Floschi’s Blog

Wow. I’m back from an evening event for employees beeing absent from duty, which took place in our old city hall. Of course, topics like successful come-back, possibilities of home-work and so on were much more important for the visitors, but for me it was quite impressive that many questions asked at our LiMux booth were “how can I become familiar with OpenOffice.org or Linux at home, before starting to work again”.

There were nearly no fears about the “new” desktop software the employees would have to use after their return; they are actively willing to use free software at home, like they will do at their offices in Munich.

That’s a great achievement, on the one hand side of our project including the manifold training offerings, the communication strategy and the strong support by our management. But it’s also an earning of the many free software communities and developers, improving the look and feel and the handling of “their” software during the last years.

Would you have expected, that common people with nearly no IT background are talking about free software as a real choice? That these people want to use free software at home? Not just due to the fact that they can save license fees, but because they want to use the software their employer have chosen for reasons they also agree, like independence and freedom.

That’s imho a huge progress, but also a reminder for us not to become carelessly in the future. It’s worth working on this item

Good night.

He was late, exactly four days behind his estimated arrival day. But then he didn’t want to miss something more and took a short delivery process (OK, his mother helped him a lot).

And now I’m happy to welcome Oliver, my first son, born on wednesday at 12 to 4pm. Alive and kicking, squeaking happily.

About 3.200g and 51cm. Ready for the daily challenges in Munich.

Welcome Oliver

Hi everybody!

There are so many questions asked to me during my talks and most of them are the same topics. So I decided to start a column here to answer them in a unsteady way, when there’s some time left to me.

At the moment I plan to answer:

• Why Munich chose free software
• Why it takes such a long time

Please feel free to ask me questions you’re interested in. I won’t guarante to anwer them quickly, but I won’t ignore constructive-minded questions.

All will be released in the category “LiMux questions“.

Yours,

Florian

OK, so now it’s time to go home after one week diving into the Debian GNU/Linux community at DebConf9 in Cáceres, Spain. Marsmensch, Roert and me represented “the City of LiMux (Munich)” (quote from Marsmensch).

At first: Cáceres, the capital of Extremadura, is quite hot in the summer. Really quite hot. So every day starts before noon, ends shortly after noon and restarts again in the early evening. Siesta time between.

I gave a talk (slides) at Debian OpenDay, the first day of DebConf targeted at an Debian interested audience. Many Debian Developers attended, imho because the other talks were held in spanish. And the feedback was great. Fine

DebConf was for me an new experience, I have never before attended such a real community event. Wow, great. Wifi nearly everywhere, even at the beer pub located in the recreation park beside the venue. Highly motivated developers, hacking and discussing nearly the whole day (and night, of course).

Roert gave a talk about one of the topics he is working on at LiMux, how to distribute and manage applications in VirtualBox Images (slides). Great work and very interesting discussion afterwards. Don’t think about virtualization, get your streaming up and you’re done. We’ll discuss this next week.

We want DebConf11 to be in Germany, especially in Munich. I blogged about this some days ago. Strong support from our City Mayor, very good.

The official GroupPhoto with nearly all attendees (some slept during the meeting) is online.

Debian won’t be Debian without some breaking news. This time at first the Release Team announced to switch to time-based releases, but then revisits its decision after enormous community protests. I’m curious about when the freeze for squeeze will happen

I also enjoyed the discussion with the developers from our cooperation partner, the German Federal Foreign Office. We have a lot of common tasks to do, but we finally have to start working together on a technical base. We’ll see and I’ll blog.

To conclude: thank you attendees, thank you organizers and thank you everyone who wants my thanks.

Yesterday the possible bids for the upcoming selection process presented themselves at DebConf 9 in Cáceres.

Beside the bid from Bosnia there are 3 german regions competing for one german bid until end of this year, of course our pulsating capital Berlin, the Rhein/Ruhr area and Munich.

Our Munich entry slide:

Impressions from Munich

Then we described some facts and figures about Munich and ended up with a statement by City Mayor Christian Ude, welcoming Munich’s bid:

C. Ude

“The City of Munich uses free software and open standards. Both are an essential base for our information technology. I would be pleased to welcome the worldwide developer community of Debian GNU/Linux in Munich in 2011.”

At the moment we’re the onliest only region with such a strong political committment and support. Great.

I think it is really important for Munich to host recognized open source events to show the broad support for openess and freedom in Bavaria’s capital. Political support is one success factor, but politicians everywhere imho slowly realize nowadays, that there’s no future for being dependend or locked-in to special vendors. Fine

Some thoughs about dc9 will follow the next days.

Hi,

just a small collection for me, please feel free to add interesting links or ressources about this topic.

Rob Weir: Update on ODF spreadsheets

Rob Weir: Follow up on excel 2007 sp2s ODF

Rob Weir: Battle for ODF interoperability

Jeremy Allsion: In Office SP2, Microsoft manages to reduce interoperability

Jomar Silva: Microsoft now attempt to fragment ODF

ODF Alliance: Microsoft’s ODF support falls short, additional fact sheet

Microsoft (OOXML based): Document Interoperability Initiative Drives Development of New Tools

… to be continued!

Hier die offizielle Ankündigung:

Liebe Debianhowto.de-Interessierte,

am heutigen 18. Mai wird das Projekt “debianhowto.de” sechs Jahre alt. Alles Gute

In den letzten zwei Jahren wurde der weitere Fortgang dieser Plattform mehrfach diskutiert. Zuwenige haben sich für die aktive Weiterpflege gefunden, zuviele unterschiedliche Plattformen existieren mittlerweile. Zeit, um hier ein Fazit zu ziehen:

Es waren 6 interessante Jahre, aber jetzt ist das Kind erwachsen und muss auf eigenen Beinen stehen! Vielen Dank an alle, die durch eigene Howtos und durch Korrekturen und Verbesserungen dazu beigetragen haben.

Um den künftigen Aufwand möglichst gering zu halten und eine gewisse Konsolidierung der Wikilandschaft rund um Debian GNU/Linux zu erreichen,  beginnt ab heute der Umzug zu einer der aktivsten online Communities rund um Debian GNU/Linux im deutschsprachigen Raum, zum debianforum.de.

Was heißt das?

1. Ab soeben ist das Wiki nur noch read-only, um keine weiteren Veränderungen zuzulassen. Ebenso schalte ich die Mailinglisten ab, die seit Jahresanfang nicht mehr genutzt wurden.

2. Ich bitte alle, die “ihr” Howto gerne weiterhin pflegen möchten, dies unter http://wiki.debianforum.de neu anzulegen und fortan dort zu führen. Wer Fragen zur Struktur des dortigen Wikis hat, möge diese bitte im Forum posten, dort gehören sie hin und werden sicherlich beantwortet.

3. Ich ermutige alle, die sich besonders für das eine oder andere Howto interessieren, eben jenes ebenfalls zu http://wiki.debianforum.de umzuziehen; auch wenn sie nicht Autor desselben sind.

4. Ende Juli 2009 werde ich die Domain debianhowto.de entsprechend umleiten, d.h. ab dann sind die nicht umgezogenen Inhalte aussortiert.

An dieser Stelle möchte ich mich schon vorab beim debianforum.de für die Aufnahmebereitschaft recht herzlich bedanken.

In diesem Sinne wünsche ich einen erfolgreichen Umzug,
viele Grüße,

Florian
–
.”`.
: :’ :  Florian Schießl <debianhowto [at] floschi.info>
`. `’    Debianhowto.de Team – http://www.debianhowto.de/
`-       Blog: www.floschi.info

OK, it was time to act after one year of resistance

I got my microblogging account:

Twitter: twitter.com/floschie

Identi.ca: identi.ca/floschi

I sync them and try to use identi.ca as my main account, because it’s more free than twitter. Feel free to listen…

Today I finally got some time to start a listing about previous public talks about LiMux. I’ll try to list the events and set hyperlinks to detail pages, sometimes containing the slides, audio or video casts – mainly in german.

Danke an Christian Imhorst für seinen Tipp. Mit dem Plugin WPtouch sieht mein Blog definitv besser aus auf dem iPhone.