I’m here at LWE. It’s not been a bad trip- I had wonderful Cuban food last night at Victor’s Cafe, and talking to Real People(tm) about the usability and design message is really good- when you explain what GNOME’s philosophy is on usability, they really perk up and seem to get it. But I have to stop this traveling- it’s tiring me out[0], and it’s not good for my team or for my responsibilities with GNOME. Or Krissa, who is about ready to tell me not to come back next time, I think…
I did get to show off the new evo integration with Ross’s blog applet and the calendar applet a bit, which was cool, and I saw Eli from the bugsquad and met Jef Spaleta of Fedora, who is hoping to do bugsquad-like work with Fedora. And I saw Patrick Patterson, Jim Gettys, and Havoc. Nice to match names and faces again- I look forward to GUADEC this year.
As far as the rest of the conference, it’s pretty standard big-business-linux fare, I think. IBM and Sun have pretty huge booths, and Novell and SUSE have big presence. Red Hat is actually giving away a Porsche Boxster which currently has a large Fedora Wearing Guy(tm) on the hood. Hope it actually goes to one of the Fedora guys. ;) GNOME’s booth is pretty nice- HP donated some really sweet banners that I’ll post a picture of later. We’re still failing on the marketing front, though- KDE won ‘best desktop’ from the show organizers. We need to have a really good live CD to distribute at these things[1], and we need to have better marketing materials. Jeff has been putting some time into this lately, but we need more help. It’s a great way for non-coders to get involved. Aaron has also done some awesome stuff lately- the why gnome page needs to mention the community more, but otherwise, it’s really good. Others need to help the two of them out- the list for it is here.
Anyway, show is about to start- I probably have to turn this station into something other than a blogging demo. :)
[0] With luck, my sore throat will deteriorate so quickly that I won’t be able to man the booth this afternoon. :)
[1] I keep wanting to try GNOPPIX, but not having a CD burner keeps getting in my way on that one. Great to see from their web page that they are still actively developing it, though.