Karl-Tux-Stadt

Vergangene Woche, genauer gesagt vom Donnerstag den 2. bis zum Samstag den 4. Mai, haben in Wien am Technikum, wieder die Linuxwochen Wien stattgefunden. Für dieses Jahr waren die Linuxwochen zum ersten Mal im neuen Gebäude der FH gleich neben dem altem Haus. Das ist wieder ein enormer Fortschritt, denn dort gibt es ausreichend Platz für eine Austellung der Projekte. Der Platz wurde für dieses Jahr allerdings nicht ausgereizt, scheinbar sind die Projekte noch den alten Platz gewohnt, der im Eingangsbereich nur minimal war und auf den Fluren war man doch recht einsam, wenn sich nicht die Besucher dorthin verirrt hatten. Neben Fedora hat nur noch Debian, die RailsGirls Wien, die Wikimedia und OpenStreetMap ausgestellt. Auch seltsam in Wien ist, das die 3 kommerziellen Austeller am Samstag dann nicht erscheinen.

Was die magere Austellung wieder wett macht, sind auf die 3 Tage verteilte 100 Vorträge und Workshops. Auch im größten Vortragsaal wurde Platz hinzugewonnen und der wurde dann auch ausgereizt, in den meisten Vorträgen. All zu viele Vorträge habe ich selbst nicht gesehen, da ich mit meinen eigenen Beiträgen beschäftigt war. Am Donnerstag hatte ich Vorträge zu Animationen unter Linux mit Tupi, zum Erstellen von Präsentationen mit Inkscape und ich habe die Fedora Design Suite vorgestellt. Normalerweise wird am Donnerstag eher den Business-Vorträgen der Vorrang gegeben und ich hatte schon befürchtet vor nur sehr wenigen Zuhörern zu stehen. Dem war aber nicht so, schon am Morgen im ersten Vortrag waren ausreichend Leute im Raum und beim nachfolgenden zweiten dann noch mehr. Für den letzten Vortrag war ich dann im größten Raum aber der war dann nicht mehr so gefüllt.

Für den zweiten Tag hatte ich nur nach dem Mittag einen Workshop zu Inkscape und für den habe ich kurzfristig entschieden, diesen in Englisch zu halten da wir ausländische Gäste hatten. Das wäre in Deutschland eher unmöglich, aber in Österreich sagt das Publikum zu so etwas nicht nein. Mit der Anzahl der Besucher kann ich voll zufrieden sein, 22 ist eine gute Zahl bei spätestens 30 ist ohnehin Schluß mit lustig.

Für den dritten Tag hatte ich den ganzen Tag zu tun, schon am Morgen hat mein Blender-Workshop begonnen. Trotz der großzügig bemessenen Zeit war es am Ende knapp, wir haben das geplante Bild fertiggestellt und das auch unter der Zeit, allerdings haben die Spielmatzen doch aufgehalten. Aber es ist in 3 Stunden zu schaffen. Nach einer kurzen Pause ging es gleich weiter mit einem zweiten Inkscape-Workshop und der war mit ein paar weniger Leuten gefüllt als der erste aber trotzdem mit einer zufrieden stellenenden Anzahl von Besuchern. Insgesamt gibt es auch nur gute Kritiken zu meinen Beiträgen, ich kann also rundum zufrieden sein. Ich werde wohl auch nächstes Jahr zu den Linuxwochen in Wien fahren vom 8. – 10. Mai 2014 wieder am Technikum in Wien.

Linuxwochen 2013 in Vienna are over now, it was 3 days with a lot of talks. The program had 100 different talks and workshops and most of them was really filled up. As the Linuxwochen was this year in the new building of UAS Vienna, there was plenty of space for the exhibition, but not a lot of booths. Hopefully there will be more next year otherwise the exhibition is not interesting. Otherwise we had a lot of conversations and the 3D printer rocked again.
Personally I had 3 talks and 3 workshops, my talks was scheduled all for the first day. The talk about doing animations with Linux and Open Source was well visited and also the following talk about how to do slides with Inkscape. Interesting for me I doing this talk since over 3 years and its still new to the people, that it can be done. Last talk at that day was the introducion of the Fedora Design Suite and as it was the last talk on the day, there was not so lot of people as in my other talks.
On friday I had the first workshop at 2pm and it was good visited, there was 22 people and that is the optimal amount of people. For this workshop I had to switch to english as there was guests from aborad. If there is more interest in Brno, we can also do one of my Inkscape weekends there. The other two workshops I had on saturday beginning in the morning with the Blender one after a short lunch break the second Inkscape workshop followed. Also here they was filled up.
The system for the schedule the Linuxwochen use allows the visitors to vote for the talks and the speaker can see them, so I looked yesterday if I have comments on my talks and workshop and I already had for most of them good votes and comments. One comment said it’s already time that somebody starts to talk about how to do animations with Linux and Open Source. Actually I think about doing an workshop for that but the problem is, it’s for users and as Tupi isnt packaged for Fedora or openSUSE yet, it’s not possible. For Debian and Ubuntu there are packages but they are outdated. So we will see if in the future also workshops for animations can be done. So on the end Linuxwochen was a good event for me and I think I will be there 2014 again.

Next week from 2nd to 4th of May there will be Linuxwochen in Vienna. This event is part of a series kind of road show events in Austria touring through different cities in the country. Linuxwochen will be held in the new building of UAS Technikum Vienna and Fedora will have of course an booth there. But besides that Fedora people will deliver a lot of talks and workshops. Christoph Wickert will doing a talk about Kolab3 and an second one about spam protection with postscreen, Raphael Groner will talk about the VoiceXML framework, Rákosi Gergely will show how gaming with Fedora works, Jaroslav Reznik will talk about Fedora works and talk about the new upcoming Fedora 19, Peter Czanik will show new things in sylog-ng, Miro Hroncok will give an talk about RepRap 3D printers and deliver an workshop how to do 3D models with OpenSCAD and in a second one how to create manpages. I will also have workshops in the program on friday one about Inkscape and on saturday one for using Inkscape again and a second one about using Blender, besides that I have also 3 talks introducing Fedoras Design Suite, how Tupi can be used for animations and the third talk will be about how you can use Inkscape for preparing presentation slides. In case you are interested in the program it can be found here.  I would say that’s a lot of talks and Fedora blue will be very visible….

Vergangene Woche war ich in Madrid zum LibreGraphicsMeeting. Der jährlichen Zusammenkunft vieler Grafikprojekte, wie GIMP, Krita, Darktable, Scribus, Inkscape und vieler anderer. Neben dem Vortragsprogramm, in dem ich mit zwei Beiträgen vertreten war, gibt es Zusammenkünfte der Entwickler und Workshops. Am ersten Tag hatte ich meinen Vortrag zur Fedora Design Suite und am dritten zu Open Source Movies. An vielen Meetings habe ich teilgenommen, so an den Gesprächen zwischen Tupi und Krita and denen geklärt wurde, wie beide Programme interagieren können. Dabei sind Fehler im Datenmodell von Tupi zu Tage gekommen, die in naher  Zukunft geändert werden. Damit wird Tupi dann schneller im Laden von Reihenbildern zum Beispiel. Auch Ideen zu OpenRaster als mögliches zusätzliches Datenformat haben stattgefunden, dass würde ermöglichen das Tupi Dateien von Krita und Mypaint übernehmen kann. Aber auch die Gespräche zwischen Krita, GIMP und Mypaint zu einem gemeinsamen Brush-Format habe ich verfolgt, auch hier tut sich so einiges. Auch bei Fonts, tut sich so einiges, wie ich am Rande mitbekommen habe, die Gespräche habe ich allerdings nicht mitverfolgt. Persönlich habe ich die Zeit genutzt um mit Tavmong Bah über Aufzählungen im SVG-Standard zu sprechen, dieses Feature wird in meinem Blog oft im Zusammenhang mit Inkscape gesucht und auch in meinen Vorträgen angefragt. Die schlechte Nachricht ist, dass dieses Feature auf jeden Fall von Fliesstext abhängig ist, dieses Feature wurde schon im Zusammenhang mit SVG 1.2 gecancelt. Da wäre die Möglichkeit Aufzählungen ähnlich zu integrieren, wie Textumbrüche aber diese werden beim speichern als konformes SVG ja zerstört. Auch im Inkscape IRC wird dieses Feature oft nachgefragt, die Problematik hier ist, das diese Wünsche ans W3C herangetragen werden müssen und nicht an Inkscape, so also wenn ihr es wollt schreibt an die Arbeitsgruppe. Die vertretenen Browser-”Hersteller” haben jedenfalls kein Interesse daran, die wollen SVG möglichst klein halten.

Es tut sich also eine ganze Menge in der Welt der freien Grafikprogramme und die 2013er Ausgabe des LGM hat wieder einige Sachen vorwärts geschoben. Bleibt am Schluss zu sagen, dass ich gespannt bin auf die 2014er Ausgabe des LGM egal ob sie in Montreal, Medellin, Buenes Aires oder hier in Deutschland in Leipzig statt findet. Auch in der Organisationsstruktur des LGM hat sich einiges getan, was zukünftige Meetings verbessern wird. Also alles in allem hat es sich gelohnt nach Madrid zu fahren.

Bleiben nur noch zwei Dinge zu sagen, erstens es fehlt noch Geld auf dem offiziellen LGM-Pledgie und auch auf dem für Gustav Gonzalez/Maria Leandro und zweitens wer Lust hat ein eventuelles LGM in Leipzig organisieren zu helfen, kann sich bei mir melden.

First day of LGM is done, it started late and it ended late. I attended the Synfig Animation workshop which get an break because of an fire alert. After the workshop the talks started but not as scheduled. I had the third talk and was half an hour to late, so I went through my talk very fast and skipped also the questions. But I think it was a good talk about the Fedora Design Suite. Personally I was interested in Tavmong Bahs talk about the future of SVG -SVG 2.0 But he prepared a lot of slides and most of them explained what SVG is and he runt out of time as the talks on LGM are only 20 minutes.

The rest of the day was a lot meeting old friends and new people, but a little bit stressful for me as I had to manage to close the supplemental wallpaper process and attend the EMEA Ambassadors meeting, but I managed that until my battery run off power. So its already late now and I am tired. But tomorrow will be a new day full of talk, in case you are interested they will be streamed: http://streaming.medialab-prado.es/

As the schedule for talks and workshops of this years edition of LibreGraphicsMeeting is now published, its time to talk about. For those who dont know LibreGraphicsMeeting is the annual meeting of most of the graphic tools of the free software world. This year LGM will take place in Madrid from 10th to 13th of April and is combined with Interactivos?’13 of LibreGraphicsResearchUnit which will start on 13th and end on 27th of April.

Personally I will give a talk about Fedora Design Suite and a second one about Open Source Movies. In general there is a lot this year about animation software Synfig Studio workshop and also Tupi is there, interesting is also the talk of Nina Paley, because she is a well known animator. But I am not the only Fedorian who has a talk there, Maria “Tatica” Leandro has an Localization workshop as she works on the translation of Darktables User Manual since a few weeks. Only sad thing here is she had to borrow money to buy the flight ticket, as we had not enough on the pledgie, so we still need some support. Richard Hughes will tell the truth about display color calibration. Jakub Steiner will talk about localized animations with blender,python and mallard. So it will be definitly an interesting conference. Btw. the LibreGraphicsMeeting has also a pledgie collecting money for the conference.

The Design Team is still working on the default wallpaper and design for Fedora’s next version, called “Schrödingers Cat“. We had two public brainstorm sessions and a lot of nice ideas came out: if you want to participate, Mizmo collected the ideas in a Pinterest board.

But that is not the only way you can contribute to Fedora 19. In addition to the default wallpaper, each Fedora version has a package with so called ‘Supplemental Wallpapers,’ submitted by the community. From these submissions, the Design Team traditionally chooses the best (here you can find the for Fedora 18 chosen ones.) This time, not only the design team will vote for the best ones – all Fedora contributors can vote. But first, we need your submissions. So how do you do that?

First there are some rules. Here are the technical specifications:

• Submitted wallpapers must use a format that can be read by software available in Fedora Package Collection. Preferred image formats include SVG and PNG.
• Master files, which may be further edited, should be maintained in non-lossy formats. Preserving vector graphics, raster layers, and channels is important for such materials.
• Originals for landscape formats must be a minimum of 1600 pixels wide and 1200 pixels high. The larger the better. Photographic submissions should be made at the highest resolution the camera is capable of.
• Submitted wallpapers should be provided in a 16 x 9 aspect ratio when possible.
• No watermarks, signatures, photographer/creator names, or messages may be included in any part of the work. However if the license allows, and the photo is compelling enough, we could remove watermarks.

Now here are the organizational rules:

• Submissions must not contain material that violates or infringes another’s rights, including but not limited to privacy, publicity or intellectual property rights, or that constitutes copyright infringement. If your submissions include or derive from artwork created by other people, please make sure the license of the original work you incorporate is compatible with Fedora and that you are not violating any of the provisions of its license. Just because a work is licensed with a Creative Commons license does not mean it is free to use (make sure you provide attribution to artists that license their work with a CC Attribution clause.)
• Submission should have the consent and approval of the author or creator
• Submissions re thereby licensed to the public for reuse under CC-BY-SA unless specifically identified as being licensed by another approved liberal open source license. See a list of approved licenses for Fedora. Note that we can not accept NC or ND submissions.

The deadline until you can submit your artwork is the March 31 2013 at 23:59 UTC. You can submit your material directly to the wiki: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F19_Artwork/Submissions/Supplemental_Wallpapers. For further questions, you can send me a mail gnokii@fedoraproject.org. We are looking forward to many great submissions…

The Fedora Design Team met yesterday in his IRC channel for a first brainstorming for Fedoras next version Schrödingers Cat. We had two major ideas, how Schrödingers Cat could represented in the design. First one is Schrödingers Cat is a thing between alive and dead, which are the opposite. That can be represented in the design with contrast or something like that. The second idea is boxes as the cat was in a box.

We collected some ideas arround the ideas and Mizmo putted them on a pinterest board. Some of them are really interesting and definitly worth to work on them.

I started working during the session on a mockup for one of the ideas, it can be found on the pinterest board. I even worked during last night more on it and so it looks now.

In case you are interested to work also on that idea, the source file can be found here. It’s mainly to find the right color combination, lighting and camera position. The modelling isnt to complicated its only the default cube with a lot of modifiers.

The Design Team will do an Brainstorming meeting this friday at 6pm UTC in his IRC channel #fedora-design. So if you have ideas how Schrödingers Cat should look like and/or interested in the design for the next Fedora version, you should join this meeting.

I am back from the first Linux ColorManagement Hackfest in Brno, four days working on color management stuff an we achieved a lot. Normally I planned for every day a post, but there was no time for it, really every minute was used for hacking and learning, testing. We even went not out for lunch on Saturday and Sunday, just pizza or sandwiches, on Friday we also did not went out for dinner we worked until the RedHat offices was closed at 10pm. But we had a lot of fun on Saturday during the “Colord vs. Oyranos Bowling Death Match”, colord has won it

For me is was mostly handing over TaxiDB to Daniel Jahre, who is interested in continuing the work on it, but we also worked a lot on it, because like it is now its not really useful. I personally like the KISS principle but Sebastian who made during the TaxiDB happen during GSoC 2011 made it really so “kissy” that there are now many problems there. So we worked on implementing full text search for the profiles and things like that, as we need it in the future for the work with colord.

Øyvind (pippin) analysed all the VCGT data in the icc profiles from Taxi so that he could find a colour-managed resistant dithering routine to reduce the amount of banding in gradients. Designers like me using always gradients with colors very nearby on there work, that includes wallpapers so they are interested in it as you can see here.

Lukáš Tinkl fixed a lot of bugs in colord-kde and implemented also some new things and polished the UI, so there is a really working version now. To bad that Daniel Nicoletti could not work on that, as he was arrested in Munich at the airport. He still needs some help with that problem. Honza Grulich did a lot of work on the UI of kolormanager and Dan Vrátil got ksnapshot working color managed and fixed a lot of bugs on different things, like an bug in SELinux.

Besides of that, there was a lot of discussions and tests get printing color managed under Linux, so Till Kampetter, Richard Hughes, Chris Murphy and Kai-Uwe Behrmann worked on that. It looks they found out also an nasty bug in Ghostscript. There was also discussed how to do an real print preview and Richard Hughes coded a small reference implementation. During doing that he found a bug in lcms2 which has to be fixed but he found with Pippin also a problem with CAIRO, so there is still work which has to be done. I am sure a lot of the things that was discussed there will help on a new printing dialog for GNOME. I am not sure I mentioned here everything, there was done a lot of things more. Think Hughsie mentioned in his blogpost some things more.

I am sure that is was a good idea to bring experts in color management together, with the authors of software that should be included in that process. As John Layt wrote “We really need more of these type of events to build communities around the common desktop infrastructure.” Right now we plan to do a kind of round table for one day at the LibreGraphicsMeeting and do an Linux ColorManagement Hackfest next year again.

Thanks goes to RedHat Czech for hosting us, Jaroslav Reznik for helping me a lot with organizing the hackfest and of course to the sponsors Google and KDE e.V.

Auch dieses Jahr werde ich wieder auf der deutschen Ausgabe der Ubucon sein. Am Samstag werde ich um 13.00 Uhr im Raum Oneiric, einen Vortrag halten, wie man in Zukunft auf OOo oder LibreOffice oder noch schlimmer PDF/Flash & Co. verzichten kann und dennoch sein Vortragsfolien im Browser vorführen kann – Free Your Slides.

Am gleichem Tag gibt es im gleichen Track um 15.00 Uhr mit mir noch einen Inkscape-Workshop – Sexy Jeans. In diesem zeige ich, was mit Filtern und Pfadeffekten alles so möglich ist.

Am Sonntag gibt es dann um 13.00 Uhr noch einen Inkscape-Workshop – Grinsen kann jeder. In diesem geht es darum, wie man einfahc ein eigenes Emoticon-Set erstellen kann und zeigt einige Tricks zum Icondesign  und -export. Mich auf der Ubucon zu finden dürfte überhaupt nicht schwer sein, ich werde wohl in Fedora-Blau wieder aus der Masse herausragen. Man sieht sich also am 19.-21. Oktober in Berlin an der HWTK zur Ubucon.

The submission phase for supplemental wallpaper ended already last week. We got this time 65 submissions, not the biggest sum we ever had but the biggest since a few releases. Also this time the quality of the submissions was very good, which made it not easy for the Design Team to decide which should be the choosen. The submissions came from 20 people some submitted only one, some more. Now the Design Team has voted and the results are there. So let us take a look at what will be in the supplemental wallpaper package.

The first one called “Churi” is a submission from Kushal Das – damn if I am honest, that was even my favorite. I like the colors. The next called “Vienna Nights” comes from our own Nicubunu and was taken during the last LibreGraphicsMeeting in Vienna. The “Pink Flower” comes from Cleide Isabel, who contributed her first time to Fedora but I am sure it will be not the last time. She also has two other wallpaper in the package “Patagonia” and “Caminhos”. The really confusing structure on the next wallpaper is somewhere in Duisburg and was submitted by Charly Kühnast, german users might know him more as columnist from LinuxMagazin, but he also does amazing photographs. And because it is so one more of his submissions called “Calluna” was selected. The Lighthouse on the next wallpaper in that really amazing waves was shoot from Francisco Crippa. The next wallpaper comes from Diego Turtulici who normally contributes more to Mageia and Ubuntu, think he submitted two good wallpapers and the one called “Trama calda” was selected. The next one called “Calm” speaks for itself and comes from Harald Hoyer, who contributed also that amazing widescreen wallpaper on the end of this article called “Bastorf Lighthouse”. Sylvain Naudin submitted first one wallpaper unfortunatly the same wallpaper was choosen from Ubuntu for his next version, but everything he submitted after that was even better and so his snowy landscape called “Lioran” and his submission “Luminaire” was selected. Last wallpaper called “Giza At My Roof” and “Schmetterling” came both from our own Tatica.

If you are interested in all the other submissions you find them in the wiki, and I am sure you will also get to the conclusion it wasnt an easy job to decide. For the next collecting for Fedora 19, there will be some changes so stay tuned.

Fedora brings in addition to the great design standard wallpaper always supplementary wallpapers. That wallpapers are collected from the community and the best 15 of them are chosen from the Design Team and packaged. Now its time to collect that supplementary wallpapers for Fedora 18 “Spherical Cow“.

There are some restrictions for what can be submitted some are technical nature:

• Must use a format that can be read by software available in Fedora Package Collection. Preferred image formats include SVG and PNG. Master files, which may be further edited, should be maintained in non-lossy formats. Preserving vector graphics, raster layers, and channels is important for such materials.
• Originals for landscape formats must be a minimum of 1600 pixels wide and 1200 pixels high. The larger the better. Photographic submissions should be made at the highest resolution the camera is capable of.
• Should be provided in a 16 x 9 aspect ratio when possible.
• No watermarks, signatures, photographer/creator names, or messages may be included in any part of the work. However if the license allows, and the photo is compelling enough, we could remove watermarks.

some are more organizational nature:

• Must be covered by the Contributor License Agreement. We cannot accept contributions from individuals who have not signed the CLA in the Fedora Account System. The CLA allows us to properly license artwork submissions for distribution with Fedora and other Fedora projects.
• Must not contain material that violates or infringes another’s rights, including but not limited to privacy, publicity or intellectual property rights, or that constitutes copyright infringement. If your submissions include or derive from artwork created by other people, please make sure the license of the original work you incorporate is compatible with Fedora and that you are not violating any of the provisions of its license. Just because a work is licensed with a Creative Commons license does not mean it is free to use (make sure you provide attribution to artists that license their work with a CC Attribution clause.)
• Should have the consent and approval of the author or creator
• Are thereby licensed to the public for reuse under CC-BY-SA unless specifically identified as being licensed by another approved liberal open source license. See a list of approved licenses for Fedora

The deadline until you can submit your artwork is the 5th of September 2012 23:59 UTC. You can submit your material directly to the wiki: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F18_Artwork/Submissions/Supplemental_Wallpapers. For further questions, you can send me a mail gnokii@fedoraproject.org. I am looking forward to many great submissions…

The Design Team had yesterday again a little meeting/hackfest for working on the design for Spherical Cow. And this is the result of the hackfest:

We merged Mizmos Steel Background with my spherical Nebulas. It looks beautiful now, from tha far it looks a little bit like snowflakes but it are definitly Qubits Martin already packaged the background and it  just needs some reviews.

A german floss news page wrote yesterday that Fedora 18 has his shape now. What it still misses is a face and thats not so an easy task with an name like Spherical Cow. Some might read Mizmo’s post about the things that happend yesterday arround the design for Fedora 18. We had yesterday a little brainstorming what to do and it turned into an hackfest and things moved forward. There are some ideas for the design for “cosmic cow”, you can all see them in the post from Mizmo.

But I like to talk a little bit more about mine. In Vienna I saw at the Fedora booth the game OSMOS running, I dont know whats the game about but it creates beautiful spheres and I saw them and thaught thats how spherical cows look like. Gergely took a screenshot of some of them and reminded me yesterday on that idea. So I tried yesterday to create similar spheres with Inkscape. My creation turned out a little bit more “electrical” looking, but thats not bad because electricity is power and Fedora has power.

So thats the status now and right now, I am unhappy with. Especially with the background which contains simple formulas from quantum computing (which should be a cow) e.g. of a qubit. I am also unhappy with the colors. So maybe someone has a idea which brings me forward. You can find the source for playing with it on my fpo account.

Friday the 4th of May was the 3rd day of Libre Graphics Meeting and the 2nd of Linuxwochen Vienna. The day of the goat invasion or the day I had not really fun. Why, I missed all the talks I was really interested in. For example Johan Engelen with the development of Powerstroke in Inkscape. I missed them because I had at the same time an Inkscape workshop on Linuxwochen. The workshop wasnt so crowed as they normally are. Because it was friday in the morning, a lot of people have to work. But there was no other time slot left. So I couldnt enjoy all the interesting talks from the GIMP world.

At 3pm was a bigger slot with an panel: Doing Design In The World Of FLOSS which Mizmo, Allan Day and me was planned for, Peter Sikking joined us also. The problem sitting on the end means, very often the points are taken. After that I skipped one talk and watched later Nicus talk about Free Culture meets Free Software: Wiki Loves Monuments and after that a video presentation from Bassam Kurdali about the Tube movie project. I had an conversation with Bassam a week before LGM started about that, because there was the idea to do a free movie session on the Linuxwochen after party on friday. But before we went to that, there was another q/talk planned like the day before. This time about open hardware, Pete Ippel talked about the MilkyMist One, Richard Hughes about the ColorHug and normally Mickey Lauer was planned but he didnt make it, so Zoltan joined the round and talked about the Nanonote.

After the q/talk I played again the role of a tourist guide and we went to the MuseumsQuartier. That is one of the places I like most, there is a lot of art and its also a place for Geeks as there is the quartier 21 for digital art and life style. The Linuxwochen after party wasnt invaded from LGM people like Nicu wrote, it was actually planned this way. Normally the after party its just a bigger table with arround 20 people as the most speakers are on there way home after there talk. Thats a problem of a longer event, you will never get all together. I tried to show some free movies, but it was already to late for that. On the social event Elisa de Castro Guerra went to me and used one of the few chances to speak with me, it was actually funny, because she works also for Doudou Linux, where I did last year made a submission to the Logo Contest and we had time to talk a little bit about it. Later we went for a couple of hours to the Metalab, Viennas hackerspace, which isnt far from the MQ and then home.

pictures Nicu & Kai-Uwe Behrmann

May the 3rd was the second day of Libre Graphics Meeting and the first one of Linuxwochen Vienna. So in the foyer of the UAS Technikum opened the exhibition area and also DrupalDay.at and the first talks of Linuxwochen helped to fill the area with people. Of course there was a Fedora booth at the exhibition and it was the biggest one. I brought the table cloth and one of the rollups to Vienna, and also what was left from FOSDEM on stickers. Mizmo brought also some stickers and flyers and also some DesignSuite DVD. Zoltan brought cheatcubes, DVD and an OLPC. So the booth was well prepared. The Fedora booth was also photographed from the Der Standard and published on his online platform. As you can see not only the both was photographed, also Taticas keynote was topic. She had later an interview with Der Standard and got there own article. The topic on migration to Linux is really from interest for the people in Vienna, as the migration in that city failed and they have to spent now again every year a lot of mon€y for licenses. On the end the topic was from so much interest, that the organizers decided to give a second slot to Tatica speaking about the situation arround Open Source in Latinamerica. Together we managed the spontaneously additional talk.

On the Libre Graphics Meeting side Mizmo and Emichan had their talk: An awesome FLOSS design collaboration workflow presenting SparkleShare, Magic Mockup, GlitterGallery and DesignHub. I didnt see a lot of talks on LGM on this day, but this one I didnt miss. The day on the event ended with an traditional q/talk from q/uintessenz. The topic on that panel discussion was “Open Content, Free Culture” the guests was Pete Ippel, Ricardo Lafuente and Ana Carvalho who work together on Libre Graphics Magazin and the guy who does always Free & Open Movie Nights, I think he is called gnokii So an second additional talk at this day. We didnt went out for dinner this evening and I prepared a dinner in our appartment, “Zwiebelkuchen” and 2 nice bottle of wine.

photo by Nicu.

It might be a “waste of time and money” for Richard Hughes but is isnt for others. The argument nobody would run “Fedora Verne” is a really funny one to me. Nobody runs “openSUSE Teal” or “openSUSE Asparagus” in fact not many people inside openSUSE knows the codename for the version. But because 11.4 was named Asparagus its got a design in that color. So as you can see what for others is just a wasting of time ist for other people a help for doing there work. The design and the marketing team can better work with an name as with a simple number.

So if you go to the poll and vote, please do it not with the actual situation with that ugly submissions for the name in mind, please consider more what does it mean for the work of others to have release names. Its just a wasting of time to write such nonsense blogposts and when release names are wasting of time for Richard, so consider not to vote. For others its that participation in an open process, or can I choose the name in openSUSE or ubuntu?

The program schedule for LibreGraphicsMeeting in Vienna is now published. If you are intereste, you can find the comlete schedule here. On 2nd May the first day of LibreGraphicsMeeting the main topics are Color Management and reverse engineering of some file formats. On that day, I will give my first talk “Taxi DB – Call A Cab To Bring The Colors” about the internet color profile database – Taxi. It’s mostly the same talk as I gave on FOSDEM in february. This day will be really interesting.
On the second day Mizmo and Emichan will have there first talk – “An awesome FLOSS design collaboration workflow” I am very sure the talk who follows that talk – “The importance of new tools to enable collective design process” fits exactly to it.
On friday, I am really interested in the talk of Johan Engelen about -”Powerstroke: variable stroke width in Inkscape” hopefully I can visit it, but I fear not because I submitted also 2 workshops to Linuxwochen and after my experience they will scheduled on friday and saturday. And on friday it has to be scheduled in the morning because on 3pm I have together with Mizmo and Allan Day another talk – “Doing Design In The World Of FLOSS”. Nicu Buculei will also have at that day an talk – “Free Culture meets Free Software: Wiki Loves Monuments”
Saturday if mostly animation programs like SynfigStudio and Tupi topic. But talks like “Remake – build system for animation projects” are also interesting. But I will have no time visiting them, first as I said I will have an workshop on Linuxwochen and at 1pm I will have an workshop – “Open Source, Just Works – The LGM Book Workshop” where I try with visitors of LGM and Linuxwochen to produce a book with the papers of the talks from LibreGraphicsMeeting. The idea behind that workshop is simple, Linuxwochen always asked me for an workshop about Scribus. The problem with this is for me simple, you can sit down with the participants and doing something with Scribus and hopefully they see how it works. I have another opinion on that, I always doing my workshops in the way to give the participants a target, which is useful. So later the participants can be proud of what they have done and see that they can doing things with free tools, its the most what you can reach in a 3-4 hours workshop. If I reach the target the book will be published and available at amazon and all participants will named in it. The profit flows back to LibreGraphicsMeeting and will be used for covering the travel costs for the 2013 edition of LGM.
Some might have the question where on LGM comes Tatica in, because there was a donation campaign for her travelling to LGM Vienna. First of all we reached mostly the goal of 2.500US$ and a few weeks ago we booked the flights to Vienna. We got a cheaper flight as we calculated and 3 weeks ago I booked an appartment which brings the costs for accomodation also down to arround 200€ instead of the calculated 300€. So Tatica will participate on LibreGraphicsMeeting and Linuxwochen, where she submitted 2 talks “One Of The World’s Largest FLOSS Events – FLiSoL” and “Venezuela – An Entire Country Migrates To Linux” especially in the 2nd one are the organizers interested, because Vienna had like Munich his own Linux distribution once but the migration failed. So she will have definitly an talk at Linuxwochen. We will know it, when the program of Linuxwochen comes out. So Fedora will have an good and very visible participation on LibreGraphicsMeeting. Fedora of course will also participate on Linuxwochen, which is on same time and building, about that later more.

Colormanagement war lange Zeit das Stiefkind der Linux-Desktops, mittlerweile gibt es allerdings Entwicklungen in Zukunft die Farben eines solchen zu verwalten. Mit colord gibt es ein Projekt auf der Seite des GNOME-Desktop. Aber es gibt auch Alternativen zu diesem System.

Mit Farbmanagement (color management) soll erreicht werden, dass eine Vorlage, die mit einem beliebigen Eingabegerät erfasst wurde, an einem beliebigen Ausgabegerät möglichst ähnlich wiedergegeben wird. Viele Anwender sind der Meinung, dass ein Farbmanagment nur von Designern benötigt wird. Das stimmt insofern, dass man derartige Systeme zu schätzen weiß, wenn man mit Druckereien zusammen gearbeitet hat. Aber farbverwaltete Systeme sind nicht nur für diese Gruppe interessant.  Nutzen daraus ziehen können auch andere, stellt euch vor, eure Frau ordert via Internet ein paar pinkfarbene Heels und als die ankommen sind die eher lila, auch Ärzte nutzen für Diagnosen teilweise Farbbilder auch die haben einen Nutzen von solchen Systemen.
Eine Alternative zum Farbmanagement mit colord ist das Oyranos-Projekt. Oyranos arbeitet nicht als Deamon im Hintergrund, wie colord sondern Oyranos arbeitet mit den Rechten des Nutzers. Für Farbverwaltungseinstellungen, Profilsuche und Profilinstallation benötigt Oyranos kein Compiz. Will man allerdings mit einem komplett farbkorigiertem Desktop arbeiten so benötigt man dazu Compiz und das Plugin CompICC. Dabei ist Oyranos unabhängig davon ob man GTK oder QT als Toolkit benutzt.

Wer das Ganze ausprobieren möchte, findet auf den Seiten des Projektes eine auf  openSUSE basierende Live-CD. Das Projekt stellt natürlich auch Binärpakete für verschiedene Distributionen bereit. Dabei ist Oyranos abhängig von den Paketen libxml2, libXcm, libXinerama, libXrandr, libXfixes, libXxf86vm und lcms2.

Das Oyranos-Projekt entwickelt nicht nur ein Color Managment System (CMS) sondern auch verschiedene Werkzeuge zur Verwaltung und Korrektur entsprechender Farbprofile. Das sind im Einzelnen KolorManager ein Verwaltungswerkzeug für Farbprofile für den KDE-Desktop. ICCExamin ein Werkzeug zum Betrachten von Farben und Farbprofilen. Die neueste Entwicklung des Projektes ist eine Datenbank zum Austausch von Farbprofilen, welche im vergangenen Google Summer of Code entstanden ist. Mit Hilfe dieser soll es in Zukunft möglich sein egal ob man colord oder Oyranos benutzt die entsprechenden ICC Farbprofile für die eigene Hardware einfacher zu finden und zu installieren. Dieses Projekt wurde Taxi getauft, da es die Farbprofile an den gewünschten Ort bringt. Allerdings bis dieses System wirklich einsatzfähig ist, muss noch einiges an Arbeit investiert werden. Die derzeitige Oberfläche der Datenbank macht optisch noch nicht viel her und eine Menge an Information fehlt und es fehlt auch ein Client zur Abfrage dieser Datenbank. Diese Entwicklungen werden aber in Zukunft verfügbar sein. Mitstreiter, die gern an dem Projekt mitarbeiten möchten und die nächsten Hürden meistern wollen, sind dem Projekt natürlich willkommen.

Es scheint das Nutzer die farbverwaltete Systemen benötigen in Zukunft nicht mehr auf Mac OS X und ähnliches angewiesen sind, sondern auch hier mit Linux arbeiten können.