Last week was Solutions Linux, one of the big free software events in France each year. And of course I went to there (thanks Novell for letting me go there on work days!). While still in Paris, it moved from CNIT La Défense to Porte de Versailles, which was a good thing: it felt really better there. We did have some good web access, but as usual, it was nearly impossible to read mails, do IRC and generally communicate to the outside world. A good excuse to breathe a bit, if you ask me!

The GNOME booth was great. We were face-to-face with our KDE friends, and we had some good time with them. On the booth itself, we had t-shirts and stickers (like for FOSDEM), and the Events Box that made it in time, although we asked for it a bit late. Since we had quite some stickers left at the end, we put a good bunch of them in the box. A good bunch as in around 2500. That should be enough for a few events! Feel free to send a postcard to GNOME-FR to thank us if you get some of those stickers...

Of course, I also went from time to time to the Novell stand: there were SUSE Studio kiosks for people to try, which were more or less always in use by people. This wasn't really surprising since SUSE Studio is quite cool. There were also some Batman-spotlight-like Novell pen -- I first said I don't need another pen, even if it has a light, and then discovered that it was a spotlight. And fell in love with the concept :-)

The french gang was there: Frédéric (not the other Frédéric who couldn't make it, but I was lucky to see him when I went spying in the Mandriva offices), Christophe (who was kind enough to host me for a few days, thanks!), Michael Scherer (I hope it's the right blog ;-)), Pascal, Luis (the French one, or French-Portugese, or just Portugese ;-)), Dodji, Daniel, etc. This was obviously some great times with all those cool people!

During the event, I gave two talks: one about the GNOME history and philosophy and one about freedesktop.org. Both went well, although I couldn't stop talking for the first one, while the second one could probably have done with more examples in a demo. I'm also still wondering if they were really suited for the audience: since it's more a commercial event than a community event; it's not really easy to know if all the audience enjoyed the community-related talks...

Last week was also when we started the serious planning for GNOME 3.0. It was actually weird to be isolated from the rest of the world at this time: it was first a challenge to coordinate with the rest of the release team for all this, and then I missed the initial feedback. Which might actually be a good thing ;-) I still plan to read articles and comments, but after taking a quick look at the beginning of this week, it was quite interesting to see some people saying that the planning announced nothing really big for the users (it's a developer release), while some other people were worried that the end user changes might have a bad impact, and then another group was praising the revolution that is planned. Not sure if there's any conclusion to draw there ;-)

It has become a tradition now: Google is organizing a Summer of Code this year again, and quite a big number of organizations will be involved in mentoring students. We can certainly expect some good stuff to happen thanks to this program! Some students have already started applying: the application period began last week and will end next Friday. Oh, by the way, dear students: submitting your application a few days before the deadline is a good way to make sure that potential mentors can love you ;-)

Of course, GNOME is participating as a mentoring organization, as well as openSUSE. There are some quite good ideas in both cases, but of course, students are welcome to apply with their own idea. When applying, keep in mind that one of the most important things is that the application is well-written and detailed, and comes with a good plan. Also, in the case of GNOME, we ask students to provide a patch -- this is a step that lets mentors easily know if the student can at least get the code and compile it ;-) (and the quality of a patch, or the way it's written, actually often tells us a lot about the student)

A big difference for me this year is that I'm not an administrator on the GNOME side (I agreed to help a bit for openSUSE, but Zonker is doing all the work). Last year, Adam and Sandy did a great job for the organization, so it was not a big surprise to see them step up for the task this year!

Of course, even if I'm not an admin, I'm still curious; so I'm looking at the student applications and adding a comment here or there, but nothing really big. I might mentor a project, though, if the idea I proposed for openSUSE seduces a student and gets well-ranked, or if a student comes with something I'd really love to see and where I could help! I guess we'll know in a few days ;-)