Barcelona

Plenty of us the Mono developers and Linux developer got together during the Brainshare event in Barcelona. Lluis (the man behind the implementation of Mono's Remoting and Mono's WebServices support) lives in Barcelona, and Gonzalo (Mono's ASP.NET developer) was coming back from vacation from Istambul. It was the perfect chance to discuss Mono.

Juantom�s (HispaLinux's president) joined us on Monday night, and Man, Andreu and Osorio showed up on Tuesday for a few hours for dinner. We had a great time with both our new co-workers are Novell and the Spanish Linux crowd in Barcelona.

Jordi Mas who has been working on Abiword and on the catalonian support for various free software projects is developing an interest for Mono. He has plenty of Win32 experience, and he is interested in helping us move Mono's Windows.Forms support forward. He advocates following a single path: Wine-based Windows.Forms and customizations to Wine to make it track the Gtk+ theme and dropping our support for the Gtk+ based toolkit.

Spent a fair amount of time with Nat: mostly at night when tracking the best restaurants that served jam�n and the bars afterwards. Nat had a little accident with his new cell phone.

Novell

One of the benefits of joining Novell for us was that our products have a much bigger audience now. This is due to the fantastic channel that Novell has with enterprises. During the conference we met many sales and solution engineers of Novell, many of them already with contacts of people interested in Linux-based solutions (both the Novell Linux software stack for servers as well as the desktop side).

Plenty of people at the confere are considering Linux on the desktop, a recurrent topic with people we met on the hallways was large scale enterprise deployments.

XD2 has the right mix of components to make the Linux Desktop on enterprises a reality:

• GNOME 2.4 has been making tremendous progress in terms of accessibility, ease-of-use, simplicity, API stability and the Gnome Foundation who has helped focus the development on these important projects.
• OpenOffice is maturing, and we are commited to keep improving the common code base on which OpenOffice is built to help people migrate and reduce their costs of deployment.
• Mozilla: a fantastic standards compliant browser. My favorite feature today: tabbed browsing, the smartbar plugin.
• Red Carpet: A recurrent theme we hear about people doing large desktop deployments is that they need a way of managing these machines. Red Carpet does a lot today, and the management roadmap is at the center of the development effort right now.
• Evolution: Mail, calendar and addressbook, with groupware collaboration.

Nat did one of the most amazing presentations I have ever seen on why the above software stack is the right one for Linux on the desktop.

We are collaborating with other teams inside Novell to support the Novell software stack: Groupwise, i-Folder, e-Directory and Liberty Aliance authentication

More Gnome Deployments

In Andaluc�a, 20,000 Gnome desktops were just launched. I have to take a trip there to witness this again. 20,000 Gnome-based machines on 1,800 schools in Andalucia. I have to go see this. Congrats Gnome folks!

The Telecentros experience in Sao Paolo was very interesting, because the site I went to was one of the centros equipped with accessibility hardware.