Liberdade na Fronteira : LaKademy 2018

Past October 2018, Florianópolis hosted the 6th edition of LaKademy, the Latin-American KDE sprint. That moment is an opportunity to put together several KDE developers – both veterans and newcomers – from different projects in order to work for improve their respective software and plan the promotional actions of the community in the subcontinent.

In the technical side, I worked with Cantor, Sprat, the KDE Brasil and LaKademy websites.

For Cantor, I researched some new ways to implement backends, specifically the use of websockets. It is my old idea for a recommended approach to be used in order to support all backends in all platforms. But, like in previous attempts, I am in doubts if it is a interesting way and if the objectives could be achieved by it. Well, definitively it needs more research.

Sprat is a text editor aimed to write scientific papers. The software implements the Amadeus methodology for writing papers and it is more like a collection of common sentences to be used in specific sections of a paper.  Sprat is my toy project and I expect to release this year and turn it a KDE project in near future.

KDE Brasil website uses an old Drupal infrastructure. I and Fred researched for some plugins in order to import the texts to WordPress and currently we are studying how to do this task.

Last, I ported LaKademy website to Jekyll. It needs some work yet but I expect will be available soon.

In the social side, we discussed some activities for KDE this year like go back to FISL and Latinoware, try to go to new events in Latin-America (DebConf and Cubaconf, we are looking to you), organize the “Café com Qt” event (our distributed event about Qt and KDE), feedback about the management of KDE Brasil group chat in Telegram, our new promo materials to be produced and distributed in events here, and more.

About social side I helped some newcomers in tasks like code review process in KDE and answer some doubts about Qt.

LaKademy is a great opportunity to meet other KDE developers and work to increase our community. Last years KDE took a prominent role in free software community in Brazil, and we are planning to expand it for different countries. We expect to organize next LaKademy in some country outside Brazil and work hard to expand the community in the subcontinent.

LaKademy 2018 Group Photo

See you in LaKademy 2019!

Mageia Blog (English) : It’s Artwork Time – Mageia 7 Artwork Contest is Open

As with every release, the artwork for Mageia 7 comes from you, the great community that supports and makes Mageia possible. It’s time to start the process of getting Mageia 7 ready for release, updating all of the artwork and designs that will make it look great and unique. As in previous years, we’re looking for your contributions and ideas, but not just images and photos – if you have icons and logos, or ideas on how login screens or animations should look, then it’s time to discuss or show them off.

Image credit – XKCD

We will normally choose a digital abstract piece using the colours of the Mageia logo for the signature background. It should be easily cropped to different aspect ratios without losing the feel of the image and have a resolution of at least 3,200 by 2,400px, in order to accommodate a wide variety of monitors.
Alternative background and screensavers have less restrictive guidelines, so if you feel like flexing your creativity, we’d love to see what you come up with.

Rules

The contest begins today, 30th of November and will run until the 28th of December, giving good time and hopefully some holidays for everyone to be creative.
Mageia will provide 1 official background, 10 additional backgrounds and all the other bits we do to make Mageia look great. If you’d like to participate, it’s easy:
Please submit your work to the Mageia 7 artwork drop. You also have the option to send a link to the Atelier mailing list.
The Atelier team will choose 10 backgrounds from different contributors to be included in the “additional backgrounds”.

Prerequisites

• Minimal size: 3,200×2,400 px for images, preferably svg for icons
• No borders
• No text inside: the Mageia logo may be placed for show, but will need to be removable
• Scalable or croppable for all possible aspect ratios: 4:3, 16:9, 16:10 etc.
• License: CC By SA 3.0 or later

Please also have a look here for more information about things you have to watch out for, or to see previous Mageia wallpapers. Some screensavers and the Mageia 6 background are uploaded on the artwork drop for reference.
Photos will be considered for screensavers and additional backgrounds provided no recognizable people are visible. Please avoid copyrighted artwork, or, you must own the copyright and agree to the CC By SA 3.0 license.
All the work needs to be original with the source files (svg, xcf, etc) available and within Mageia’s artwork guidelines. Please upload a png or similar as they are much easier for previewing. We hope that these guidelines will make everything clear and help you to make something that will make Mageia look great. The guidelines cover the Official Mageia Logo, colour scheme, website motif, fonts, wallpaper and other elements. The Mageia official logo is also covered by our Trademark Policy.
Take a moment to learn the rules, then, jump in and create with us!

Final choice

The final winners will be chosen by the Mageia council and announced on the Mageia blog.
We’ll also try and put together some goodies for the winners, maybe a T-shirt, USB keys and pens or something along those lines.