As GNOME 2.0 was being announced in Ottawa, we did our own introduction of Gnome at the UERGS. The State University of Rio Grande do Sul. This university is has deployed in all the desktops Gnome.

They want us to change the default in Gnumeric, Abiword and OpenOffice to store the files in Office 95 format. This is important because not everyone uses the same spreadsheet all the time: some people prefer Gnumeric and Abiword for quick documents, and some other prefer the larger OpenOffice applications.

They are using a customized version of the Conectiva Linux distribution that includes the Ximian Gnome.

I met with Vagner from Conectiva, and hoped that Conectiva would include more support for Gnome in their distribution. We are interested to work with them.

Porto Alegre Government

Marcelo had arranged a meeting with the vice-governor of Porto Alegre to discuss the impact of free software and Gnome. Marcelo reports directly to the vice governor office and he is a liason with the UERGS.

University

That afternoon I did a talk on Mono, and some bits about Gnome at the Federal University. The talk went pretty well, it was mostly a technical presentation on Mono: the history behind it, and the reasons to develop it. I was exhausted at this point.

Procergs

The last stop of the day was a meeting with Marcos Manzoni and other representatives of Procergs the state software development company. They have a very nice piece of software called Direto GNU which is a web-based groupware solution written in Java. The question of building a protocol handler for calendars to Evolution came up. We have to research what is the status of the CAP protocol, because the last time we looked at that at Ximian, it was still a protocol either in flux or broken.

Later that night, we went for a traditional dinner at a churrasco restaurant. Here you can see me dressed as a RS Gaucho