2003.08_Gu4Dec 2003-the Fourth Anual Gnome User and Developer European Conference.pdf

GU4DEC

COMMUNITY

Going Gnome

The Fourth Annual GNOME Users And Developers European Conference

(GU4DEC) was held from June 16th–18th at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.

The conference has drawn several hundred people for the first two days, which

were dedicated to GNOME developers. The third day was co-presented with

Linux@Work and was geared towards users of GNOME, Linux and other open

source software. BY LESLIE PROCTOR

attended, but by far the most pop-

ular room at the conference was

the hacking room. At any given time,

between 50 and 100 developers milling

around, working on their computers and

looking over one another’s shoulders.

“Getting together to hack is one of the

main features of GU4DEC,” said Telsa

Gwynne, former GNOME Foundation

board member. “People who have been

working together for months over IRC

can sit side-by-side and really see what

the other person is doing.”

GU4DEC opened on June 16th with a

rousing welcome from Miguel de Icaza,

GNOME Foundation president, Jeff

Waugh and Glynn Foster, GNOME Foun-

dation board members, and Timothy

Ney, the foundation’s executive director.

Attendees then got down to work, with

four tracks of technical sessions.

Robin Rowe, founder of Linux Movies

Group, gave a keynote address on the

growth of Linux in the movie

and television industries. He

attributes the rapid adoption of

Linux by movie, television, ani-

mation and special effects

houses to Hollywood’s attitudes

of saving money and using

what works. Rowe noted that all

of the major studios have

adopted Linux, not only for ren-

dering or special effects, but for

the desktops of their creative

departments as well. “This is a

big moment for open source

software on the desktop,” said

Jim Gettys, GNOME Foundation

board member and principal member of

the technical staff at HP.

The second day kicked off with a

keynote address from Alan Kay, one of

the earliest pioneers of personal comput-

ing and senior technologist at HP. Alan

spoke via videoconference and despite

having risen in the middle of night his

time, he gave a great presentation. Kay

spoke of the need for designers and

developers of user interfaces to keep

things as simple as possible and high-

lighted how needlessly complex and

confusing many of them are. Kay used

examples from his early work with per-

sonal computing and on the Dynabook,

which was designed for “children of all

ages”. He noted that computers are expo-

nentially more powerful today, yet user

interfaces have not improved, and in

many cases, have gotten worse.

Technical sessions on the second day

included a session on desktop integra-

tion with GNOME, which focused on the

issues that are present in the current

GNOME desktop, and provided a

roadmap to avoid future issues.

News generated from the conference

includes an announcement by the

GNOME Foundation that 80,000 comput-

ers using Debian GNU/Linux and

GNOME have been installed in schools

in the region of Extremadura, Spain. The

ratio is one computer for every two stu-

dents. The region has also founded 33

computer centers to serve the general

population. The centers feature one-on-

one computer assistance and have

attracted local users as old as 99 years.

GU4DEC has attracted visitors from all

over Europe and also brought a large

contingent from Japan, Canada, the

United States, as well as Mexico, Chile,

Peru and Brazil. “We are so happy that

top IT officials from the EU, Spain, Ire-

land, India, France, the Netherlands and

Brazil have all chosen to speak at

GU4DEC,” said Timothy Ney, GNOME

Foundation executive director.

The location of the next

GU4DEC has not been deter-

mined yet, but Tim Ney expects

that a location will be selected

in the next few weeks. “We’ve

seen past GU4DECs have a

tremendous impact on the

places it’s been held and we’ve

also seen an almost 400 percent

growth over the past four

years,” Ney said. Archives of all

three days of the conference, as

well as the slide sets from the

speakers will be found at http://

www.guadec.org/ .

Figure 1: Opening Talk at GU4DEC

www.linux-magazine.com

August 2003

GU4DEC 2003 report

T he sessions have been well

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