Category Archives: General

Thin Clients really work

General

A week or so ago I was in Linz, Austria, to do a little report for GNOME Journal about the Pangea internet/multimedia centre for immigrants and refugees. I was really surprised at the performance of GNOME using very old PCs as thin clients with a regular new PC as the server. They seemed as fast as new PCs.

A couple of issues came up:

  • How can things be set up so that local drives (CDRoms, USB-sticks, etc) will be visible on the GNOME session that's actually running on the server? Hopefully the answer is simple.
  • There doesn't seem to be any UI for setting gconf lockdown keys. Not only would this be easier, but it would allow the administrator to, for instance, quickly unlock the panel on a user's computer, make a change, and lock it again. This could be a great little pygtk hack.

I was a bit confused when arriving in Linz this time. Last time I was there, it had a vaguely eastern-european-style makeshift train station, but I suddenly found myself inside a multi-level shiny metal and glass complex. The tram used to be across the street but I couldn't find the street anymore. I followed the signs, and eventually figured out that I was indeed in Linz.

Landshuter Hochzeit

General

Last weekend we visited Landshut, near Munich, for their Landshuter Hochzeit celebration. It only happens once every four years, and it was sold out in January, but a friend got us some tickets.

It’s apparently meant to be a reenactment of a royal wedding, and the accompanying festivities, that happened 500 years ago. Thousands of the local residents dress up in fancy medieval clothes and play assigned parts, so the whole town gets taken back in time a bit.

There’s a free parade down the main street of the old town, a huge area with fenced-in groups of medieval folks, like a human zoo, and a display of medieval entertainment. It’s less kitsch and a lot more fun than Oktoberfest, so I highly recommend it to visitors to Munich in 2009.

IMG_0582IMG_0600

Glom in Ubuntu

General, ,

Many thanks to Daniel Holbach for getting Glom packages in to the Ubuntu Breezy (unstable) universe. I think this version doesn't install the example from the tarball, and even the cvs version doesn't yet cope perfectly with example files being read-only, but it's certainly easier than building it from source.

LinuxTag done: Effective marketing

General

LinuxTag is over and it's left me feeling incredibly positive. We really made an impact and we saw incredible demand for a usable desktop. GNOME is becoming clearly defined as the desktop for regular people who want to get things done. We invigorated our volunteers and brought in fantastic new people, plus we made great contacts with other organisations and got fantastic TV coverage. The GNOME Deutschland volunteers should feel really proud of themselves.

While most stands were passive and unwelcoming (even the X.org guys were almost hiding their fantastic new toys), we had at least 2 people in front of the stand all the time, drawing in the crowds. It really paid off to prepare simple talking points, including “GNOME is the easy to use desktop”, asking whether they are GNOME users already, and the latest news on GNOME 2.11 (people love hierarchical spatial).

Using LiveCDs as props also makes us incredibly effective (see our press release about giving away around 1200 CDs). The GNOME bags were popular too – there's a big demand for GNOME merchandise from people who want to show their love for GNOME. It's strikingly similar to Mac fans' non-techy enthusiasm and identification with a product.

We had a computer (sometimes 2) with keyboard/mouse to play with, but in future I'd like to have one showing a recording, maybe via the Istanbul screen recorder. We had 2 screens just showing people's laptop desktops, but I often had to remind people to show the default simple desktop instead of their cluttered panels and wacky themes. You've got to keep it simple.

Also, though it seems counter-intuitive, it's probably a good idea in general to a) not have enough chairs for the presenters, to force them to stay in front of the stand, b) not have chairs in front of the test computers, to keep the flow of people moving and to encourage conversation.

GNOME at LinuxTag 2005

General,

The GNOME stand at LinuxTag in Karlsruhe this year is a real success. We are really selling the GNOME product, and presenting it as the simpler usable desktop that doesn’t get in your way. Yesterday was very busy, drawing small crowds into the booth. There’s lots of eager new Linux users who wanted to see how a Linux Desktop looks and lots of happy existing users. We seem to have gained many new GNOME users around the 2.6 time, and there’s lots of new functionality to tell them about since then, plus the great new stuff in GNOME 2.11/12. We also have a list of suggested presentations, such as translations, bugfixes, and UI development, which inspires people ask us about the project.

We thought a bit about how to present ourselves this time, so it’s much easier to engage people, make them comfortable, and be prepared for their questions. Free LiveCDs are the perfect way to start these conversations with people – you can tell people all about the GNOME that they will see when they install or try the LiveCD, showing them on the computer and encouraging them to play with it.

We gave away all 500 of our Ubuntu 5.04 LiveCDs, mostly in one morning, but some more should arrive by express delivery this afternoon. Plus we are burning our own German LiveCDs with some example content on there too. We can make just as many as we need thanks to the CD burning robot loaned to us by ADR Engineering.

People love our chunky GNOME logo too. I think some people have been buying the GUADEC bags from us just because they look good.

Our usual corporate sponsor couldn’t provide the usual 2 LCDs this year and let us down at the last minute by not supplying the expected exhibition tables either. But Thomas Uhl at Topalis saved us by providing some flat screens, which Joerg Hoh (one of our GUADEC network geniuses) generously brought to us from Stuttgart. Many thanks for making it such a success.

imgp0691We are here until Saturday so visit us and take in the show.

FC4 install crash

General

I'm close to giving up on the Fedora Core 4 install. I've burnt the first CD four times now, but it always crashes after the firewall settings, with a python backtrace ending in “'TimezoneMap' object has no attribute 'currentEntry'”.