer. The server could be accessed by Windows clients, too. The project is supported for (at least) the next 3 years by the department for education of Austria to distribute and teach their software at schools in Austria. This is really rocking cool!

At openSUSE conference we talked with Nuno about the KDE-Edu project in Portugal (special widgets and such stuff) and other possibilities the KDE Plasma Desktop provides. At the moment I saw them in Dornbirn today, they greeted my with the words "You don't have to convince us anymore. Our next release (coming out in December) will ship KDE."

Matthias and Helmut at their booth

LibreOffice and X2Go
It was also a great pleasure to talk to the LibreOffice crew to exchange some news and think about an intensified collaboration. X2Go is a open-source project providing remote access to other PCs and terminal services. Next to web-access a qt client provides access from the desktop. They are very interested in a cooperation, esp. together with OwnClowed to provided remote access to applications and data. X2Go is used by d4e mentioned above. This seems a great chance for the KDE and X2Go project to join forces and provide much better services than every project alone. Collaboration across borders rocks!

LibreOffice and KDE folk

Work, live and learn with KDE software
At high noon I had the pleasure to giva a presentation about KDE software, esp. for in educational environment. Audience level: Beginners (so I was told at least). So my talk was aiming for beginners. To make sure I asked at the beginning. About 95% were using Linux and knew KDE software. I decided to change my talk. I only showed a view slides and did a mixture of live demo of cool features and questions & answers. I think it went quit well.

The day ended with the traditional "Kässpätzle" in a beautiful restaurant in the town. The event was professionally organized and I will be going next year, too.

Social event with "Kässpätzle"

Thanks to the organizers, the other projects, and especially Myriam, Mark and Christoph for the fun we had. I hope to see you soon again.
Special thanks to the whole KDE community for creating, maintaining, distributing, improving, ... all the amazing software. Without you I had nothing to present.