[wrap up] Camp KDE 2010

[Ryan Rix]

hello everyone,

Hope everyone is doing well. :) Last weekend I had the chance to visit San 
Diego, California to attend Camp KDE, the largest KDE event in North America 
and an awesome chance to meet and connect with KDE developers.

You can see my blag posts about it here:
http://hackersramblings.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/campkde-day-1/
http://hackersramblings.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/camp-kde-day-1/
http://hackersramblings.wordpress.com/2010/01/17/camp-kde-day-1-seriously-it-
is-this-time/
http://hackersramblings.wordpress.com/2010/01/18/camp-kde-day-2/
http://hackersramblings.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/camp-kde-day-3/
http://hackersramblings.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/things-i-learned-at-camp-
kde-2010/

As the event was a little less of a general convention, and more of an ad-hoc 
developer meeting, we had no table or booth, and only the chance to talk with 
a bunch of KDE developers and users, and a bunch of people who were new to 
Free Software in general. As a result, the posts are a little less "hey here's 
what we did at the event" but the team building and hanging out that we did in 
the evening.

There was a large KUbuntu and OpenSuSE presence at the event, so getting 
Fedora and the Fedora KDE SIG some much needed PR was a Good Thing, and I 
think we were pretty well received at the event. I did however take away a few 
things which I will go into details on below. Feel free to dissect the post.

Media:
I'm in possession of a KUbuntu 9.10 CD and an OpenSuSE 11.2 DVD. I've noticed 
a few things about each.

The OpenSuSE DVD is a dual sided DVD with 32 bit packages on one side and 64 
bit on another. This was the only image that they shipped, and the fact that 
it was dual sided was also interesting. I think that in the F13 or F14 time 
frame, we should look at using DVDs for the Ambassador media. Last I heard, 
the Desktop team was going to be producing 1gb live images, which wouldn't fit 
in a CD anyways. If we used a DVD for the primary images, we could ship more 
software, and have the ability to showcase other spins in the live media 
(whether it's as a separate squashfs on the image, or as a single image, with 
GDM having the ability to choose between GNOME, KDE, Moblin, XFCE, etc, even 
Sugar?) which would, imo, be a Big Win. The Dual Sided-ness is probably a 
little bit overkill, but still a cool thing to see.

The KUbuntu CD(? may have been DVD, don't have it nearby) was packaged in a 
sleeve that had an extra flap that that primarily keeps the media from sliding 
out of the sleeve it is stored in. But what I think is even better is that, 
when you open it up, there is information on the inside, answering common 
questions... How can I use this CD as a live test? How can I install KUbuntu? 
What is KUbuntu? What is free software? How is this software available free of 
charge? etc. Something like this is easy to add to our media, and should be  
looked at, imo. As it is, if $person picks up a Fedora live image, it's fairly 
non-certain what they should do with the disk, how they should run it, etc, if 
they have never used a live media before. It's a little intimidating, I think. 
A few KDE developers and I spoke with a fellow at the place we stayed at for 
about a half hour about these sorts of things, and about Free Software in 
general, and it was a good discussion. However, in many cases, we will not 
have the chance to engage in such discussion with prospective users, and this 
can lead to unfortunate cases of users simply picking up the media and not 
knowing how to use it, or doing something even worse (picking up install media 
and using it thinking it's live because they don't know any better, or other 
such things the IRC support channels have seen)

Fedora from a KDE developer's point of view:
As a whole, the KDE development community represented at Camp KDE has become 
increasingly impressed with the Fedora distribution as a whole over the last 
few releases and the KDE SIG's work at creating a "well integrated" KDE 
distribution. A few were also impressed at the spins.fedoraproject.org 
redesign, so major props to the design team and everyone else involved in that 
redesign :)
As far as I could tell, there were only one or two folks their running Fedora 
on their systems, but one of them was a past employee at Mandrive, so we can't 
be doing that badly ;)

[cc'd the KDE SIG list as it has some impact on them too]

Best to all,
Ryan Rix

-- 
Ryan Rix
Fedora KDE SIG Member, Phoenix AZ Ambassador, News KDE Beat writer

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