February 2008 – Chema Casanova's Blog

Next Master on Free Software Lessons

After the hard work that Students have done preparing their presentation for FOSDEM during next weeks we will continue with the subject “Development with Free Software”. The first part of this subject is devoted to get in touch with the platforms and technologies used nowadays in Free Software.

This weekend will be devoted to Ruby and PHP.

Asís García y David Barral from Trabe Soluciones will show the possibilities of Ruby and its web development framework Ruby on Rails. These guys have a lot of experience on this topic and they are working on Free Software in Galicia as we do in Igalia.
Lorenzo Tilve and Xavier Castaño from our web development group in Igalia will teach the PHP Framework.

Next week it will be devoted to the most important Desktop development frameworks GNOME and KDE. The introduction to GNOME as platform based in the combination of the C language and GTK+ will be prepared by Carlos García Campos from the URJC and member of GNOME HISPANO. And the KDE session is being organized by Albert Astals Cid, one of the main KDE developers in Spain. This session will focus on the platform C++ and QT. Both of our Desktop teachers are working in applications related to the presentation of PDFs (Evince and Okular) documents so students will be able to compare different approaches in Desktop Development.

FOSDEM 2008 Balance

Fosdem 2008 was an interesting experience for me, because it has been the biggest free software conference i have ever been. Fosdem is a community conference so that the presence of companies is not as visible that other ones like the Free Software World Conference of Malaga or even GUADEC where I usually go.

The program was really full of interesting talks with more than 10 parallel sessions about different projects (GNOME, KDE, Java, BSD, Mozilla, Postgresql, Mobile gadgets, Research, X.org, etc… ) so it was impossible to go to all the interesting presentations i wanted.

I attended to the GPG signing party too, it was quite funny and i exchanged my GPG signature with more than 100 persons, i will spend some time this weekend sending them my signature of their GPG public key.

But the most important event for me was the presentation of our Master on Free Software Students, it was presented by Pablo Sangiao and they explained the the application of OpenBRR in order to decide witch is the better GNU/Linux distribution for an average user. Finally the best result in their study was Ubuntu over Fedora, OpenSuse and PCLinux. Here are some photos of the Research Room in FOSDEM durring their presentation.

Night in Brussels before FOSDEM

I have spent a nice night in Brussels. I’ve arrived this afternoon with the rest of the Igalia crew in order to assault FOSDEM this year. Tomorrow, … in a few hours the students of the Master on Free Software will defend an interesting paper related to the Quality on Free Software. They have made an hard work analyzing four different GNU/Linux distributions in order know which is the best distribution based on an medium users point of view. So i a few hours Pablo will present the collaborative work of all our students.

We have been tonight to a nice pub near the “Bourse” of Brussels called “Celtica” there I have drink a pair of beers with my Igalia partners and some Master Students, but i had an especially nice night with the main Vagalume developer, Alberto Garcia, who has been my flatmate for almost ten years, and has just become one of the finalist of the Nokia Mobile Rules competition. Good luck Berto in San José (USA). Here is a photo of Berto tonight.
Sugar in Brussels

Countdown to GUADEMY

Last year the First edition of GUADEMY was organized by GPUL and it was a fantastic experience, this year we are proud of the Polinux guys, because they have decided to assume the challenge of organizing a second edition.

Last year it was quite a success because of the participation of almost of the people from the spanish KDE and GNOME community.This year goal will be improving the communication and sharing of experiences among people from our communities and we will try promoting an international participation.

So will see you in II GUADEMY from April 25th to April 27th. Thanks Polinux.