Late post about GUADEC… well, everybody is doing that, right?

So, all I wanted to say is that this GUADEC edition was terrific! Great people, great organization, great venue, everything was so great! It was the best GUADEC I ever attended.

Some random notes:

• FreeFA soccer match was amazing. Bastien and others complained because I was cheating by staying in an off-side position. Well, I made some goals and we won, that’s what matters, isn’t it?
  
• Pizza of raw meat is not one of our favorites:
  
• Definitely hackers do not know how to make a barbecue (actually we prefer just to eat, not to cook ):
  
• After the announcement that GNOME 3 was postponed to March 2011 (wise decision!), I’ve decided to not release Vinagre 2.32. Instead, I’ll release a 3.0 beta, which is already using 3.0 technologies and features RDP support.
• Also, it will feature a new interface, more GNOME-ish brought to you by the famous Vinicius Depizzol.
• After GUADEC (which was held in The Hague), I visited Amsterdam and London. I liked the Netherlands. Amsterdam is the new Sodom. London is great and quite expensive. Had a lunch with Lucas there.
• My talk about GNOME in Brazil went fine. I hope to have shared my experience with other teams. Feel free to get in touch with me for more details.
• Finally, thanks to GNOME Foundation for the sponsorship of my travel!

Hackers going to FreeFA soccer match!

Here are my answers to the meme:

1) Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Jonh Wendell, 30 years old, from Brazil. I work for a sugar factory as software developer. In my daily job I do nothing related to GNOME at all. In GNOME, I contribute by maintaining 2 modules, vino and vinagre, both related to remote access. Also, I do translations and I spread GNOME in my country.

2) How did you get into GNOME?

After some time using GNOME, and having developer skills, I wrote a patch, back in 2006, that fixed a bug in vino, the GNOME VNC server. Atfer that patch get committed, I went ahead writing others and others patches, until I got the maintainer hat for vino. After realizing how easy was to contribute to GNOME, I always give talks about that, inviting people to not be afraid of submitting patches to GNOME

3) Why are you coming to GUADEC?

I’ll give a joint talk with Emily Chen about GNOME communities in Brazil and Asia. What’s the state of GNOME in our countries and what we are doing to increase our community.
I’ll be showing a little use case in Stormy’s GTD in GNOME lightning talks.
Also I’ll be hosting a BoF about the state of Remote Desktop stack in GNOME. It’s a great opportunity for us to share our ideas about the ongoing development of vino/vinagre. Also, we lack people taking care of this area in GNOME, so, if you are interested in contribute to GNOME, come up!
Of course, I’m looking forward to meet the amazing GNOME folks again and play some game…

4) In 1 sentence, describe what your most favorite recent GNOME project has been. (Doesn’t have to be yours!)

The whole GObject introspection work.

5) Will this be your first time visiting the Netherlands?

Yes, I’m looking forward to be there!

You might have heard about the use of Javascript in desktop programming, specially with gnome-shell becoming part of GNOME 3. I just discovered the beauty of coding in Javascript, I’m fascinated!

This post is to announce the creation of the javascript mailing list in GNOME servers, to let us discuss javascript usage in GNOME, development in javascript with its bidings: gtk+, glib, etc.

So, if you, like me, enjoy coding in javascript, or are still giving the first steps into this new technology in GNOME, go subscribe to this mailing list! Also, if you already have knowledge in this language, join the list and help us with our doubts!

Thanks to Johan Dahlin for accepting being the mailing list administrator

Hi, folks. Last week I was in João Pessoa, Brazil, attending 4º ENSOL (stands for Free Software Northeast Meeting). GNOME Brazil was represented there by having three talks and a kind of booth, where we meet, discuss and have fun!

I gave a talk about the GNOME and the GNOME Foundation. It was great to see the room full, and we had many questions, though some of them related to the eternal “fight” GNOME x KDE and about GNOME copying MAC OS

Talking about GNOME

We also had Fernandes Neto talking about translations in GNOME and Izabel Valverde talking about GNOME Woman.

People visiting our “booth”

ENSOL was a terrific event, hosted in a wonderful place, and full of great people! It’s always great to meet new and old friends at FLOSS events. Of course I want to be there next year!

More photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jwendell/tags/ensol/

I forgot to blog about it, last week we had FLISOL – stands for Latin American Free Software Installation Festival. It’s a global (okay, a Latin American) day where people can bring their computers to some place and get FLOSS installed on them. Also, there are talks about FLOSS. It happens simultaneously on many cities in the continent.

GNOME Brazil was represented in 4 cities, including mine! Of course, I talked about the GNOME project, what it is (yes, many people do not know about GNOME, only know about Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux, OpenOffice, etc.), how it is organized and how funny is to be part of the project!

The talk

Two guys winning a GNOME t-shirt

More pictures

Tomorrow I’m going to travel to João Pessoa to attend ENSOL, a big FLOSS conference that happens in Northeast of Brazil. We -  GNOME Brazil – will have three talks and will host a booth, where we can meet and have fun! The event ends Sunday (May 09) so, next week I’ll blog about it.

See you!

I’m unable to play any video (divx, dvd, etc) from totem. The solution?

Install VLC media player.

It’s not as integrated to GNOME and not as simple to use as totem, also, it shows some glitches in the video being played, but still, it works with SiS drivers. It means I can continue to follow LOST!

BTW, would this be an issue in gstreamer?

It’s known that the support to SiS video cards are too poor on Linux, right? Recently my old laptop broke and my company gave me a very poor new one, with a SiS [671/771] video card. After searching a bit on Google, I managed to install a driver that at least gives me 1280×800 as resolution. However, 3D (aka compiz) doesn’t work.

Without a composite window manager, I can’t run GNOME-Do’s Docky. What’s the solution?

Enable compositing in Metacity: Open the GConf Editor (Alt-F2 -> gconf-editor) program, go to the key /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager and enable it, so that it be checked.

Voilá! You have a composite desktop running and you’re able to run GNOME-DO’s Docky!

Unfortunately, gnome-shell doesn’t work and thus, no GNOME 3 for me :’(

If you know any trick to make gnome-shell work on those poor SiS drivers, please share it!

The survey had 373 responses. See the result (winner option in bold):

1) Do you currently contribute with code, translation or something similar in GNOME?
Yes – 14%
No – 86%

2) Would you donate money to GNOME?
Yes – 79%
No – 21%

3) If yes, would you donate monthly (depending on the amount)?
Yes – 42%
No – 58%

4) Which is the best way to make the donation?
Paypal – International credit card – 31%
Boleto – 36% (Boleto is the most popular way to make payments in Brazil)
Direct transfer into a Brazilian bank account – 33%

This shows that most people (69%) prefer to make the donation in a “Brazilian” way, rather than using international transactions. We’re going to work with the Foundation to find a solution to this issue.

Lots of people had some common questions, in the comments section of the survey. I’ll answer those:

Minimum amount for donations
There’s no such constraint. What currently happens in Friends of GNOME program is: if you donate a minimum amount of USD10.00 for a whole year, you get a gift. Or if you donate a bigger value, you get another gift. Everything is explained here. If you do not wish to get a gift, you can donate the value you want.

Where is my money going?
Usually this question is made by who is outside the project, someone who doesn’t follow the project. Often the Foundation publish reports about all activities during a year, or a quarter, finances included. For instance, take a look here and here. Also, follow the Foundation blog and Planet GNOME. We try to be as transparent as possible. If – even after analyzing the above reports – you still have a doubt or you’re not satisfied with something, please contact us.

By buying t-shirts and other GNOME stuff in events where we are present, you’re also helping the project. All money received is used to help the Foundation with travel, hotel, etc, for the participants of the event.

So, I hope this survey is useful not only for Brazilians, but for people in other countries where Paypal (or international transactions in general) are not so popular. Let’s find alternative methods for people to donate [more] to the GNOME Foundation.

Content in Brazilian Portuguese

Oi gente.

Muitos de vocês sabem o que é GNOME (se ainda não sabem dêem uma olhada aqui). E alguns de vocês devem saber que existe uma organização sem fins lucrativos por trás do GNOME, a GNOME Foundation. Esta entidade gerencia as finanças do projeto, recebendo as doações e fazendo os pagamentos necessários. A grande maioria do dinheiro é gasto com despesas de palestrantes (viagens, hospedagens), hackfests, e com o salário da diretora executiva da fundação, Stormy Peters.

Com o intuito de aumentar as receitas, a GNOME Foundation lançou, tempos atrás, o programa Friends of GNOME, que é um chamado para pessoas comuns, como nós, doarmos dinheiro à Fundação. Esse programa já foi divulgado aqui no Brasil, inclusive em sites como o br-linux.org.

No entanto, sinto que nós brasileiros podemos contribuir mais, financeiramente falando. Talvez a forma de doação (via paypal, cartão de crédito internacional) seja uma barreira para muitos de nós.

Para saber mais sobre o perfil brasileiro dos [possíveis] doadores, criamos uma pesquisa, na qual perguntamos basicamente se você é um potencial doador e qual seria sua forma preferida de fazer a doação (boleto, paypal, etc).

A pesquisa é extremamente simples, não dura mais que 2 minutos para respondê-la. Por favor respondam e divulguem (via twitter, blogs, pessoalmente, etc) para o maior número de pessoas possível.

A pesquisa: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PKLWK5W

Obrigado!

–
A. Because it breaks the logical sequence of discussion
Q. Why is top posting bad?

As seen in Simos Xenitellis email, for instance, here.