KDE Mobile and Gluon presentations at the Linux Mobile Summit (Also few words about Plasma Active and Mer)

Hey there! =)

Unfortunately, I have been busy recently with a couple of real life issues, like moving into a new apartment, while simultaneously burning out a bit in my full time job. That is because of the continuous beheading that outsiders can also feel about our Harmattan project where we have tried for a long time to ship the best platform ever, and it is now fading away. I do wish to give my thanks to Nokia for providing the opportunity to take part in such a great project (as Harmattan is)! Luckily enough, I was able to attend a very fruitful and amazing summit during the last few days to get a bit away from the troubles and chill out a bit with very friendly people in a cozy environment.


General information about the Linux Mobile Summit conference

The event took place in Oulu, Finland, on 4-5th of October 2011. The city of Oulu is located in the northern part of the Baltic Sea, about 200 km from the Arctic Circle. The program consisted of lectures provided by invited industrial and academic experts, community presentations selected from the open call and demos on MeeGo and other Mobile Linux systems given by the regional groups, invited FRUCT teams and selected from the open call. I am really thankful for the organizers and decision makers for giving me the opportunity to talk about my two favorite ongoing leisure projects: Gluon and KDE Mobile. All my respect goes to the organizers, too. I am really happy about their support for such brilliant events as this. You can find the detailed program for the event at the following link:
http://fruct.org/MobileLinux2

FRUCT (organizer community) logo for the event

The first day, KDE Mobile presentation

Unfortunately, I had a very bad start of the whole traveling and conference as around 02:00 am, I felt asleep. The problem is that my plane was scheduled to leave at 06:20 am, and I was unable to wake up before 05:00 am, even when friends were calling me on the phone... :) You can imagine my trip from the bed to the airport. :p I did not have time for a shower, I forgot my identity card at home before the airplane trip (luckily enough, I had my driver's license with me :). After the arrival and welcome speeches, my colleague gave a very good presentation about "How to survive with Platform Security on Harmattan". The next presentation was mine about the KDE Mobile project. I had had a very rough weekend beforehand. I was very busy with the presentation, which you can now find here if you would like to check it out (Let me know if you need the source for any re-invocations or so):
http://fruct.org/sites/default/files/kde-mobile-laszlo-papp.pdf

Many thanks go to Eugene Trounev for the background of the presentation.

KAlgebra Mobile on N9

I had to hold back a meeting with some buddies because of the heavy work on this, but it was worth it for me after all because of the very positive feedback. One interesting point about the presentation was that, after submitting my slides to the event organizers, I noticed the announcement of the MeeGo Reconstructed project:
http://lists.meego.com/pipermail/meego-dev/2011-October/484215.html

After reading it, I thought it would be very cool to speak a bit about that to other participants. Mainly because, regarding the KDE Mobile project, it can provide a very useful base OS for Plasma Active, for instance. I wanted to talk about a couple of things: History, Plasma Active (shallowly), Qt5, KDE frameworks, KDE on Harmattan, Android, Mer and so forth.

The First day, the social event

After the many interesting and impressive presentations, the organizers were kind enough to take care of us and we got transported to a local place with excellent Sauna opportunity (Real Finnish way of enjoying the sauna ;) and we had free drinks (beer, but also soft drinks) and pizza. More importantly, pretty much fun everywhere. Had a good chat about insane things with the local site manager of a subcontractor company and with many other guys. :) Having fun after the dinner! ;)

Having fun after the dinner! ;)

The second day, the Gluon presentation

My hotel reservation was needlessly luxurious in my opinion, and I did really enjoy it. :) I have got used to cheap accommodations in the past because of the university apartment.  Also, KDE Developer Sprints: where we tried to keep the costs at minimum for the KDE e.V. board. My company sponsored the hotel room for me, so I am really thankful and happy about that. I had a small walk around in the city before the long conference day. I believe I was even a bit late; I missed the first presentation. :P The second presentation of the day was about Gluon, so I could present our vision, current project state and future plans. You can find the presentation on the following link:
http://fruct.org/sites/default/files/gluon-oulu2011.pdf

Note that, it is just a slight modification of the Gluon presentation slides that Dan and Arjen produced for this year's Desktop Summit in Berlin. All my respect to them for providing me the presentation, so I could concentrate more on my KDE Mobile presentation during the weekend. There were more people interested in game development (There was even another game development related presentation that day), so we could share our visions and paradigms. On the other hand, there were more presentations about Social Desktop, Collaboration and similar things. I could also present the Open Collaboration Services to them that we have been using in Gluon. They were all very fruitful discussions and I could really get to know very high-skilled and cool people. Unfortunately, I could not show the demos, for instance the Games we have built on Gluon as examples for the Community because I could not use my own laptop, but some people came to my place after the presentations, and I could show them some games.

Gluon Space Invaders on N950

The Second day, the end of the conference, Plasma Active and Mer

We had large hugs with other participants and they told me they are looking forward to seeing the KDE Mobile, Gluon and Plasma Active projects in the future. I feel it as respect, and it makes me happy. :p Actually, it sounds funny, but I "could not" leave the venue after the conference since I started listening to the ongoing Plasma Active and Mer IRC meeting on my N9 Nokia phone.

MeeGo Reconstructed

It has been a very hot and fresh topic with many ideas and enthusiastic people over there. It has been a bit hard for me to follow every post, but I think I got the gist of the discussion. By the way, it will be "repeated" this Thursday if you could not participate, 18:00 UTC if I am not mistaken. It sounds like a very interesting project, and I hope they can really build a commercial future for it, and also a nice community. Here you can find Aaron's invitation for the IRC meeting:
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2011/10/meegonext.html

You can follow the meeting minutes here:
http://misc.chouchoune.fr/mer.log

Plasma Active Device Spectrum

Unfortunately, there were also some drawbacks in the organization:
1) It is a pity: a group photo was not taken
2) The presentations were not recorded, not even with simple audio recorders
3) There were not many photos taken during the presentations, the social event and other times. However I started taking some pictures about the presentations with my N9 the second day, that I will publish later.

All in all, it has been a very nifty summit. I hope I can join the next conference in November which will be held in Tampere. It is the next bit of the series from FRUCT.

I am really sorry for the long blog entries, but it seems when I start typing, I can not easily stop. ;)

News in the Gluon World

Hi,

As you may already know, we have just had the Gluon Electron, alpha2 release few weeks ago. It seems the project coding just gets more and more active, as well as from the presentation and promotion point of view. Remember, it is not enough to write code in the corner of a dark room, you need to hand the vision over to the potential users. I was planning earlier to write few words about my two previous talks on the topic of Gluon, but I have been really busy with the KDE Sprint in Randa, a small town in Switzerland with just a few hundred citizens. I will discuss my experience there in this entry.

Presentation about Gluon at the MeeGo meetup

Last week (Tuesday), I gave two good presentations about Gluon in Helsinki.  The program began with the local MeeGo meetup which has been sponsored by my company (not Nokia (: ) this time. Thank you to my company, the organizers and the participants for making it a success. The lightning talk went really awesome and actually turned into a long speech. As a matter of fact, this was the first time I could speak about the Gluon vision in this form and what activity we have been doing in our leisure time with other friends. I got a lot of positive feedback as well as very useful recommendations and suggestions (e.g. QML 2.0, because of the shader, particle, et cetera support). The outcome of the MeeGo conference has also been a very hot topic. As an extra, there was free food, drink and, most importantly, we had a good time together: a lot of fun with cool people from the opensource community. I think such situations make me feel quite happy and give me passion for the future.

The Gluon Vision

Another Talk about Gluon at the IGDA event

I was heading to the other presentation with my friend, namely to the IGDA (game development and player) community meeting. By the time I did the second presentation, I was better prepared and had more experience, but it has also been a lot of fun. On the other hand, from the technical point of view: I did realize the fact again that the game developers and players have a strong need for windows support. It is something that has eventually been relatively fine (I could build on my Windows 7), but we will be trying to solve and test by the end of the Desktop Summit. So does it currently work on Windows. It has indeed been a bit of a special presentation in a way so that an opensource and free game development and distribution platform could be presented. This is something rare at the IGDA meetings. The most frequent situation is that there are commercial companies, for instance Rovio with their Angry Birds game, taking these occasions. In summary: I tried to speak to them about the Gluon vision and show a demo about the game creation and playing process.

 Gluon Invaders on WeTab

GluonCreator and KDevPlatform cooperation at Randa

I did not have too much time after the talks to relax because I was flying to Randa, a KDE sprint the next day. I was participating in the KDevelop sprint over there in order to discuss the opportunities and cooperation with the kdevplatform guys. The beginning of the story was very adventurous: the plane was late and I could not pick the cheap ticket up from Aaron Seigo who was waiting for me in Zurich.  In spite of the "vis major" situation,  it did really work out just fine. :) We had few days for the brainstormings and hackings. It
has really been a lot of fun. The work I have already achieved during the sprint is available in the creator branch of the Gluon repository. The purpose was to realize the pro/cons of the cooperation and to get familiar with the
kdevplatform API as much as possible. There were quite a few issues fixed during the Sprint in the kdevplatform project with regards to our requirements. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the kdevelop guys. It has been a pleasure to spend a few days together with them. The Version Control System integration is on the way and language support also works fine that might be interesting for us, right after someone implements the javascript language support. While the hard work was proceeding nicely, we had a lot of non-geekish fun as well, like the football match behind the house on the ground, foosball, and walking up in the mountain and the neighbour city.

 The KDevelop sprint participants

Gluon and CDash
Special thanks to Alexander Neundorf so that we could discuss the cdash project and the usage of that. It might well be what using this tool can bring another quality level into our project. I would personally like to see nightly builds and automatic test runs for the Gluon project and the results forwarded to the mailing list later or just check the results regularly out on the dashboard. I have a good friend who can support us with the proper server and hardware, thus let us see the outcome when I can finish (I have a bit of time) the procedure.

 CDash is an open source, web-based software testing server

GluonPlayer and Telepathy
Another important discussion that took place the last day of the event
during the breakfast was about the Gluon Player and Telepathy integration. I am looking forward to making further research and investigation about the Telepathy Qt API.  One of the Telepathy guys told me it would be nice to meet at the Telepathy sprint, so I "accepted" the "invitation". Let us see what the future holds, but the audio, video voice, other multiplayer and real time
collaboration features might be interesting for us. I have some issues about the current situation, but not architecture-wise, like the cross-platform support and API stability. I hope the Collabora employees and volunteers can stabilize the API soon (e.g. this year). I also desperately hope the Windows and Mac D-Bus will be able to evolve to a certain level when it can be said: it is really awesome and wonderful on tholse platforms, too. That is a very attractive point, it is already for mobile phones, operating systems, like handsets and tablets. I would like to express my gratitude for their great work.

That is it for now. Thank you for your patience and attention! :)
 
Last Update (2011-06-10 19:07:20): Paragraph headers and pictures added according to the comment from Jos, thank you!