Radio Tux has published my interview with the core developers and contributors to the Lumiera project now. I conducted the interview at FROSCON 2009 a couple of weeks ago. Lumiera is a Free and Open Source video editing application project for GNU/Linux developed originally by the CinelerraCV community. It was born as a rewrite of the Cinelerra codebase called Cinelerra3 but it is now an independent project with its own name.

35:35 minutes (28.53 MB)

lynxis published the first lubuntu test iso based on the seeds by David Sugar and additional patches. The first release was 381 MB and a second one only 292 MB. Following test images are also around this size. After crashing the c-base server several times with the lubuntu images, the LXDE team kindly offers the download from its website: download.lxde.org/lubuntu-9.10

lubuntu logo suggestion by gusion

The lubuntu project was started in February after I met with Mark Shuttleworth in Berlin. We talked about how to cooperate between LXDE and Ubuntu. Mark agreed that a light Ubuntu distro would definitely be worthwile to proceed. I started the lubuntu project with the goal to create an Ubuntu derivative that is fast and lightweight just as the goals of the LXDE project.

LXDE, "Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment", is an extremely fast, performing and energy saving desktop environment. It is maintained by an international community of developers and comes with a beautiful interface, multi-language support, standard keyboard short cuts and additional features like tabbed file browsing. LXDE uses less CPU and less RAM. It is especially designed for cloud computers with low hardware specifications like netbooks, mobile devices (e.g. MIDs) or older computers. LXDE can be installed with distributions like Ubuntu or Debian. It provides a fast desktop experience connecting easily with applications in the cloud. LXDE supports a wealth of programs, that can be installed with Linux systems locally. The source code of LXDE is licensed partly under the terms of the General Public License and partly under the LGPL.

The lubuntu team already had IRC meetings, face to face gatherings in Singapore, Berlin and other cities. And, I am excited to see the team getting together and releasing first results now. lynxis who is most of the time in the c-base just over the street from my appartment joined the team a few months ago. I am looking forward to more people joining up with us.

There are many ways you can support the project. Firstly download and test the current test releases. If you are a developer you can submit patches. If you are a tester, please leave info about bugs in the bug tracker. Secondly you can join us and create desktop backgrounds and logos for lubuntu. We have not decided yet, what the final logo will look like.Check out the lubuntu Artwork Forum and leave your ideas there. You can also help with translations, if you speak another language and translate the desktop of LXDE. Or you can help to improve or write Wikipedia articles about lubuntu and LXDE.

lubuntu logo idea by genelyk

lubuntu Design Idea by leo

Download lubuntu test iso: download.lxde.org/lubuntu-9.10

Links

* lubuntu on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lubuntu
* Join up with the LXDE community http://join.lxde.org
* lubuntu Artwork Forum http://forum.lxde.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=437
* Bug reports: https://bugs.launchpad.net/~lubuntu-desktop
* Seeds and Code of Lubuntu: https://code.launchpad.net/~lubuntu-desktop
* Launchpad Project: https://bugs.launchpad.net/~lubuntu-desktop
* How to make a LiveCD: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCDCustomizationFromScratch

On Tuesday, June 2 2009 sixteen members of the local Debian and FOSS community met in Berlin to discuss a possible bid from Germany for the Debconf11. We had some discussions at DebConf8 already and also our DPL promoted the idea. There is a strong desire in the local community to get the Debconf to Germany for the first time. The participation at the informally organized Berlin meeting was already overwhelming. There is a big and active group of very welcoming and friendly local supporters and there is an excellent and cost effective infrastructure available to host the event and contributors from all over the world. We had a follow up about a Berlin bid during the Linuxtag on June 26, 2009, where bidders from Rhein/Rhur and Munich also presented their ideas for bids. We decided to submit only one bid for Debconf11 from Germany and will have an internal German process to decide which bid will work out best. During the Debconf9 there was a presentation of the bids from Germany.

 

Presentation by: Berlin - Torsten Werner, Rhein/Ruhr - Rene Engelhard, München - Michael BanckLinks

* http://debconf.org 

* Debconf 11 Germany Wiki page: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf11/Germany

* Mailing list: http://lists.debconf.net/mailman/listinfo/debconf11-germany

* Archive: http://lists.debconf.net/lurker-net/list/debconf11-germany.html

* IRC: #debconf11-germany on irc.debian.org AKA OFTC 

Robert Schuster interviewt Harald Welte auf dem Linuxtag 2008.

Links:

* Video http://www.vimeo.com/2081264

* Blog von Harald Welte http://gnumonks.org/~laforge/weblog/

* GPl Violations http://gpl-violations.org/

* Robert Schuster  http://blogs.fsfe.org/robertschuster/

A good friend of mine, Chris Wickert, is running for the Fedora Engeneering Steering Committee. Chris is a big contributor and supporter of LXDE and I value Christoph's contributions to the free software community a lot and especially his commitment to make computer systems more accessible to people who do not own high end computers, be it here in Europe or anywhere else in the world:

• Christoph is the maintainer of Xfce and LXDE in Fedora, the lightweight desktops in Fedora.
• His goals are to make Fedora more lightweight and less ressource hungry as well as keeping depencies low.

To be able to vote for Chris you need to have a (1) Fedora Account and (2) be accepted in a group, for example as a Fedora Ambassador. Voting is possible until June 22, 2009. Chris is the most active distro package maintainer of LXDE in Fedora. His engagements is a great success for both Fedora and LXDE as the large interest at Chemnitzer Linuxtage and other events have shown recently.

A quote from Chris Wickert:
(I want to) … improve packaging quality and enforce higher standards for better cross desktop interoperability. Try to reduce the dependency bloat to make sure Fedora does not become too fat, so it still can be used on older or smaller hardware like netbooks or the OLPC without too much pain.

If you are interested to find out more about the community elections at Fedora, please check out: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/voting/about/fescof12

Links

* Blog of Chris Wickert http://www.christoph-wickert.de/blog/
* LXDE: http://lxde.org
* Join Fedora https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts
* https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Elections/Questionnaire
* http://www.leemhuis.info/files/fedora/answers.txt
* http://www.leemhuis.info/files/fedora/answers-table.ods
* https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Meetings:Town_Hall_FESCo_2009-06-03_1400

Daniel Molkentin von der KDE Community spricht mit mir ueber die aktuelle Entwicklung der Desktop-Oberfläche auf dem Linuxtag 2008 in Berlin. Themen sind
- die Plasmaoberfläche von KDE 4.1
- Moeglichkeiten fuer kommerzielle Distributoren den Desktop zu branden
- die Zusammenarbeit mit anderen Communities, wie Wikipedia und der Idee von Offlineclients
- die Zusammenarbeit mit dem OpenStreetmap-Projekt beim KDE Desktop Globus Marble
- die weltweiten Parties zum Release von KDE 4.0
- das geplante Camp KDE in Amerika
- das Potential der wachsenden Community in Asien
- Moeglichkeiten bei KDE mitzumachen

Linuxtag 2008, Interview mit Daniel Molkentin von KDE from Mario Behling/Kamera: Stefan Koehler

Die K Desktop Environment (KDE; auf Deutsch K-Arbeitsumgebung; früher: Kool Desktop Environment) ist eine frei verfügbare Arbeitsumgebung, das heißt eine grafische Benutzeroberfläche mit vielen Zusatzprogrammen für den täglichen Gebrauch. Diese ist vorrangig für Computer gedacht, auf denen ein Unix-ähnliches Betriebssystem läuft, wie z. B. BSD, Linux oder Solaris. Die Version 3 kann mit Cygwin auch unter Windows und mit Fink auch unter Mac OS X betrieben werden. Seit Version 4 kann KDE-Software prinzipiell auch nativ unter Windows und Mac OS X genutzt werden, die Entwickler planen eine lauffähige Version von KDE für Windows und für Mac OS X für KDE 4.1. Version 15. Juni 2008 um 22:56, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kde)

Daniel Molkentin: "Wo es im Moment interessant wird. ... Wir haben einen Desktop-Globus namens Marble und dort arbeiten die Autoren aktiv mit OpenStreetMap zusammen. Wir koennen jetzt bereits OpenStreetMap-Karten anzeigen, noch als "Tiles" und wir hoffen diese "Tiles" bis Ende des Jahres durch wirkliche Vektordaten erzetzen zu koennen, die wir dann ueber die Landkarte legen koennen. Da sind sehr viele Leute aus dem KDE-Projekt aktiv geworden. Torsten Rahn ist da zu nennen, der Autor und andere."

OpenStreetMap ist ein freies Software-Projekt mit dem Ziel, für jeden frei verfügbares weltweites Kartenmaterial in elektronischer Form zu schaffen. Es handelt sich bei dem Projekt um ein Wiki mit geographischen Daten, die (im Gegensatz zu proprietärem Material) unter einer freien Lizenz (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0) verwendbar sind.

Liferays CEO Bryan Cheung offers insights into its business. Liferay has hit 1 Millions downloads in the forth quarter of 2007 and currently employs 55 people worldwide.

Google Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8314322112100513065

Mario: What can I do with Liferay?

Bryan: You can do blogs, wikis, message boards, document library, web publishing, more traditional things like having an intranet or extranet . You can do e-commerce. I think the key difference from just having standard litte blog or message board is, it is community based. So you have different groups of people that have a message board.

Mario: About your business case. How do earn money?

Bryan: Some of the major revenue sources are professional services, professional support, sort of providing insurance for large enterprises, that want someone to call if something goes wrong and then things like training. We also do performance tuning as well as partnerships with other businesses...

....

Mario: Why did you actually start as an open source company? Why did you take that decision?

Bryan: ... Looking back, we do agree very much with the philosophy and we do think that software development in the future an increasing percentage of it will be done in open source fashion. The way we started the business and the project was very grassroot and so having an open source development philosophy meant getting a lot of development and systems from the community. It has worked out very well for us.

Liferay, Inc. is a professional open-source company that provides free documentation and paid professional service to users of its software. Mainly focused on enterprise portal technology, the company was founded in 2000 by Brian Chan and currently has its headquarters in Los Angeles, CA. Liferay was created in 2000 by Chief Software Architect Brian Chan to provide a enterprise portal solution for non-profit organizations. In 2006, the company was incorporated under the name Liferay, Inc., formalized its Germany subsidiary Liferay GmbH and named as its new CEO Bryan Cheung, the company's former Director of Business Development. In 2007, the company opened a new Asian headquarters in Dalian, China. ... In July 2007, they announced a partnership with ICEsoft Technologies for developing AJAX technology for their enterprise portal software. In January 2008, the company hired the lead engineer for jQuery UI, Paul Bakaus, to exclusively work full-time on the JavaScript library. (Version 2 April 2008, 18:33, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liferay)

Links:

• Liferay http://www.liferay.com

Jürgen Neumann, one of the initiators of freifunk.net, and Marek Lindner, openmoko developer and B.A.T.M.A.N. programmer, speak about the Open Hardware Initiative event Open Tech Summit in Taiwan.

Open Hardware: Jürgen Neumann and Marek Lindner about Open Source and Hardware from Mario Behling on Vimeo.

Google Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3658635997245168365

Links:

• Open Tech Summit Taiwan
• Open Pattern Mailinglist: https://lists.openpattern.org/mailman/listinfo/open-hw
• Server name: irc://chat.freenode.net/otstw2008
• Open Pattern Website: http://openpattern.org
• openmoko

Jim Zemlin talks about the the Linux Foundation, its members, the participation in Europe and new projects involving (GNU)Linux as an operating system and platform.

The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007 by the merger of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and the Free Standards Group (FSG), it sponsors the work Linus Torvalds, the original developer of the Linux kernel, and is supported by leading Linux and open source companies and developers from around the world. The Linux Foundation promotes, protects, and standardizes Linux "by providing a comprehensive set of services to compete effectively with closed platforms." (Version, 10 May 2008, 17:55, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Foundation)

Interview: Mario Behling // Camera: Stefan Koehler
Direct Link: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1023750676842833246

Jim: The Linux Foundation ... it is made of all of the largest backers of Linux in the world. Many thousands of individuals in the world as well. Some of our prominent members include NEC, IBM, Hitachi, Hewlett Packard, Oracle, AMD, Intell, Novell, redhat. It is kind of everybody than Microsoft... And what we do is we provide services to help grow the Linux platform. Some of which include employing and paying people like Linus Torvalds to work on the Linux kernel. We provide a program to standardize the Linux operating system... We promote advance that help the community collaborate on Linux, such as Kernel Summit, a collaboration summit. And we work on all kinds of different collaborative development projects to enhance the Linux platform.

Mario: How big is the involvement in Europe?

Jim: It started in the US and we got a limited participation in Europe, which is ironic considering Linux really was born in Europe, but we are a young organization and we wanna extend over here.

Mario: How do you see the future of Linux?

Jim: ... I think what we are seeing is Linux is growing in three different categories. One in embedded and mobile, you are seeing Motorola ships their cell phones based on Linux platform. Google announced two months ago a reference platform for mobile devices based on Linux, Android. ... And you are seeing ... companies like Samsung, Lenovo and others with interesting new mobile devices. So there is tremendous amount of growth there. We are also seeing growth in the desktop world, not only we are seeing Linux being used in large corporations, in fact Peugeot in Europe uses Linux on their desktops and saves quite a bit of money in doing so, more importantly we are seeing pc manufacturers for the first time ship their computers to the market with Linux preinstalled. ... This is a break through. ... And finally we are seeing a ton of growth in the server side of the market. Linux has a about 35 percent market share now and that is growing, and we have trends like virtualization, where Linux is strong. ... in high performance computing, in super computing...

Jim Zemlin, formerly executive director of the Free Standards Group, is the executive director of the Linux Foundation. Zemlin previously served as vice president of marketing for Covalent Technologies, the leader in products and services for the Apache web server. Prior to that, he was a member of the founding management team of Corio, a leading enterprise application service provider that had a successful initial public offering in July 2000. Widely quoted in the press on open source and commercial software trends, Zemlin has also been a keynote speaker at industry and financial conferences including Gartner's Open Source Conference, Linux World and OSCON. Zemlin is an adviser on open source strategy to various companies and governmental groups including Hyperic, Zmanda and the Chinese Open Source Promotion Union. (May 26, 2008, http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Staff)

Links:

• Linux Foundation Homepage
• OpenPrinting
• Blog of Jim Zemlin http://www.linux-foundation.org/weblogs/jzemlin/
  

 

Ein Vorzeigeprojekt der Freien Software-Gemeinschaft ist das Projekt LiMux der Stadt München. Bei dem Projekt werden die Computerarbeitsplätze und Server der Stadt München nach und nach auf freie Software-Alternativen umgestellt, weg von einer Microsoft-abhängigen Monopolstruktur. Auf der Open Source Meets Business hatte ich die Chance mit Florian Schießl über das Projekt zu sprechen.

Producer: Mario Behling // Kamera: Stefan Koehler
Direkter Link: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1615580599839632999

LiMux – Die IT-Evolution ist ein Linuxprojekt der Stadtverwaltung München, das freie Software auf den derzeit ca. 14.000 Arbeitsplatzrechnern der städtischen Mitarbeiter etablieren wird; aufgrund der für die öffentliche Hand in punkto Software-Beschaffung neuartigen Ausrichtung auf Open Source ist LiMux weltweit in den Medien präsent und wird von der proprietären Softwareindustrie und den Befürwortern freier Software gleichermaßen beobachtet. Das Kofferwort LiMux setzt sich aus Linux und München zusammen. Der Zusatz „Die IT-Evolution“ steht im Gegensatz zur „Revolution“, die versucht, durch einen scharfen Schnitt die aktuelle Situation zu ändern. „LiMux – Die IT-Evolution” wird eine langsame, aber kontinuierliche Entwicklung sein, die als Ziel eine modernere, den Anforderungen auf dem Arbeitsplatzrechner besser angepasste IT-Landschaft hat. (Version 23. März 2008, 16:30 Uhr, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux)

Hintergrund zu Florian Schießl, der das Limux-Projekt von der Seite der Stadt München betreut und Stefan Koehler, der von Seiten von Gonicus an dem Projekt arbeitet:

Biographie: Florian Schießl
Florian Schießl (29) ist seit 2003 bei der LiMux-Projektleitung und stellt als stellvertretender Leiter des Linux Client Teams die Ablauffähigkeit des Basisclients und die Koordinierung der Officeumstellung sicher. Linux ist sein ständiger Begleiter seit 1998.

Biographie: Stefan Koehler
Stefan Koehler wurde 1971 geboren. Nach einem Musikstudium wandte er sich der Informatik zu und vertritt aus Überzeugung den Einsatz von Freier Software in Unternehmen und Behörden. Derzeit begleitet er als Berater der GONICUS GmbH die Linuxmigration der Landeshauptstadt München.
(http://www.heise.de/fastbin/eventmanager/event_js/2/?event_id=124)