Nokia is sponsoring a social event tonight for the GNOME and KDE communities, where people will be able to chat together about really important things, like the good food around here, or the nice sound of the sea when you sleep, or how walking in the sand can be hard.

The event will take place at the Terraza del Muelle at 21:30. I assume most people are like me and won't be able to even know where to go, so we have a meeting point at 21:00 at the Dunas Canteras Hotel (Calle Portugal Nº 68) — it's 10 minutes away from the conference venue and it's really easy to find: walk alongside the beach until you see a big group of people ;-)

Thanks Nokia, I'm sure we'll have fun!

Quim just gave his keynote, announcing that maemo will switch to Qt as the main toolkit in the future, with GTK+ being a part of the maemo platform that will become supported by the community. Not a big surprise, since Nokia acquired Trolltech a while ago.

The interesting thing, though, is that, listening to Quim's talk, maemo is still a big GNOME Mobile user: the maemo platform will actually still more or less be GNOME Mobile, except that it will be using Qt instead of GTK+. This may come as a surprise to some people since for many, GNOME is GTK+ and GTK+ is GNOME. GNOME is actually way more than GTK+ and the GNOME Mobile platform in particular covers a good number of technologies (glib, dbus, gvfs, bluez, telepathy, avahi, gstreamer, gconf, etc.). All of those technologies are historically close to GNOME (usually living on freedesktop.org), or even part of GNOME.

So while the move to Qt is a logical move from Nokia, it's good to see that Nokia stays firmly committed to GNOME Mobile. It's actually quite amazing to see that what we built there is attractive to a big industry player like Nokia (and, well, a bunch of other players ;-)).

GUADEC is starting tomorrow, but the GNOME Foundation was busy today with a all-day board meeting. With the election results now being official, we were able to welcome Germán and Srini.

Still, the meeting wasn't easy for everybody.

Still, you can be sure that the board is working hard for the Foundation to make sure that the GNOME project will succeed!

Last week was LinuxTag, in Berlin, and I went there to help with the openSUSE booth. We had a really nice booth, where people could play with laptops, try the build service or SUSE Studio. Oh, and we enjoyed writing words with magnetic letters on a board :-)

Attendees were mostly german people, of course. So it was quite funny to start talking with people in English, and have them reply in German ;-) But after some time, I got used to German again, so I could talk a bit, or at least understand what people were saying. Yes, you might not know about it, but I'm supposed to have a good level of German. Let me stress the supposed...

Image from Adrian Schröter

This was a great opportunity to meet various people from the community. I discovered how active the people from the openSUSE Education are — quite impressive! As usual, it was good to also be able to put faces on names, and catch up with friends, or discuss various topics (login-time performance, UI design, openSUSE Conference, etc.). I definitely came back with some food for thoughts.

Sven made sure the GNOME booth was working well The stickers that GNOME-FR had printed for Solutions Linux were quite nice to have, at least I would think so ;-) At some point, Sven and I created a new lovely background for the GNOME desktop, based on Big Buck Bunny; I'm pretty sure it would make a great default background! Ah, if only I had kept a copy of it...

Among the tidbits worth mentioning, I demoed GNOME Shell to various people — mostly people from the KDE community ;-) —, and although the version I had was quite old (it was git master as of May 1st), people seemed to like it. That makes me even more confident there will be quite some positive action around GNOME Shell during the GUADEC/Desktop Summit.

Image from Adrian Schröter

All in all, this event was obviously quite some hard work for me :-)

I came back from Berlin on Sunday evening, and I'm leaving for Gran Canaria tomorrow. No need to mention that the three days between those dates were incredibly busy, if only for the part where I naively try to catch up with all mails ;-) Still, I find time to be quite excited about the Desktop Summit: it will probably be a busy week, but it'll be amazing for sure! It was also a good surprise to see people thanking the Foundation for sponsoring them to go! The travel committee did a really great job there!

See you all in Gran Canaria!