Last Friday, we had a openSUSE 11.3 Launch party at Prague. Why so late? Why not right after the release? Well, it takes some time to organize things but the main reason was that we wanted to have official promo media so we wouldn’t need to give away home burned ones as last. Home burned were made with love, but manufactured ones looks better 😉 So what we did? We had some talks, gave away some DVDs, ate some Pizza, talk about openSUSE, give our visitors tour through the SUSE Offices in Prague and moved to the pub to continue talking about openSUSE.
So how was? I think it was great. We showed people where do we work and we talked to them about our work. First and the last presentations were by Pavol. These presentations were A-Z Contribution basics. He talked about how easily people can join us and help openSUSE. These presentations were two because people were still coming during the first one and some of them already left before the last presentation.
Second talk was by Luboš and it was about KDE. He told us that KDE is not only Desktop Environment, but that it is much more. And he of course also spoke about what is new in new KDE. I really liked the idea behind KDE activities. Switching from one desktop mode to another including all application settings sounds like a really cool idea.
Third talk was by me and it was about Gnome in openSUSE. I’m not really a Gnome guy. But Luboš and Pavol likes KDE. I prefer GTK applications and I use Gnome from time to time. And I really like some parts of Gnome. So in the Prague Boosters team, I’m the most Gnome guy we’ve got. And I really wanted to take a closer look at some of the Gnome features anyway. So I spoked in the beginning about our current Gnome in 11.3 – no GTK1, no HAL, … I also spoked a little bit about SLAB menu and then about Gnome Shell. We even had one web developer in audience who was pleasantly surprised, that he can use javascript to customize Gnome Shell. And at the end I also spoked about Gnome Activity Journal and Zeitgeist (do you also have troubles with spelling this?).
In the end, everything went quite smoothly, some of our SUSE colleagues also showed up to listen some talk or to talk to the community. And I think that this was another advantage of having it in SUSE Office. Our community was able to meet our colleagues who are otherwise too lazy/busy to attend such events. So let’s hope that 11.4 Launch Party will be at least as good as the 11.3 one 😉
PS: Some photos are available from my gallery.