Desktop Summit Day One

Yesterday was fun and enlightening. We manned the booth from 9am to 4:30pm. Most of the day was us answering questions, and we received praise for what we(read KDE project) have been doing and how nice our desktop is. I don't think I heard one complaint about any area of the KDE desktop. I fielded questions about ODF in KOffice, Kexi(which I personally have never used), API documentation for ISV's, Mayan calendar support(as a request from a user) and other areas of Linux in general. I got to talk with Marcel Gagné of "Cooking with Linux" fame, Arne Flones from "The Linux Show" and not to mention the other booths at the show such as Mandriva, REALBasic and even Borders. There was even discussions about Women in Linux from a member of LinuxChix. Jes Hall may be getting a ping from them. ;)

Time for Day Two to start. I'll have pictures posted later for everyone to check out Matt and Wade's awesome booth presence.

Short Notice Savior

Before my departure to Desktop Linux Summit, I needed to get my laptop updated with something new and snazzy in regards to a distro. My first thought was to go with the usual, opensuse. Little did I know that the 10.1 RC1 was still a bit rough unlike the 10.0 RC1 that I had on it. Yast had a mind of its own most of the time and would decide when it wanted to open the software management dialog so that I could install rpms. Fighting with this repetedly while trying to compile KDE from SVN proved difficult, too dificult in the crunch that I was in.

I decided to "run away" (a la monty python) and find something else that could possible run better and have 3.5.2 on it since my chances at compiling it on my 650mhz laptop in 2 days were close to nil. Enter Kanotix! It is a Debian-Sid based live cd with a quick (and I mean under 20 mins full install on my slower than life laptop) graphical installer. Only problem I really had was that the network card I have worked fine in the live cd boot, but not after the install. I new what modules to load to get it running, but others may have difficulties with that. I'd also like to say a big "THANK YOU" to devil in #kanotix. Their community left a nice impression on me in their desire to help _everyone_ in the channel. Those guys were just non stop with others even while helping me in my dire times. I'd definitely suggest checking it out to anyone reading this.

If anyone attending the summit reads this, please feel free to come up to the KDE booth provided by Linspire and say "Hi". We're always interested in chatting it up, or answering any questions you may have, especially SuperKaramba related questions. ;)