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Presentation and conferencing

Last week-end, in the Salle des Rancy in Lyon, GNOME folks (Fred Peters, Mathieu Bridon and myself) set up our booth at the top of the stairs, the space graciously offered by Ubuntu-FR and Fedora being a tad bit small. The JdLL were starting.

We gave away a few GNOME 3.14 Live and install DVDs (more on that later), discussed much-loved features, and hated bugs, and how to report them. A very pleasant experience all-in-all.

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On Sunday afternoon, I did a small presentation about GNOME's 15 years. Talking about the upheaval, dragging kernel drivers and OS components kicking and screaming to work as their APIs say they should, presenting GNOME 3.16 new features and teasing about upcoming GNOME 3.18 ones.

During the Q&A, we had a few folks more than interested in support for tablets and convertible devices (such as the Microsoft Surface, and Asus T100). Hopefully, we'll be able to make the OS support good enough for people to be able to use any Linux distribution on those.

Sideshow with the Events box

Due to scheduling errors on my part, we ended up with the "v1" events box for our booth. I made a few changes to the box before we used it:

Removed the 17" screen, and replaced it with a 21" widescreen one with speakers builtin. This is useful when we can't setup the projector because of the lack of walls. Upgraded machine to 1GB of RAM, thanks to my hoarding of old parts. Bought a French keyboard and removed the German one (with missing keys), cleaned up the UK one (which still uses IR wireless). Threw away GNOME 3.0 CDs (but kept the sleeves that don't mention the minor version). You'll need to take a sharpie to the small print on the back of the sleeve if you don't fill it with an OpenSUSE CD (we used Fedora 21 DVDs during this event). Triaged the batteries. Office managers, get this cheap tester! The machine's Wi-Fi was unstable, causing hardlocks (please test again if you use a newer version of the kernel/distributions). We tried to get onto the conference network through the wireless router, and installed DD-WRT on it as the vendor firmware didn't allow that. The Nokia N810 and N800 tablets will going to kernel developers that are working on Nokia's old Linux devices and upstreaming drivers. The events box is still in Lyon, until I receive some replacement hardware.

The machine is 7 years-old (nearly 8!) and only had 512MB of RAM, after the 1GB upgrade, the machine was usable, and many people were impressed by the speed of GNOME on a legacy machine like that (probably more so than a brand new one stuttering because of a driver bug, for example).

This makes you wonder what the use for "lightweight" desktop environments is, when a lot of the features are either punted to helpers that GNOME doesn't need or not implemented at all (old CPU and no 3D driver is pretty much the only use case for those).

I'll be putting it in a small SSD into the demo machine, to give it another speed boost. We'll also be needing a new padlock, after an emergency metal saw attack was necessary on Sunday morning. Five different folks tried to open the lock with the code read off my email, to no avail. Did we accidentally change the combination? We'll never know.

New project, ish

For demo machines, especially newly installed ones, you'll need some content to demo applications. This is my first attempt at uniting GNOME's demo content for release notes screenshots, with some additional content that's free to re-distribute. The repository will eventually move to gnome.org, obviously.

Thanks

The new keyboard and mouse, monitor, padlock, and SSD (and my time) were graciously sponsored by Red Hat.