Hello all on Planet KDE,

After yet another session of select all + delete on kde promo and marketing lists, I decided to unsubscribe and say goodbye once and for all. With all my work for my employer, the Green Party, People & Planet and getting completely caught up in a new relationship, I just don't have the time. Probably not even to help out much with the KDE 4.0 release.

Besides, there are so many cool new people involved in KDE promo work these days that my presence is hardly needed anyway!

So goodbye, thanks for all the fish & good times, I wish you all the best of luck and I'll try to keep track of the planet / Dot. I'll get my blog off Planet KDE too so nobody need read my occasional off-topic rants about UK politics and making maps!

Can anybody help? I want to set-up a computer that sits in the exhibition centre at work for members of the public. It's currently off the network and just runs Windows XP with auto-login, some videos on the desktop and an internet connection to browse a few permitted web sites in Internet Explorer. Soon we're going to connect it to our network so I want to make sure it's locked down!

Ideally I'd like it to run Kubuntu Linux with Kiosk, it would both be easier for me, better (of course) and a nice way to demonstrate a computer running nothing but free software to my colleagues. But I also need to look into the possibilities with Windows (sigh) since we don't have anyone else in our charity or support company who knows anything about Linux.

Can anyone drop a comment with some tips for setting up a well secured video & web browser Linux box, and any hints for Windows?

Since it's Sunday, go to OpenStreetMap.org and type into the search box "pubs near East Dulwich". Or, for the sober and devout, you might like to try "churches near East Dulwich". I'd completely forgotten how flexible David Earl's excellent search tool was :)

I can't wait for OpenStreetMap to be integrated into Marble. It will be interesting to see when other free software projects start using OSM rather than proprietary providers like Google and Multimap, especially now that we have complete street maps for the Netherlands.

Late last year I wrote about my disappointment at having to use proprietary software at work. We're a charity working to develop and promote mainstream solutions to sustainability, so it would be more consistent with our values to use and promote software freedom. Well since then things have changed considerably - I've had a number of good leads, not least by discovering and using the fantastic Open Source Consortium, who help you find suitable companies.

I have in mind three basic scenarios: using free software on the Windows desktop, replacing Windows on the server(s) and switching wholesale to Linux+KDE on the desktops.

During my first staff appraisal yesterday, which went really well for those who care, we agreed that I would conduct a feasibility study into using free software in the organisation. I've got a year to do it, so I'm going to be able to do a really thorough job of it. So far I have have a three page document outlining our general requirements and the research I need to do. I've stuck it up here, if anyone is interested and has any suggestions of things I should look into please get in touch! I'm not, by the way, interested in suggestions along the lines of "you should use application X to do Y", but rather things I need to get right in my research to avoid a bad decision down the line.

In other work-related news the meeting with David Miliband went really well, our response to a govt consultation that I'm coordinating is rumbling along, and I'm off for an interview about carbon footprinting this afternoon. Super!

Hundreds of KDE contributors converged on Dublin in September for the annual KDE conference, aKademy. With two days of presentations, the general assembly of the membership organisation and a five day coding marathon, attendees were bombarded with news, ideas and beer. The main focus of aKademy this year was of course KDE 4, the next generation of the popular desktop, due to be released sometime next year. But with time given over to the OpenDocument movement, human-computer interaction research and the general assembly, aKademy reflected the diversity and maturity of the project.

Part of my job involves managing our IT systems, which usually means tearing my hair out over Windows and proprietary licenses. I'd love to migrate the organisation over to Linux with KDE, Kolab and the full works. But just as circumstances can make it difficult for right-minded people to advocate public transport, so they can compel a huge free software advocate to advocate the status quo.

I was trying to explain this to some friends in the pub last night. You see, the time and money spent on the insanely complicated licensing surrounding proprietary software, the cost of upgrading machines to meet its performance demands, and the hassle of viruses & spyware in a small business environment add up. At a guess I'd say it would work out much cheaper in the long run to move over to free software. But there are two big problems standing in my way:

• So far as I can tell, no company exists to provide the kind of support we currently get. Basically I manage all things IT but an external company provides the day-to-day support for staff (by phone or on site), they look after the server (phone and on site), and they provide us with good quotations and lots of assistance for purchasing decisions. It's far more than any Linux company I can find seems to provide. Maybe I'm just missing them? I could run some free software systems myself - I have the expertise - but if I moved on or had to take time off being ill, I'd be leaving everyone high and dry. I've set-up an in-house wiki for government policy work and a little php-driven database to keep track of licensing (because Access is just so awful) only because I know I can quickly dump that data out into something they can maintain later on.
• There are a lot of very busy people in the organisation. Even a day or two spent learning a new system would be time misspent in their eyes, so I'd need a very compelling reason indeed to make them learn, even over time, new applications and then a whole new desktop environment. Most people use Firefox, and I recommend Inkscape, PDFCreator and other applications like that if they can make do, rather than shelling out on proprietary licenses. But training the whole staff, and then assisting them as they get used to the quirks of working with OpenOffice when everyone else has Microsoft Office, The GIMP when they're used to Photoshop, etc. would be a significant undertaking.

So I'm in a position where it would actually be irresponsible of me to advocate the most ethical and (potentially) cost effective course of action. Sigh.

Just a brief follow up on Sebas' post asking for journalists to help KDE. If you're reluctant, here are some additional reasons to get in touch:

• If you're worried about the quality of you work, then worry no more. There are a few experienced writers on the kde-promo list and amongst the Dot editors, who will help you improve your writing skills and shape your articles up.
• If you're sceptical about the Dot, and think it's a waste of time, think again. The Dot itself has a fairly big readership, it is syndicated to many other web sites, and journalists often take Dot stories as the basis for their own work later on. You may not be writing code, but coverage brings new contributors & users, and raises the profile of the project, platform and community. Writing Dot stories is a very valuable contribution to the KDE Project.
• If you think it will be a waste of your time, you're wrong. Building up a portfolio of decent articles that you've written for free gives you a useful platform for paid work in the field. I started out writing for the Dot and Newsforge for free, then earned a decent amount of money whilst at University writing for publications including The Daily Telegraph, ZDNet, O'Reilly, Red Pepper, Linux Journal, Free Software Magazine, LinuxUser & Developer, Linux Weekly News, Newsforge,The Liberator and Spark (my uni paper). If you already follow the Dot, PlanetKDE and maybe a mailing list or two then most of the research work is done, so it's actually very little additional effort for quite a lot of money! All of that experience was a big help in landing my current job. If you do enough good work you also get a good excuse to travel to Akademy and help out with the press team :)

So put pen to paper pen to key, subscribe to the kde-promo list and get in touch!

KOffice has seen a huge surge in exciting feature development in the past year, putting it in the same league as free software giants such as OpenOffice.org and The GIMP, and even surpassing them in places. With version 1.6 due out this Sunday (October 15) it's timely that Krita, KOffice's painting application, is now leading an effort to develop a fairly boring feature, an open graphics file format.

After a slightly unproductive Monday I got lots done at Akademy yesterday!

The first talk in the Open Document Day gave me a great subject for an article that I'm now working on - the politics of open standards in Europe, which overlaps nicely with the continued fight against software patents. It's good to see these subjects getting continued exposure at techie conferences. I only hope that KDE contributors will take it upon themselves to talk to their MEPs more about these two issues!

I then spent much of the day doing promotion stuff: I worked on the above article, helped Rob Scott and Ken Wimer get photos for the PlanetKDE hackergotchis, talked crap with various people to fish for story ideas, attended the Kubuntu session (edgy eft has some nice incremental improvements), then had a proper kde-promo meeting... with a whiteboard!

Of course that quickly turned into a game of pictionary - look out for portraits of the team by yours truly - in which Wade Olson and I proved that we can be unproductive and distracting in real life as well as on mailing lists :). The big problem with Akademy is that there are just far too many interesting stories, so Sebas Kuegler struggled to keep his wrap-up to our invitation-only press list brief. Hopefully we'll manage to get some more stuff on the dot over the next couple of weeks. For those fed up of seeing Wade re-post his life story to PlanetKDE every few weeks, my posts showing up twice, and any number of other gripes with that stupid software, dark mutterings harbour plans to slay the beast and install a nicer aggregator.

The day drew to a close with a group of us enjoying the webteam's anguished attempts to overhaul the KDE web presence (hint: the marketing team should take complete control, unless you want me to help out with low-level code in kdelibs ;)), then heading off through Dublin trying to find a mystical pub/club called something like 'Sinn A'. Lots of confused locals later, Aaron Seigo and I got cut off from the crowd so we sat in a themed club called Zanzibar, ranting about whaling and state/corporate power until he'd sated his 80s dancing desires. The next Akademy should really feature an organised ceilidh :D.

I finally arrived at Akademy in Dublin at 6.30am today, only to find that this man has set about a slander campaign against me (although he redeems himself in part by helping Robert Knight chase Konsole bugs):

Having missed the first few days I've mostly been meandering around without doing anything particularly productive. Hopefully I'll be able to have some good chats with the promotion and marketing gang over the next couple of days, and write some articles. I only wish that next year I'll be free and have the spare cash and energy to help run a press office as I did in Ludwigsburg two years ago. Ah well, it looks like the other promo people have been busy, freeing me up to clear my name and get some work done.

Shame I'll miss the KDE 4 naming session... I can just imagine how that is going to become a nightmare for poor old Wade-the-chair :( Just so long as we don't drop our banner of "community, freedom, platform" (or something to that effect). All three are in evidence here in Dublin, with SVN going nuts with contributions being committed, and lots of chit chat and fun :) Right, one boring entry down, maybe when I wake up tomorrow (moved house on Saturday, got coach on Sunday, arrived this morning - yawn) I'll have something more interesting to say.