This was my second FOSDEM, and it was really great to meet people again. Like last year, it's not possible to do everything you'd love to do since there's just too much interesting talks and too many people you'd want to talk with. I guess it shows how good FOSDEM is at attracting people :-)

GNOME devroom

The GNOME devroom was quite successful, thanks to Christophe and all the speakers. It was nearly full for some talks, which is quite impressive since, I believe, more than 200 people can sit down there. The talks in the devroom were great, and everybody will probably agree that Mirco's talk was the most well-received, since the audience succeeded in triggering an alarm with applauses. The name badges and the t-shirts we had were fantastic (thanks Guillaume!), and I hope Foundation members were happy to have free t-shirts (yay for GNOME-FR!). Unfortunately, people who didn't register on the wiki page could not always get the t-shirt since we didn't have enough in the end.

Of course, there are still things to improve for next year. Number one priority will to have a stand, I guess. If you have some ideas for next year about our GNOME presence at FOSDEM, share them!

Love Wall

Since I arrived quite early on the first day, I could find a big empty spot that was perfect for a love wall. It was funny to look at people walking and stopping just to read the feedback that was written there, and then contributing.

Here's what people told us they love after a few hours:

And here's what people think we should fix (after a few hours too):

Stefan and Sébastien took the notes and here's the result. Reading the comments is interesting (especially the negative ones, even if some are not really helpful), so give them a look.

I ♥ GNOME

If you met a weird guy with a camera asking people if they agree to be on a photo to show how much they love GNOME, then you met me :-) I finally tried to turn into reality this idea I had since a long time. It's far from being perfect (you can see that I'm really not good at taking photos, I couldn't print the image in color, and I would have needed more time to take a lot more photos), but I still like the result. Browse the gallery to see some GNOME lovers (they're not all GNOME users, but they all love GNOME):

Google

Of course, Google had a stand at FOSDEM. They had a box of an interesting gadget, the Pepper Pad 3. I talked a bit with one of the Googlers to know more about it, and before taking a photo of him, I asked him if I could get this device. He unfortunately told me that I had to put my name on a paper to have a chance to win it.

On Sunday, I was already out of the building, and leaving for the airport when Sébastien ran after me to tell me that I was the lucky winner of the Pepper Pad. It's not the N800 that could replace my 770, but it's nonetheless an interesting device, running Fedora, using GTK+ and metacity :-)

Thanks Google!

Two weeks ago, I wrote a Rhythmbox plugin to automatically change my Gossip status so that it displays the currently played song. I was amazed that it was possible to achieve this so easily, thanks to python and D-Bus. Here's the mandatory screenshot:

(Looks quite weird to see the tooltip and not the mouse cursor, doesn't it?)

There are of course small issues to fix: I don't know if it works with the latest python bindings for D-Bus, and quitting Rhythmbox/stopping the music leaves you with an empty status (that's a small Gossip bug).

You can install it with only a few steps: download the tarball and move the directory it contains to ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins/gossip. Enjoy!

Update: new tarball that should work for more people.

It's still winter, but it's already time to start thinking about Summer of Code: Google took the (good) decision to start things sooner. Meeting some of the students who participated to SoC in the past at events like FOSDEM makes you believe that SoC is a good thing, since it helped them getting more involved in our communities and they decided to stay and rock.

There'll be an IRC meeting to talk about GNOME in SoC 2007 tomorrow/today (yay for timezones, so let's be clear: Tuesday 27th) at 20:00 UTC, in #soc. That's in a few hours. We'll discuss what went well last year, what could be improved, what we want to achieve, etc. Everybody is welcome to attend this meeting, but this is not a meeting for students who want to participate in SoC: it's more targetted at potential mentors for this year's SoC. It'd be great to have some of the students who participated in previous SoC join the meeting to give some feedback. If you can't attend the meeting but have some comments you'd like to share, you can send me an email or leave a comment.

Also, after this meeting, we'll create the wiki page to gather ideas for SoC projects. We're waiting a bit to create the page because the meeting might learn us some things about how to manage the idea pool, but it shouldn't prevent you to start thinking about cool, sexy or revolutionary project ideas :-)

I guess everybody knows that there'll be a GNOME devroom at FOSDEM. We already have a great program with many interesting talks. Oh, and there's still some free slot for one or two talks. It might be too late to add a talk to the official schedule, but if you're still interested in talking in the devroom, we can surely manage to make this possible ;-)

We're trying to get some more organization than last year for the devroom. So we'll probably have badges with names and, if everything goes well, t-shirts. I mean, not some random t-shirts, but real cool and awesome t-shirts with lovely art on it. Yes, you read it right: lovely art, which of course implies I'm not the one designing the t-shirts.

To have everything go as smoothly as possible, we need some help for this: if you're planning to attend the GNOME devroom, we really need you to register on this page. Please mention your name, but also your IRC nick and a size for the t-shirt (if you're interested in having one). Dodji already updated his entry to give an example.

Did I mention that we're wanting to have the t-shirts really cheap for Foundation members and GNOME-FR members? Cheap as in "free", if possible.