Since Foresight’s X server started using EXA for acceleration by default with the intel driver, various bits of rendering on the desktop have been horribly slow. Fortunately it’s still possible to switch back to XAA, which at least on my i915 is faster. Just stick
Option “AccelMethod” “xaa”
In the driver section of xorg.conf. Hopefully EXA will get faster in the future.
The third day was ‘User and Business’ day. Despite this worrying-sounding title, it actually turned out very good. There was a great keynote by a guy from DreamWorks whose name I have yet to be able to remember (sorry) including a fairly long clip from their new film ‘Madagascar’ which looks really rather worth seeing, especially as it includes a squad of crack penguin operatives (I bet he showed us that bit because he knew we’d like it). DreamWorks produce all their films using entirely Linux-based systems now — from GNOME desktops to Linux-powered render farms. They’ve got some criticisms, some things they’d like done, but overall they prefer it to the IRIX systems they used to use — and it’s significantly cheaper as well. How’s that for corporate support?
Oh, and Nokia are giving the GNOME Foundation the proceeds from some number of their groovy N770 tablet things. This appears to have caused some problems with some people because of their stance on software patents. On which there was an excellent talk yesterday, which far too few people attended.
The big news of the day they weren’t allowed to announce because the Internet got taken out of the building and so people couldn’t check if it was already public news. So this morning we all discovered that Novell have signed a huge deal with part of the US Government which will involve Linux desktops being deployed… running GNOME of course, since it’s Novell.
Oh and apparently the Chinese government have over 1,000,000 machines running GNOME. Wow.
Now I just need to amuse myself until I meet up with Daniel again, and then go to the airport to catch my flight home.
So day two of GUADEC6. The talks are over for the day, everyone’s trying to get food before they go to the GUADEC Party which is at what appears to be a well-regarded (at least by the local culture journalists) yet rather odd club in Stuttgart called Suite 212. Located conveniently close to the Haus der Wirtschaft, which is the GUADEC venue (and very impressive too — I need to get some proper pictures tomorrow, or at least dig up everyone else’s and link to them so you can see what it’s like). It may not be my kind of thing (most of you probably know what I’m referring to when I say that) but I’m going along anyway because thanks to the intervention of Novell, the party is now free upon waving of GUADEC name badge. Yes mine’s got my name spelt wrong on it (I have two ‘t’s in my first name, not one), I doubt they’re going to want to compare it to my passport and get all nitpicky. Almost everything about the administration of GUADEC seems to happen in a condition of relaxation and it’s extremely easy-going. Everyone’s very friendly and helpful and just great stuff going on here.
Tomorrow may not be as good though, it’s GNOME User and Business day, and as far as I can tell there’s nothing happening before lunch that I’m really interested in. While on the bright side this means that I can actually have breakfast at the hotel tomorrow, it also means nothing to do…
I shall probably have breakfast then come in and use the wi-fi, do some hacking or some writing or something, and talk to people. I’ve not really done enough of that — I want to talk to Davyd Madely about his panel applets ideas, although I doubt I can add anything he hasn’t already thought of I may at least be able to get a clearer idea of what he’s after and how it’s all going to work.
Someone next to me just asked Keith Packard for his signature to, if I heard this right, stick on a mainframe somewhere. Cool and weird — that’s GUADEC. People are saying it’s the best one yet, which might just be nostalgic warm fuzziness, but may also have something to do with the fact that this has been a very good conference so far. I haven’t of course been to one before, so I don’t have a basis for comparison.
Well it’s actually day two of GUADEC and the third day I’ve been in Germany, but I haven’t written about yesterday yet. Anybody who’s seriously interested in GUADEC can of course get all the information from the GUADEC site but I thought I’d talk about what I got up to. The welcome keynote was interesting, as it had an unexpected contribution from Seth Nickell who was eloquent, funny and also a little scathing of some things he sees that improvement is necessary. But that’s okay, because he’s right. Not to say that the other speakers weren’t also good of course.
Went to Keith Packard’s talk, then to Owen Taylor’s. Both very interesting. Chatted to Murray Cumming. Had a bit of a panic about battery power of the Powerbook (see yesterday’s entry). Located an Apple Store — today I went there and got myself a PSU. Woohoo! Now I have a spare, although it’s got a German plug on it so I’ll have to get an adaptor at the airport to use it at home. Of course, at home is the proper one… I think I’ll keep this spare one in my laptop bag at all times to help prevent this sort of thing happening again.
Much kudos and many thanks to the people who helped me find the shop and lent me power in the mean time.
Am now in Davyd Madeley’s talk on panel applets and it’s interesting so I’m going to start paying attention. More later.
Am at GUADEC 6 in Stuttgart. Despite the best efforts of the airline and the people at London Stansted airport, I managed to get on the plane and it left late, but thankfully we weren’t actually all that late into Stuttgart.
Did a very stupid thing though – left PowerBook charger at home. Bah. Have hijacked stacato’s computer to do this, but it’s going to severely diminish the time I was hoping to have hacking on Growl while I’m here. Which is a shame, because I was feeling all enthusiastic. Hopefully I can borrow someone’s charger, there seem to be a few people around GUADEC with Apple laptop and I hope that by using other people’s chargers for a bit of time here and there I can acquire enough charge for a bit of hacking or writing.
Writing would be good actually. Best thing about it? Doesn’t use much power. Muahahahahaha. Good thing I brought with me a couple of good books.
Byee!
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