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FOSDEM 2012

  • February 9, 2012
  • Jannis Pohlmann

This year’s FOSDEM is over and I hope that most of us have by now recovered from an exhausting weekend that was first and foremost exciting and a lot of fun! With about 12 people, the Xfce group was—I think—larger than ever before. Add to that a fairly large number of my colleagues from Codethink, into which I bumped at the beer event and FOSDEM itself from time to time. Despite mostly staying with Xfce, I enjoyed knowing and meeting people all over the place.

Unfortunately, some of us—myself included—missed half of the beer event because our trains and planes arrived late. Snow in Brussels, a cold weekend ahead. When we arrived at the Delirium Café at around midnight, I was glad to see that all the others had already made friends again. Olivier, Stephan, Peter, Nick, Simon, Christoph, everyone was there, some of them sufficiently drunk, I imagine. Although to be be fair, you wouldn’t really notice. Most of us left not to long after that in order to be in a good condition in the morning. Having only caught up half on drinking, Christian, Mike and I ended up staying at the Delirium with a few Codethink colleagues including Sam, Luc and Javier—until they finally kicked us out at around four in the morning.

Food, taxi, 2 1/2 hours of sleep later and we were sitting in the hotel, enjoying a fantastic buffet breakfast. Admittedly, I couldn’t eat that morning, ending the night in the Delirium had lead to quite a strong hangover. After the majority of us had gathered in the hotel lobby, we squeezed ourselves into the 71 bus in two groups and finally arrived at FOSDEM. I do not remember the details of the day, but it was a great mix of talks (including my own one about Tumbler, which I felt was not very special, picture below), chatting and minor hacking (at least on my side; Nick made good progress with the settings editor in the meantime). During the day, Jean-Francois, Jens and Mark joined us and we (or most of us at least) ended the day having food in a Vietnamese restaurant close to the hotel and a beer in the hotel lobby.

Sunday was similar, except that I could finally enjoy the breakfast. Lovely. Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to get everyone together anymore, so our initially large group was now split up into smaller ones for the rest of Sunday. We still managed to have a few technical chats about Xfce that day and made a few decisions (see below). Regards talks, I mostly remember the Wayland Q&A session and a talk about social engineering in free software communities, Most of us left in the afternoon or evening. I met up with Luc, Sam, Javier and a bunch of other people to have food in a very nice restaurant. Got up at six in the morning, walked to the central station, took a plane home from the airport and went back to work in the afternoon. Unlike a few others I seem to have escaped the typical illnesses (cold, broken sleep cycles, general exhaustion) that events like FOSDEM always bring along.

Xfce-Related News — Fresh from FOSDEM

Wayland was big this year. I will spare you the details of how it works. Throughout the weekend, we had various discussions that involved Wayland. While it may take some load of Olivier by eventually making window managers obsolete, there is still a major problem with it: it does not support the XEmbed protocol, and therefor will break pluggable settings dialogs and panel plugins. We have sent mails to the wayland-devel list to find out how they feel about this. For now, I suppose this is all we can do.

Reorganization of the settings dialogs

One thing we decided on Sunday was to reorganize the settings dialogs so that the location of particular types of settings becomes more predictable. This applies to appearance and window manager themeing, and the application keyboard shortcuts and window manager keyboard shortcuts in particular. We will rearrange some of these tabs and merge them so that all related settings are in one place. We will also merge the window manager and window manager tweaks dialogs into one.

Release Schedule for Xfce 4.10

Despite a lack of completed features in Thunar (which are unlikely to get finished before 4.10), there are only a few things that really keep us from releasing Xfce 4.10. We have not decided on a release date, but if things go well, we should be able to roll the first pre-release one month from now, in early March. This would mean that a final release in May or June would be feasible.

Possibility of a hackfest

Meeting up with the team is always great fun. Unfortunately, FOSDEM is a busy event and only lasts two days. Like last year, we discussed the possibility of an Xfce hackfest in the future. I would love to see this idea becoming reality. If half a dozen of the relevant people can make it for at least a couple of days, this could greatly benefit the development of Xfce. Ideally, such a hackfest would span over at least 4-5 days, ideally including a weekend to make it easier to attend for people with jobs. Given a relatively small group, it might even be possible to hold an event like this at someone’s flat. This is definitely something that we will look into soon.

Like every year, FOSDEM 2012 was a great event. And like every year, a few more nicknames have turned into real faces that, unsurprisingly, belong to incredibly friendly human beings! I only wish that we had more time to discuss things face to face and do some serious work on Xfce together. In any case, this calls for another iteration next year. And with that, I shall end this wrap-up.

Xfce Foundation e.V. launched at FOSDEM!

  • February 7, 2011
  • Jannis Pohlmann

This year’s FOSDEM was a special one. Read more about it in this mail:

Hi everyone,

as some of you might have read, several of us Xfce developers and
packagers have attended FOSDEM this weekend. There was a lot of talking
and a bit of brainstorming of course. Together we enjoyed food, beer,
talks and also did something that we have been struggling with for
several years now: we launched a non-profit organization for Xfce.

Yes, you read correctly: the 

  Xfce Foundation e.V. 

was founded by a group of us on Saturday afternoon! It still needs to
be registered, so technically it's not an "e.V." (a non-profit
organization registered in Germany) yet. But it will be, we are working
on that.

The eight founding members are:

  #1  Christoph Wickert
  #2  Landry Breuil
  #3  Jens Luedicke
  #4  Christian Dywan
  #5  Nick Schermer
  #6  Jérôme Guelfucci
  #7  Jannis Pohlmann
  #8  Lionel Le Folgoc

Please give everyone a hug or at least a thumbs up next time they pop
up on IRC. Without them being there this would not have been possible!

The main part next to signing the articles of association (which we
will soon upload somewhere, probably on foundation.xfce.org or
something like that) was to elect the initial Board of Directors of the
Xfce Foundation. Without objections the following people were elected
to the Board of Directors with a 2 years mandate:

  President: 
    Jannis Pohlmann
  
  Vice President: 
    Nick Schermer
  
  Vice President and Treasurer:
    Jérôme Guelfucci

The Board will now take care of the registration process and will meet
up for the first time on March 1st, 2011. There will be a general
assembly for all Xfce Foundation members on March 6th, 2011. 

We will soon announce more details about the decisions that were made
and about how you can become an Xfce Foundation member (it's really not
difficult and it won't cost you any money -- but there are obligations
connected to it of course).

After the registration we will create a bank account and a new paypal
account as well in order to collect donations. These donations will be 
tax deductible!

Stay tuned for updates on this. I hope you are as excited as we are
about this. I hope it will help a lot in pushing Xfce forward.

Cheers,
Jannis

Proud Founding Members