12.14.07
Posted in Release, Products, Mandriva at 7:53 pm by Adam
Kicking off the 2008 Spring development cycle in earnest, the first alpha is here. This alpha features X.org 7.3, KDE 3.5.8, KDE 4.0 RC2 (in /contrib), GNOME 2.21, kernel 2.6.24, OpenOffice.org 2.3, new NVIDIA and ATI proprietary drivers, PulseAudio by default and more. Despite being a first alpha, it is also in a fairly stable and reliable state, though as always, we do not suggest you use it in a production environment. It is available in Free and One editions, with i586 and x86-64 DVDs for the Free edition and an i586, KDE-based CD for the One edition. As far as testing goes, for this pre-release we are particularly interested in testing PulseAudio and hardware detection. Please report any problems with sound functionality, and any mis-detected or un-detected hardware, to Bugzilla. Of course, please also report any other problems you run into. You can also discuss the alpha in the official forums. Download locations are available on the Wiki page: it may take a few hours for the files to be copied to all mirrors, so if you do not find them on the first mirror you try, try another.
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12.07.07
Posted in Event, English, Mandriva at 6:58 am by François Bancilhon
This is my second trip to Angola. I went there last year for the first IT Forum, the local annual IT event. Last year, I initiated the discussions that led to us signing our first contract with the Angolan government. We now have a team of Brazilian engineers on site doing training and consulting. I went back this year for the second IT Forum, to check on the status of our current contract and to discuss future projects.
As in most of my trips, I haven’t seen much: from the airport, to the hotel, to the conference center and back. But I could not help be impressed by gigantic traffic jams, a visible haze of pollution, roads in terrible conditions, people quietly siting on sidewalks as if in their living room, continuous lines at gas stations, lack of public transportation besides the white and blue minivans, young people everywhere, women carrying huge baskets on their head, young peddlers selling the usual stuff and the most usual (stethoscopes?) from car to car in highway traffic jams, a no left turn policy forcing you do to long and convoluted detours, huge SUVs everywhere, garbage dumps and favelas, dust covering everything and turning into mud at the first shower, Chinese workers building highways, huge strange trees (at least strange to me), large and modern new development areas, major work on sewage (“the water is flowing better” says my friend Eric), steel and glass building emerging in the middle of the city, Wifi but little Internet bandwidth behind it, a beautiful conference center, etc.
The country has a major challenge developing its infrastructure quickly enough to keep up with the growth: Angola is the fastest growing economy in Africa, with an 18% annual growth, and it’s been going at this pace for more than 5 years now thanks to oil, diamonds, and agriculture (and peace).
Part of the infrastructure development is mastering and using IT. The man behind the development and use of IT in Angola is Pedro Teta, the Vice-Minister of technology and the head of CNTI, the national center for information technology. He holds a PhD in computer and control, speaks 8 languages, is smart, hard working, fast moving, visionary with an attention to detail. He understands one of the key issue is people and training.
Most companies and people at the conference were from Angola, Brazil or Portugal. We make sense here because of our Brazilian team.
Microsoft Africa’s Chairman was there and give a speech just before mine. The main topic was open source, so I assume I was one of the reasons for his presence. He made a few strange statements which I am not sure match the official Microsoft position: according to him, because of Nicholas Negroponte’s OLPC project, Africa lost four years waiting for a machine that never came. He also said that Angola is the richest nation in Africa, so it should buy expensive computers (by which I suppose he means high powered machines running Windows). And he finally explained that open source and Free Software are not the same thing (at least he got this one right).
I gave a talk on low cost computers in emerging markets. I presented the Intel Classmate and the Angolinux distribution we installed on it: as part of the program we have here, together with the local community we built Angolinux, a localized version of Mandriva. It is now getting a lot of attention and excitement and with the Classmate was one of the hot topics of the trade show. Lots of people came to the booth to get copies of the system and to play with the machines, and many wanted to see if they could buy it.
I had a formal meeting with the Prime Minister. Pedro Teta took me and a Romanian professor to meet him and present two projects: a project of academic exchanges with Romania and the Classmate PC/Angolinux project for school deployment. The meeting was very formal, with translators, pictures and interviews with the press at the end.
So, I found Angola a fascinating country, taking the right path to accelerated development, and we’re happy to participate in this process.
On another front, it seems that our position Nigeria is improving and we remain involved in the project. It is too early to give precise facts, but things are better. So it seems that the attention drawn on the situation is helping towards a positive resolution.
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12.05.07
Posted in KDE, Event, English, Mandriva at 12:40 pm by Vanessa
First KDE-Edu Meeting hosted by Mandriva, Paris
The first KDE-Edu meeting, on the 1st& 2nd December 2007, aimed at polishing educational applications for the KDE 4.0 release and to start planning KDE 4.1. Debugging, testing, exchanging ideas, shaping libraries, getting to know everyone was the main focus of the meeting.
14 Participants:
Anne-Marie Mahfouf (France) : Organiser of KDE-Edu project
Jeremy Whiting (USA) : KAnagram, KNewStuff (in kdelibs), KVTML2 with Frederik
Albert Astal Cid (Spain) : KGeography and Blinken
Frederik Gladhorn (Germany) : KVocTrain which has changed its name to Parley
Carsten Niehaus (Germany) : Kalzium
Aleix Pol (Spain): KAlgebra
Benoît Jacob (France): Eigen, use in KDE-Edu and KDE program, Kalzium
Johannes Simon (Germany) : Parley
Mauricio Piacentini (Brazil) : KTurtle
Vladimir Kuznetsov and Olena Kuznetsova (Russia) : Step
Jure Repinc (Slovenia) : Tanslation. Testing, bugs
Patrick Spendrin (Germany) : KDE-Edu on Windows
Peter Murdoch (Wales) : KPercentage
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KDE-Edu était à Paris dans les locaux de Mandriva pour la préparation de KDE 4.1
Les développeurs de KDE-Edu se réunissaient pour la première fois les 1er et 2 Décembre 2007 dans les locaux de Mandriva à Paris. L’objectif principal de cette rencontre était la finalisation des logiciels pour la sortie de KDE 4.0 et la préparation de KDE 4.1.Cette réunion a rassemblé 14 personnes dont 2 Français, un Américain, un Brésilien, des Allemands, des Russes, des Espagnols, un Slovène et un Écossais. Elle a permis aux développeurs des logiciels éducatifs de KDE de renforcer l’esprit d’équipe.
Le projet KDE-Edu a été fondé en 2001 avec l’idée de rassembler les logiciels existants dans un module KDE pour les intégrer complètement à KDE. Le module kdeedu est sorti pour la première fois avec KDE 3.0 en avril 2002.
La réunion a permis de corriger de nombreux bugs pour la sortie de KDE-Edu dans KDE 4. Les développeurs ont aussi étudié l’utilisation des bibliothèques communes comme Eigen2, une bibliothèque de mathématiques. Son développeur a étudié avec les personnes intéressées les besoins non couverts actuellement par cette bibliothèque.
Divers sous-groupes se sont formés au cours du week-end afin de définir le travail des prochains mois. Les logiciels KDE-Edu sur la plate-forme Windows ont également été présentés. Une telle réunion redonne une nouvelle motivation aux développeurs et permet un travail intensif pendant deux jours.
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12.03.07
Posted in Release, Products, English, Mandriva at 9:48 pm by Adam
So many of you wondered if it was coming, glad to be able to give the happy news - we released the new 2008-based Flash today. This version is based on shiny new 2008, is $10 / 10€ cheaper than the old Flash, and has some cool new features - I haven’t got one to play with yet, but I really like the idea of being able to plug the Flash into a Windows system and run Thunderbird and Firefox from the Flash, with all your bookmarks and emails from the Linux boot. It’s available now from the Mandriva Store.
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