I'm at II Guademy 2008, the Spanish conference combining aspects of GUADEC and Akademy this weekend. I arrived yesterday, had lunch with my Novell colleagues Rodrigo Moya and Vincent Untz, then got straight into our presentations, which are a combined call for more cooperation and communication between the two Free desktop environments communities, leading to more effective sharing of data and infrastructure.

I wasn't chased out of the place or pelted with fruit, but I think it will be a long road. In the long term it should bring benefits for both desktops in the face of expanding ambitions and growing maintenance requirements. At breakfast Aleix Pol, Richard Hughes and I had an interesting discussion over breakfast, echoing a thread on the XDG list, about the possibility of standardising KDE's KNotify and reworking GNOME's libnotify to use it, so there is some real interest in the idea outside the Novell desktop group.

I've been pimping the openSUSE build service to anyone who'll listen. It's a bit surprising, when you jump out of the openSUSE pond, how few people have heard of all the features like packaging for distributions besides openSUSE. More effort needed there...

Today I'm going to present Akonadi, the PIM data server. Last week we moved it out of KDE main modules and into kdesupport, divesting it of the last bits of KDE dependencies, so I'm able to sincerely present it as a desktop-independent way to store and access your PIM data, emails, contacts, calendars and everything else. So I better stop blogging and make sure it is ready to demo...

One last thing. Dinner last night was 'interesting'. I can't get into specifics, but a visit to the Los Bestias restaurant should be mandatory for inter-desktop geek conferences. They really shake things up.

Well, not yet.

I am currently at Graz airport, about to begin a journey to Austin, Texas, where I will be attending the Linux Collaboration Summit.
Special thanks go to the Linux Foundation for covering my travelling costs and KDE e.V. for the hotel, specifically Ian Monroe who took the burden of doing the hotel reservation.

Ah, right. Houston.
The summit takes place from Tuesday to Thursday, however I am not returning until Sunday. Interestingly any return flight earlier doubles the fair, so I basically have to stay two days longer
My plan is to a day trip to Houston and visit the Johnson Space Center there, though I have still to figure out how to get from Austin to Houston and back again.

Anyway, boarding will begin soon (hopefully).

Some people already think we do a damn fine job packaging KDE at openSUSE. But we're just a few guys and we'd do it even better with your help. Tonight at 1900UTC we're having our latest openSUSE-KDE IRC meeting in #opensuse-kde on FreeNode and we'd love to see you there. This is addressed to anyone who uses KDE on openSUSE and values the way KDE works there, whether you just booted a KDE 4 Live CD or if you can remember KDE 1.1 on SuSE 6.4 and have your name on half of kdelibs. In return we value your attention, so we can tell you what's coming up, your feedback, so we do it right, and your time - if you can help us plan features or organise squashing our bugs or tell us about the things we overlook because we are used to them, KDE gets better.

Together we make an even bigger difference to the Free Software desktop, and every single contribution you make creates hundreds or thousands of individual moments of satisfaction as others use KDE.

Yesterday I made an excursion to CeBIT. Despite some major names missing and three halls staying closed it's the world's largest IT fair - and my legs remind me today of my marathon. Many halls were rather boring, the ones where the World Cyber Games took place were in opposite rather crowded. Dunno why watching others playing computer games is popular. Or the spectators were all their girl-friends who had free entrance on World Women Day. AMD wins the biggest bag contest. And many exhibitors seem to want to win in the 'Germany's Next Top-Hostess' contest.

openSUSE and KDE were present at the Novell booth and in the rather disappointing sized Linux Park:

Martin blocked the hall corridor with his openSUSE talks at the Novell theater. The last picture shows Michl giving a talk (in German) about the openSUSE project in the Linux Park forum. It will be repeated today at 15:15 CET and streamed by Linux-Magazin (records will be available later).

The last week-end me and Martin manned the openSUSE booth at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage:

Executive summary: the organizers counted 2400 visitors, Martin gave an "openSUSE project" talk to 100-120 people, we distributed 400 Promo-DVDs, several openSUSE caps and some Novell pinguins. More photos from me and from others are available.

As Franz already wrote there are a couple of exciting free software events coming up. From March 4th to 9th there is CeBIT, the world's largest computer trade show. KDE will have a booth there. If you want to help to show KDE to a broad variety of visitors there, don't hesitate to contact kde-events@kde.org. It's interesting, it's fun, and it's a great help for KDE. The KDE e.V. is able to help with travel costs if needed.

For me next stop will be FOSDEM this weekend. I'm part of the SUSE crew which will have a strong presence there. Check out the openSUSE developer room to get the latest info about the upcoming openSUSE 11.0 and a lot of other interesting topics around openSUSE. FOSDEM is great because there probably is no other place where you can meet that many free software people on one weekend. See you in Brussels.

It's this time of the year when all the events seem to happen at almost the same time: the upcoming week-end Dirk and Will will be at FOSDEM and give a talk "KDE 4 on openSUSE 11" on Sunday morning in the openSUSE Developer Room. The week-end after I will be at the openSUSE booth of Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. The week after is CebIT, visit the openSUSE counters at the Novell booth and check whether Martin presents KDE or something else. I plan to do a control visit on some secret day too. Also in March, Novell BrainShare happens where Zonker and Adrian will offer the suits an introduction to KDE4 (session IO140).

Here's the first blog in my life. KDE PIM meetings are for hackers like a bottle of water in a desert. Finally time to hack, hack, hack and only sporadic meetings. And those meetings about development topics. This meeting took place from friday 2008-02-01 till 2008-02-03. This time I remembered to take vacation for the friday.

The FOSDEM 2008 organizers now have published their 'speakers interview' with probono and myself.

If you are interested in some background about the current klik2 development, it may be serving as a good general introduction into the concepts.