Very Brief Writeup of GNOME at LCA 2004 - Adelaide, Australia [12th - 17th January]

[Glynn Foster <Glynn Foster Sun COM>]

Just got back from attending this years Linux Conf Australia, a hugely
successful event and where the GNOME project had some pretty excellent
presence. The conference was being held in the University of Adelaide,
right in the middle of the city center.

Like previous years, Monday and Tuesday were dedicated to the mini-confs
of Debian, Python, GNOME, IPv6, Linux in Government and many more.
Wednesday held the tutorials - PHP, Cairo, GNOME Libraries and others.
The main conference started on Thursday and over the course of 3 days,
60+ talks were presented, with WIP, Hackfests and Fixit's to boot.

I'd like to personally thank Jeff for putting the time, thought and
energy [1] into organizing GNOME.conf.au. It seemed to be a very
successful event, and one that we can make a permanent event in the
GNOME calendar.

All in all, it was an awesome conference, with a great opportunity to
catch up with the GNOME developers, go for food and drink some beers -
or well, some cranberry juice.
                                                                                                                                                             
LCA has transformed into a pretty huge conference, with many open source
rockstars present - Linus Torvalds, Rusty Russell, Rasmus Lehdorf,
Andrew Tridgell, Jon Corbett, Havoc Pennington, Maddog Hall and Bdale
Garbee, among many, many others. LCA heads to Canbera next year. Start
saving your pocket money now!

I've attached a *very* brief writeup of the content of the GNOME related
ones, and hopefully some of the people presenting can put their slides
online. Watch out for the audio later in the year!

Glynn

GNOME.conf.au
=============
  o Havoc Pennington - 'Ballet of The Modern Free Desktop'

  Havoc mainly reproduced his freedesktop.org talk that he gave 
  during GUADEC, explaining many of the cool projects that we now 
  being developed under the freedesktop.org hood.

  o Glynn Foster, Jeff Waugh, James Henstridge - 'Preparing for Testing and Hacking on GNOME'

  Glynn gave a brief talk on how new contributors could start working
  on the GNOME project, with demos of GARNOME and jhbuild from Jeff and James.

  o James Henstridge - 'Python and GNOME'

  James talked about the advances the GTK+ and GNOME python bindings, giving examples
  of how easy it was to create fully integrated applications using python.

  o Glynn Foster - 'Sun's Java Desktop System'

  Glynn talked about Sun's recent product, the Java Desktop System, explaining many of
  the reasons behind the desktop, from cost to usability, and gave some ideas on what
  could be expected from future releases. Glynn also demoed Sun's new concept Java 3D
  desktop, 'Looking Glass'.

  o Keith Packard - 'S-E-X-X-Y'

  Keith outlined his recent advances in the freedesktop.org X Server, explaining some
  of the architecture and various extensions. Keith backed up his talk with much
  eye candy on what we can expect soon.

  o Malcolm Tredinnick - 'GNOME Accessibility'
	
  Fresh out of his talk on the 'Linux in Government' track, Malcolm popped 
  in to give a short talk on the GNOME Accessibility stack, with demonstrations of 
  GOK and Gnopernicus.

  o Havoc, Glynn, Jeff, James, Malcolm, Keith - Panel

  The group answered a range of questions.

Tutorials
=========
The following tutorials were given on Wednesday -

  o Malcolm Tredinnick - 'The GNOME Platform Libraries'

  Malcolm went right through the stack, detailing what each part was responsible
  for, giving a good understanding of the various GNOME libraries.

  o Keith Packard - 'An overview of Cairo graphics'
	
  Keith gave a detailed look of the Cairo architecture and API, showing the things
  that are possible using Cairo.

Talks
=====
The following talks were presented in the main conference -

  o Jeff Waugh - 'To the teeth : GNOME for desktop success'

  Jeff outlined the various structures and processes in place within the GNOME
  community, and detailed some technology that we could expect to see in the
  future - D-BUS, freedesktop.org X server, Galago/Dashboard and Storage

  o Havoc Pennington - 'The D-BUS Messaging System'

  Havoc presented the D-BUS architecture, explaining why he wasn't just creating
  another IPC mechanism.

  o Steve Baker - 'The GStreamer Multimedia Architecture'

  Steve showed off GStreamer, it's architecture, API and how it can be used 
  in applications, demoing many fine things. Steve also was nominated for Best of
  Papers and presented again on Saturday.

  o James Henstridge - 'Remote Control and Scripting of GNOME Applications using Python'

  The title says it all really. James rocked the crowd with more of the fantastic work
  that has been done on the GTK+ and GNOME python bindings, with examples using the at-spi
  libraries.

Keynotes
========
Havoc also gave a keynote on the Saturday, with an overview of the Linux Desktop, and how he 
felt that 2004 was the year to take notice. Havoc explained the many obstacles that we need
to solve through the coming year, with particular emphasis on making sure that we take notice
of advancements in Longhorn.