Our early Christmas present: Jonas

On Dec. 13 our son Jonas was born. He and his mother are doing well. We are all happy that he is with us now.

Convert mp4 into ogv

With ffmpeg2theora you can convert mp4 files to theora ogv files.

ffmpeg2theora filename.mp4

In the following case all mp4 in that directory will be converted into ogv without video output.

for i in *.mp4; do ffmpeg2theora --novideo -a5 "$i"; done

I joined the game ...and you can, too!

Some months ago I joined the Game. "Join the Game" is the campaign from the KDE community to make it possible to everyone to support the KDE project. Although I contribute to KDE already (e.g. promotion) I had the impression that I still take more than I could give back. To show my love and to support the vision and the values behind KDE I decided to become a financial sponsor, too.

This is the little present I received in return.

Christmas time is approaching. This is a time of reflection. A time to rethink your values and to check if your actions are supporting those aims. Joining the game really helps to improve an amazing free and open source project. Therefore I joined the game!

... AND YOU CAN, TOO!

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.

openSUSE conference 2010 is over

Hackspace

openSUSE conference is over. It was an amazing and exhausting time. And the most important thing I learned was: The openSUSE project is a commuity. Of cause I meet many community members employed by Novell. But also many contributors NOT payed by that sponsor. The project is moving more and more into the direction of independence (e.g. with it's community based new strategy).
I was suspisious myself when I choose my distro some time ago. Shall I really try openSUSE, with all the deals the main sponsor is doing? From now on I am sure that these prejudices were wrong.

Chani doing artwork for KDE promo.

I had many inspiring conversations with many intresting people. One I want to mention here. There were three impressive guys from Austria. They created Linux for schools (desktop4education) based on openSUSE. The desktop is installed with 4 question, the server only needs 2 questions to be answered. More information at: http://d4e.at/ (DE-only)
I meet these heros end of November again and I hope we are going to improve the cooperation between their project, the KDE edu team and openSUSE-li-f-e (edu-project from openSUSE).
Greetings to Austria. You rock!

Freedom step by step

  cc-by-nc-nd by Images by John 'K' @flickr

Just a short note: Today I announced that the company I am working for is switching from MS Office to OpenOffice.org. :-)
Most of the people never heard from OpenOffice.org before and have no idea about Free / Open Source Software. The majority of the minds is open and they are curious about that new software. Others kindly asked for guidance. All in all I have a good feeling about that change. Wish me luck!

openSUSE strategy is moving on

openSUSE strategy is evolving. The strategy team is working very hard to integrate all the input they get. We got some great ideas from our contributors as well as from users and even non-users.
I would be interested in further input from the upstream projects.

• What do you expect from the openSUSE community? In which direction should out strategy point to improve our collaboration?

Please let us know your hopes and expectations in the comments or via mail (firstname.lastname  at gmail com).

P.S.: I would be great if you could spread that page to other upstream projects.