Category Archives: Meetings and conferences

GNOME Party at GCDS 09

Published / by mario / 2 Comments on GNOME Party at GCDS 09

Yesterday the GNOME Party took place and we all had a lot of fun there. There was food, drinks, live music performed by a bunch of “gnomies” and even the Ice Cream Deatchmatch took place there as well, and all this stuff “dressed” with a wonderful warm night to enjoy in a nice terrace here in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria… so looking backwards I think we can feel very satisfied of how things finally gone.

By the way, and talking about the Ice Cream Deathmatch, I have to say this was my first time taking part of such a contest and now I understand why it is a DEATH-match… as today I woke up with a “sugar-overflow failure” which will probably keep me away from more ice creams for some days :-)… you know, I need to survive yet another year to take part in the next edition of the contest :-)

At last I’d like to share with you a nice picture of the Jam session performed by some GNOME musicians:

Jam session at the Igalia Party

Jam session at the Igalia Party

Keep on rockin’ me baby…

Counting down for Guadec!

Published / by mario

As many of you know only two days are left now for Guadec and Guadec-es 2009, which will be located this year in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and which will be a “little bit” special this year because it will took place along with Akademy and Akademy-es. Actually, that’s why this year it’s named “Gran Canaria Desktop Summit”.

Thus, even though I had a great time last year in Madrid and Istanbul, I’m sure this time we’re going to have fun as never before and that it will be a perfect environment for sharing ideas, thoughts, knowledge… and perhaps even some beer at the wild parties social events both with the GNOME and KDE guys ;-).

I’m really really looking forward to being there with the rest of Igalia gang to start enjoying “the Guadec experience“… can’t actually believe I’ll be there just in three days! :-)

See you there guys!

Love and Hate

Published / by mario / 1 Comment on Love and Hate

Seen in FOSDEM, in front of the GNOME stand:
Gnome love and hate

It looks like a original and very visual idea to put many ideas and visions all together, doesn’t it? Pointless to say I agree more with the “love” side, of course :-)

By the way, I took this picture today, the second and last day of the conference… so now I’m ready to give a full and complete opinion about it, which is that it just was great: I had a very  good time and a lot of fun being there, and not only because of the talks, which were amazing in most of the cases, but also because of meeting people and sharing visions and comments with all of them.

So, it seems now it’s time to get back home, so now I’m going to bed, since I’m very tired and tomorrow I’ll have to wake up early to take the plane.

First day at FOSDEM, first impressions

Published / by mario

As planned, I attended today to my first day at FOSDEM ’09, and I have to say my impressions are even better than what I would expected: lots of talks, lots of volunteers, lots of resources to get into (I’d like to congratulate the organization for all the amazing work they have done), and lots of hackers all over the place. In fact, it was sometimes very hard to manage to select and attend to some talks (at least for me, perhaps because I’m a “newbie” here as this is my first year here), since parallelization is very high (and needed, if you think on more than 260 talks taking place in just two days) and timetables are sometimes too tight if you want to move around between different rooms.

But… what the hell? That insane amount of talks and hackers hanging around is exactly which makes FOSDEM great, isn’t it? So, no complaints, only good words for FOSDEM! :-)

As I side note about conferences, I’d like to state I liked a lot the talks I attended, specially those ones in the “GNOME developers room”, which were all great. In a more specific way, I specially liked the talk about the People Framework, which is IMO such an interesting project, which could become a very helpful tool for those kind of people that, like me, suffer the typical problems of having several devices or applications with independent (but related) contact list. Keep going on with that awesome work, guys!

Regarding to the Fosdem Beer Event, needed to say it was just great to be there, talking to so many people (some new people to me, and some already “old friends”) and trying so many different beers, which were very tasty indeed, like the “Delirium Tremens” and “Kasteel”, for instance, which I just loved. The only slightly negative point on this was that trying so many beers didn’t help me to wake up in my best shape precisely, but nothing that a good breakfast and some hours of good talks could not fix :-).

At last, as a picture is usually better than too much text, here you are one: me in the main entrance.
Me at FOSDEM main entrance

Can’t wait for tomorrow!

Just a few hours left for Brussels

Published / by mario

As some of my mates here in Igalia, I’m arriving tomorrow at Brussels, in order to attend to FOSDEM ’09. This is my first visit both to Brussels and FOSDEM and I’m very excited and looking forward to arriving there and meeting all the people attending and giving talks in this great event, which I’m sure I’m goint to love.

So now it’s time to get everything ready in my backpack and going to bed soon, since my plane leaves Coruña early in the morning and I’ll need to rest properly to reach Brussels in my best shape. And let’s hope I don’t find any problems in Madrid, where news said they’re in “orange alert” because of the snow (I wouldn’t like to miss my connection or, even worse, to miss Friday in Brussels and therefore the FOSDEM Beer Event ;-)).

See you there  guys!

Installing a VNC server on a maemo Internet Tablet

Published / by mario

Today, I’m going to give a talk about Vagalume in the VIII Jornadas de Software Libre de GPUL 2008, since Berto finally won’t be able to be there, as it was initially planned, so I’ll be charged with the responsibility of telling the people how cool Vagalume, Maemo and GNOME are in only 30 minutes… quite a big challenge for me, since I seldom can speak in a concise, short and effective way without going on and on.

So, yesterday I spent some time looking for an easy and effective way for showing people attending to the talk how cool this cute device (my N810) is… and thinking about the past I remembered when Andres gave a talk/workshop about the Maemo development platform, where he used an VNC server installed in the device to show the N810 “screen” to everyone in the room, just using an VNC client in the laptop connected to the proyector.

IIRC, Andrés compiled the VNC server for the device to get it working, but yesterday I found a much easier way to get it working, so here you are the receipt (I use too much this word in my blog, perhaps I should consider to become a cook… ):

  • Download the pre-compiled .deb package for your device from this web.
  • Copy the .deb file to your device and install it following one of the following methods:
    • Install it with the Application installer from the Control Panel (N770).
    • Install it with the Application Manager from the ‘Settings’ Menu (N800 / N810). It’s required to have the red-pill mode enabled. To know how to enable this “peculiar” mode, check this out.
    • Open a root terminal in the device with a remote ssh connection and install it this way:
    • dpkg -i x11vnc_0.9.3-1_armel.deb

  • Configure it to use a password with the default username available in the device (‘user‘):
    • Make sure you are running the terminal as ‘user’, by executing the command:
    • su user

    • Create a VNC password (recommended):
    • x11vnc -storepasswd

      • This will store your password (encrypted) under /home/user/.vnc/passwd
  • Start the server:
    • Not using the password: from Menu -> Extras, click on x11vnc.
    • Using the password (recommended):
      • Open a terminal for ‘user’
      • Execute the command:
      • x11vnc –usepw

  • Connect to server (already running on the device, at port 5900):
    • Using any VNC client connect to your device’s IP, using the following credentials if you started the server with –usepw:
      • Username: user
      • Password: (whatever you’ve set with –storepasswd)

Of course, there are lots of options you can pass to x11vnc (see x11vnc –help) but these ones worked fine for me: I have an easy VNC server working with password authentication :-)

And to finish this post, just a last advice: If you think you’re going to use always (like me) the VNC server with password authentication, it could be more nice for you to edit the /usr/bin/x11vnc.sh script so it also includes the –usepw. This way, you can always start the VNC server from Menu -> Extras, withouth having to open a terminal for it… although, to be honest, I still prefer a remote terminal for most of the times, because of the output I continously get through it… but hey! that’s just a very personal opinion! :-)

Back from California

Published / by mario / 4 Comments on Back from California

As my mate Berto has already commented on his blog, we’re back from California after attending to the Mobile Rules! ’08 awards ceremony, and I’d like to say that we had a great time there, even though we didn’t win the prize… but being a finalist was already a very nice kind of price, don’t you think?

Mario at the San Jose City Hall Rotunda

Moreover, maybe we didn’t get the acknowledgement of being the “Mobile Ruler ’08” under the Multimedia category, but we met a lot of people indeed, and we enjoyed a lot of the event, which was nicely arranged to allow all the participants to meet each other and to have a good dinner at the San Jose City Hall Rotunda (look at the picture to see me in front of the beautiful San Jose City Hall).

So, maybe the next time we could have more luck with Vagalume, but now it’s the present and, as Berto said in his last post, it’s time to get back to work and keep on getting Vagalume even better with some nice improvements we already have in mind and others that I’m sure are still to come.

PS: This was the first time I’ve been to the US West Coast, and I have to say that I loved California… such a lovely place, such a lovely place. I hope I could go back soon :-)

Live report from DudesConf (3 a.m. in the morning)

Published / by mario / 4 Comments on Live report from DudesConf (3 a.m. in the morning)

Today was a nice day here in the DudesConf 07, full of interesting talks about debian and meeting new (and not so new) people from differents parts of the world who came just because one main reason: talk about the debian distro, its current state and about several related things, in general terms. (more info at http://www.dudesconf.org).

At first I thought I couldn’t attend this interesting event, but at last I could and I’m happy to do so, because it was an interesting day in which, even though I wasn’t able to pay as much attention as I wished, I learned several new things and met new people that could be difficult in other way apart from this one. And we even had a GPG signing party in which we shared our fingerprints and get our gpg keys signed by each other.

But, apart from the main reason of this conference, we had some interesting experiences after dinner, leaded by a “queimada”, and a session of playing “Frets On Fire” videogame which was a really fun and funny situation: everyone staring at someone who played an “electric guitar” with a keyboard while something like a guitar-karaoke was reproduced in the projector used for the talks.

Here you are some photos of this last “experience”:

Conxuro da Queimada Berto with a debian t-shirt

Chema performing an impressive guitar playing with a keyboard Frets On Fire played on the DudesConf projector

Update [21:32]: I’ve added another photo of some igalians (Chema, Calvaris, Berto, Javi and me) with Steve Langasek, one of the Debian etch release managers:

Some igalians with Steve Langasek

See you next time guys!