COMMUNITY GUADEC 2005
The Gnome User and Developer European Conference HAPPY TOGETHER
The city of Stuttgart may not be known as a tourist destination, but Gnome developers from around the world still arrived on schedule for this year’s Gnome User and Developer European Conference.
BY OLIVER FROMMEL
he Gnome community gathered ried out in various countries (actually in Stuttgart, Germany on May evaluating both KDE and Gnome). T29–31 for the annual Gnome User In an effort to make Gnome the plat- and Developer European Conference form of choice for the market of migrat- (GUADEC) [1]. The conference had a ing mainstream Windows programmers tight schedule that included four parallel (the “washed masses”), Icaza called for Figure 2: Dreamworks used Gnome and tracks. The rooms were often filled, better documentation. He even dared to Linux to create the movie Madagascar, which starting with the very first talk by Keith quote Steve Ballmer in his call to “devel- features smart penguins, too. Packard of Freedesktop.org. A special opers, developers, developers …” – track showcased new Gnome multime- although he was not shouting or break- interface for the 770 is based on Gnome/ dia applications, such as the video editor ing out in a sweat. Gtk with quite a lot of changes, most of Pitivi, the Fluendo streaming server, and which Nokia will feed back to the Open the Xiph and Dirac video codecs. Faster Source community [3]. They announced Kernel programmer Robert Love a donation of about 50,000 dollars to the Better demanded more performance metering Gnome foundation, the revenue of the Among the more entertaining speakers tools to identify slow spots in the desk- sale of developer machines. were some of the usual suspects, such top code. He also gave some hints on as the self-proclaimed monkeys of Ex- good ways of system programming for a Longer Ximian. In his keynote Miguel de Icaza – faster desktop using the latest features of On the user’s day, Nathan Wilson of apart from evangelizing Mono – set the the Linux kernel [2]. A better under- Dreamworks talked about their use of agenda of finally making the Gnome standing of those features will improve Linux and Gnome in the production of desktop usable. In his slightly exagger- the design of desktop components, too. movies like Shrek. To everybody’s ated view, Gnome is currently a piece of Much of the work on the Gnome desk- delight, he showed a short clip from software that just “doesn’t work,” and top these days is done by employees of their just-released movie, Madagascar, he quoted a usability study Novell car- large companies, such as Novell and Red which features some funny and smart Hat. The increasing popularity of the penguins (Figure 2). Gnome-based Ubuntu distribution adds Overall the mood of the GUADEC con- to this momentum: they shipped more ference was great: everybody was happy than one million CDs, not counting the with the organization of the event, the downloads. Consequently, it was Ubun- interesting talks, and the ongoing tu’s Jeff Waugh who laid out his visions Gnome development. Hopefully, next of Gnome’s 10% overall desktop market year’s GUADEC will be longer. As Nat share in 2010. Ubuntu funder Mark Shut- Friedman notes in his weblog [4], tleworth (Figure 1) outlined the plans for “Three days is not enough …” ■ the upcoming Ubuntu release, which is supposed to “fly on a laptop.” Collabora- INFO tion, according to Shuttleworth, is the [1] GUADEC 2005: http:// 2005. guadec. org most important concept as Ubuntu sets [2] Robert Love's talks: out to explore the “mobile space.” http:// www. rlove. org/ talks/ Another star of the event was non- [3] Nokia’s Maemo: http:// www. maemo. org human: Nokia’s new Linux-based hand- Figure 1: This man has a vision: Mark Shut- held 770, which is about to leave the [4] Nat Friedman’s Blog: http:// www. nat. org/ 2005/ june/ #Six-day-GUADEC tleworth sketching his plans for Ubuntu. prototype stage. The graphical user
90 ISSUE 57 AUGUST 2005 WWW.LINUX - MAGAZINE.COM