Desktop Developers' Conference - Day2

I slept and missed the Wine talk by CodeWeavers CEO Jeremy White.

Next talk was about Games on Linux. These two guys hang around and port all kind of games to Linux for companies. They showed us some demos of Unreal Tournament. Alan Cox also showed up.

Then was the interesting talk about GCJ and the Desktop by Thomas Fitzsimmons or Red Hat. Seems like in a year or two we can really use gcj to compile and run all Java programs, which makes Java a good candidate for the higher-level language for GNOME desktop.

After that was the talk on Eclipse by Billy Biggs. He actually focused on the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) they have implemented and Eclipse is based on. Sounds like an interesting widget set for Java.

Then was the talk about New Features of Qt 4, delivered by Jasmin Blanchette that I will cover in the next post.

And finally, Getting to the Next Web was delivered by the Mozilla.org founders Mike Shaver and Brendan Erich. They talked about all these different markup languages. More importantly, they told us how SVG 1.2 is not what you think it is. It is Evil(TM). It even has a socket API in it! And that they are not going to implement the dirty sutff in it. They will implement SVG 1.1 and a few parts of 1.2. The rest was open discussion...

This marked the end of conference. I asked everybody to come for a group photo which we made. Here it is:

There was also a unsponsored pub-night for the coming OLS'04 that we were invited too. I met Harald Welte, the netfilter & iptables chairman. We happened to become friends last year in OLS'03. I talked more with Telsa, and a few other people. Then I joined the table with gstreamer developers and Owen Taylor, and soon found myself talking Pango with Owen, which lasted an hour. Then we joined Daniel Viellard and a KDE developer, talked about libxml a bit, and the KDE guys noted that they want to use GNU FriBidi in KSVG, the SVG engine for KDE!

We came back to hotel, shook goodbye hands with Owen, hoping to meet next year at GUADEC in Germany...

¶ 4:40 AM