Gnome / Igalia — 3 comments
28
Jul 10

Watching the GUADEC WebM live streams with Epiphany

Although it is being recommended to use Opera or the latest Firefox 4 beta to watch the GUADEC live video streams, there is another option: Epiphany. Here you can see a screenshot of what is being shown right now in one of the conference rooms, using GNOME 2.28 in Fedora 12:

The support for the HTML5 video tag in WebKitGTK+ was implemented by Philippe Normand as part of his work at Igalia during the last months. The video is reproduced using gstreamer as backend, so if you have the proper support for WebM installed in gstreamer, you can follow GUADEC using Epiphany.

Gnome / Igalia — 2 comments
28
Jul 10

Igalia at GUADEC 2010

Together with a big group of igalians, I am spending the week at Den Haag, international city of peace and justice, to attend GUADEC.

Igalia is sponsoring at Silver level again, and several of us will be giving talks during the core days; among them, I would like to highlight 4 projects we have been pushing forward quite actively this year:

  • WebKitGTK+: as Luis said during his keynote, GNOME must embrace the web and its technologies and standards (Javascript/HTML). Aligned with that thinking, during the past year we have been working hard in bringing the GNOME port of WebKit forward, improving performance and stability, and implementing relevant new features such as the awesome DOM bindings, the HTML5 video tag support using gstreamer as backend, and an increasingly complete a11y support. There are already many GNOME apps using WebKit and I bet more will do that soon. The talk by Xan and Gustavo on Friday afternoon is a must for those of you interested in these topics.
  • Cally: although born as an external library implementing a11y support for clutter, has been recently merged very recently as official part of clutter. Our plans now are to start integrating and extending it so that all the functionality of clutter-based projects like the GNOME Shell can be used by people with disabilities, in a similar way to how can use now the rest of the desktop nowadays. Alejandro Piñeiro covered all this in his nice talk today’s morning.
  • Grilo: a solution to avoid reinventing the wheel when trying to access different media providers (both locally and over the internet) in multimedia applications. There are already plugins for banshee and rhythmbox working as a proof of concept, and the GNOME’s MediaServer dbus API is implemented too. Iago will give a talk about this tomorrow early in the morning, an ideal timing for those who want to wake up early after today’s party :)
  • Modest: a lightweight, simple alternative to Evolution for all kind of devices, from handhelds to powerful desktop machines. Modest was born for the Fremantle release of Maemo, but has now a nice GNOME version. It has some limitations still, but the UI is clean and fast, and it could be a good complement as part of GNOME to Evolution or derived projects like Anjal, which don’t have exactly the same goals and advantages. José Dapena will talk about Modest tomorrow afternoon during his talk.

And as a warm up for all this, I spent the whole day yesterday at the GNOME Foundation’s advisory board meeting, which was long but quite productive, I think.  It is always good to get an update about what each of the member companies have been doing and are planning to do, and have some discussion about opportunities for cooperation.

By the way, we have some new Igalia t-shirts left. If you want one, just approach any of us and ask!

FreeSoftware / Gnome / Igalia / Technology / event — 5 comments
11
Dec 09

Everything ready for the WebKitGTK+ Hackfest

During the past weeks, Xan and myself have been busy putting together everything for the WebKitGTK+ Hackfest, which will take place next week at Igalia’s offices in the beautiful city of Corunna.

The original idea for this event arose a few months ago. We have a team of Igalians working full-time, together with other members of the community, in completing and improving GNOME’s WebKit port, and we thought that it would be a good idea to propose ourselves to host a hackfest, which should turn out to be very productive for the project. After talking to the Foundation and all the core developers, we got such a positive feedback, that we decided to push it forward.

So we will have here all the most active WebKitGTK+ hackers, working together, in the same place, during 1 week (15th-21st of December), to make one of the (imho) most important components of our platform rock even more.

The hackfest is sponsored by Collabora and Igalia, and has the support of the GNOME Foundation, which covers about half of the total cost. Igalia will also take care of food&drinks for all the days, and will organize a nice dinner before the end of the event, so that people don’t leave the place without enjoying the famous local food. Of course, any last minute extra sponsor would be very welcome. So if your company cares about WebKit in GNOME, it is the right time to join and contribute.

Stay tunned, I will try to blog and tweet about the event as much as possible.

FreeSoftware / Gnome / Igalia / event — No comments
13
Sep 09

Igalia will have a stand at OSiM 2009

This week, from Monday to Thursday, I will go together with Alex and Xan to Amsterdam for the Open Source in Mobile 2009, an interesting conference where all the main companies using and producing open source in the mobile industry will meet to present and discuss their plans, and find collaboration opportunities.

After successfully attending the previous editions, we thought that it would be nice to go a step further and have our own stand there, in order to be able to share more easily our projects and solutions with the attendants. The organization has also kindly invited us to do a short public presentation about Igalia and to participate in a panel about the best ways to share code.

If you are interested in discussing cooperation around projects/technologies like Linux, Freedesktop.org, GNOME and WebKit, or around platforms like GNOME Mobile, Maemo, Moblin or LiMo, among others, please drop us a line or just come by our stand.

FreeSoftware / Gnome / Igalia — 4 comments
05
Jul 09

GNOME party sponsored by Igalia @ GCDS

We are pleased to announce that Igalia will be sponsoring the GNOME party during Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, tomorrow Monday, at a nice terrace close to the leisure harbour of Las Palmas.

Some useful tips:

  • Starting time: Monday, 6th of July, 21:30
  • Location: Club Sotavento, Terraza Budweiser, Muelle Deportivo (close to the place where Nokia’s party will take place today). Google map: http://tinyurl.com/my6d4w
  • How to get there: either walking (~25-30 minutes from Las Canteras) or by taxi (~4 Euros)
  • Drinks and some food will be served

The popular Ice cream Death Match will take place there, and we are trying to see if we can arrange some music instruments to improvise a jam session. Stay tuned.

GNOME Igalia party

Please, share this information with the rest of the GNOME lovers/users/developers/supporters.

We hope to see you there!

FreeSoftware / Igalia / Master / Patents — 2 comments
30
Apr 09

Carlos Guerreiro and Richard Stallman at the Free Software Master

As part of the academic activities at the master on free software that we organize together with URJC and Caixanova, which this year is taking place in the city of Vigo, we try to invite every year key members of the community, so that they can transmit their motivations, knowledge and experience face to face to the students. Back in early April, Carlos Guerreiro, who had a relevant role inside Maemo since the very first moments in the history of the Internet Tablets, came to visit us for the second year in a row. Carlos gave two very interesting lectures to the students, one about the challenges in the complex relationship between big for-profit corporations and the free software community, and the other one about the differences between the status of the free software technologies for creating commercial embedded devices back in 2002, when Nokia started to look into this world, and now, trying to describe the current technology trends and foresee what will happen in the near future. In both talks, a lot of examples and anecdotes of the history of Maemo were used to illustrate Carlos’ theories and opinions, and the result was a great day where we all learned a lot.

And today, after many months trying to find a suitable date in his obviously complicated agenda, we are going to have Richard Stalllman giving two lectures as part of the Master academic activities. He will talk about the history of the movement and about the risks of software patents. The access to the talks is free as in freedom and as in beer, and we expect about 500 people attending, including the students of this year and the past year (first edition of the master). Making optimal use of our invitation to come to our country, Stallman was giving yesterday another two talks in different cities close to Vigo, arranged by local GLUGs. In total, hopefully, about 1000 people will listen the message of one of the key protagonists of the Free Software history. I’d like to thank Obra Social Caixanova for making all this possible.

FreeSoftware / Gnome / Igalia — No comments
01
Nov 07

Back from Open aLANtejo 2007

I finally got some time to talk about my recent trip to Évora for the Open aLANtejo 2007. The conference was as great as I expected after my previous experience two years ago, with a wonderful organization by the people at the NEEI and really interesting talks, all of them related to open source.

The first day I talked about FLOSS business models and our experience at Igalia. I tried hard to avoid a commercial presentation and I focused on the main challenges for doing sustainable development of innovative free software from small companies; the goal was to motivate students and professionals to start free software companies in Portugal. Quite a lot of people got interested and I kept talking about this topic during the rest of the weekend with both students from the university and people managing small open source companies.

On Saturday, I presented Gnome Mobile and Maemo, going from a more theoretical part about what is going on in the Gnome mobile sphere to the details of the specific projects and the ways one can contribute to them. The talk got even more interest than the previous one; at the end of the presentation, quite a lot of people came to see the N800 and to ask about ways to start developing new applications for Maemo or using this kind of devices for their specific (business) purpose. Really nice to have this kind of feedback; one feels that the level of coolness of all the ‘mobile’ side of Gnome is really very high.

The conference was also nice cause it allowed me to meet cool people like Flávio Glock, Isaac Clerencia, Erica Brescia, Daniel Liszka, Daniel López or Jono Bacon who were also invited speakers.

I look forward to going to the beautiful city of Évora again in the near future, and I advise everyone to not hesitate if you get an invitation for this conference.

FreeSoftware / Gnome / Igalia — 6 comments
29
Oct 07

Vagalume: last.fm on your N800

Berto has announced his nice last.fm player for Maemo. It is GPL, stable, you can listen to your favorite radio, and the binary is less than 50k. No excuse for not using it.

FreeSoftware / Gnome / Igalia — 2 comments
16
Oct 07

aLANtejo 2007, 19-21 October, Évora, Portugal

This weekend I will be in the beautiful city of Évora, for a new edition of the Open aLANtejo, the first one entirely dedicated to open source. The conference is one of the biggest IT events in Portugal and I had a great time there two years ago, when I was invited to give a talk about Gnome and to take part in a classical KDE vs. Gnome round table.

This year I was again kindly invited to give two talks: the first one, on Friday afternoon, about business models and sustainable free software development, taking Igalia as case study; and the second one, on Saturday afternoon, about the use of free software for mobile devices, discussing in detail GMAE, Gnome Mobile and Maemo.

The conference program looks very attractive, and I am looking forward to being there.

FreeSoftware / Gnome / Igalia — No comments
15
Oct 07

Master on Free Software

By the end of this week we will start the first edition of the Master on Free Software, organized in A Coruña by the Social Program of Caixanova, the University “Rey Juan Carlos” (URJC) and Igalia. Caixanova will provide the facilities and do the management, and the people at the Libresoft group of URJC and ourselves at Igalia will be in charge of the contents and teaching.

The Master is a one-year-long course targeted to people with software engineering (or similar) background that want to specialize on free software. Our experience shows that it is often the case that engineers have good general skills on software design and development but lack the specific knowledge needed to contribute to the free software ecosystem. All the teaching, with a very practical approach, will try to reduce that problem.

Of course, Gnome, Freedesktop, Gnome Mobile and Maemo will have a key role inside the course, and will be used as main case studies.

We also will have the collaboration from key people inside the community, like Miguel de Icaza, Richard Stallman, Carlos Guerreiro or Bdale Garbee among others, who will be involved in the adivising committee of the Master and will give seminars on subjects like Mono, the free software moviment, software patents, Maemo or Debian.

Some companies, like Sun Microsystems or Telefónica I+D are also contributing, giving some seminars and/or taking some o the students for an internship by the end of the course. New companies can still get involved: please, drop me a line if you are interested.

All the teaching material (written in English) is expected to be published with a free license.

This first year we will start with a very reduced amount of students, trying to keep the quality standards high, and setting the bases for consolidation during the next years.

I will try to keep sharing this teaching experience, closely related to the Gnome project, as the course evolves.

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