Marco Steinhäuser

More or less spontaneously, I decided to go to “Chemnitzer Linux-Tage” for the first time, the probably second biggest Linux event in Germany, and was really surprised: Not only Linux geeks but a very mixed up audience of Germans and Non-Germans, developers, administrators and interested people in any kind of open source software found together in a very familiar and comfortable atmosphere.

In my role as OXID Community Guide I usually go to such events to talk to owners of interesting projects and maybe find synergies and a surplus for the OXID community. The entry fee at € 5.- was more than reasonable and to be honest: I found more valuable contacts there than on my CeBIT visit a couple of days before.

Of course, I visited the booth of my favorite Linux distribution run by the guys of Ubuntu Deutschland e.V. and furthermore, the Communtu project. Communtu is a Ubuntu based Linux distribution that lets you choose which application projects to install but most interesting is the backup feature: When you have to refresh your installation (what may happen from time to time), you are able to store your complete configuration to the Communtu server and moreover, download a CD or DVD for your new installation without loosing any application.

Also the PIM and CRM project tine 2.0 is absolutely worth mentioning. Tine is based on the Zend Framework and makes extensive use of the JavaScript library jQuery. The project is still young, doesn’t provide that many features that you would expect and really took me some time to install it today. But from it’s approach, it is very promising and the code looks clear on a first glance.

YaCy is a Java based search engine software that I hope to get evaluated for use on oxid-esales.com as well as on OXIDforge as a replacement for the Google search service we implemented presently.

After listening to two talks about IT management and OTRS (Open Ticket Request System) I hooked up with the OTRS guys Shawn and Martin and apparently it turned really, really, really interesting. We use this Perl-based software very successfully in our support department and our installation needs to be adapted for our needs. Shawn is the new OTRS Community Manager and Martin actually the inventor of the OTRS system. Hope to collaborate very tightly with this guys in the future.

For the next year, I personally would really like to have an OXID booth at the “Chemitzer Linux-Tage”. Let’s see whether we can sort it out.

Tomorrow morning I will officially and proudly announce our collaboration and development platform available at http://dev.oxidforge.org. The software basis is FusionForge, a GForge fork. This platform seems to be ideal for team-work on committing code, language extensions, localizations, themes and much more.

There is just one thing we are still suffering from: How the heck shall we call that baby?
Of course, “collaboration and development platform” or even the URL name is much too long while “dev” is too short and not very meaningful. How about something like “developer zone” or “com-zone”? The word “forge” is already occupied by the whole OXIDforge thing including download pages and so on.

Let me know about your ideas.

Very good news if you want to run a modern, free and open source e-commerce plattform from Portugal:
Thanks our Portuguese community member, monteiro, Portuguese translation is now available for OXID eShop. In a first step, I put the complete file to the language section of OXIDforge. This file for displaying the front end in the correct translation, is available under GNU GPL.

Of course, you may use Portuguese lang.php as an additional language if you run your shop somewhere else then Portugal. Just make sure you translated your products and categories as well.

Also, an Italian fellow, tassoman, found his way back to the forums and promised an Italian translation to come up soon. His request for implementing gettext is interesting enough: AFAIK the PHP library “gettext” has got a lot of clients that would make both, front and back end translations pretty easy. I handed that proposal over to OXID’s shop product management.

For future, maybe we could use the new collaboration plattform on OXIDforge that we are working on for translation stuff as well as for new themes, templates or modules. It will open up the next few days.

Awesome, awesome, awesome

I never expected 35 (!) people bringing together after this very short-term announcement, I was really surprised! Obviously, most attendees did not even see the direct announcement but heard it somehow as a rumor from their friends: “Did you hear about that Open Source Meeting? I cannot go but you ought to… “. And this is how it actually shall work. Hey, Leipzig was over the Munich line of “Attendees of the first OSS meeting”!

Although the aim of this kind of meetings is to bring users together with the “makers” of open source, of course, mostly the enthusiasts took part this (first) time. Another aim is the comprehensive exchange of experiences over the different projects. Interestingly, there was no convention like this before. However, we happily welcomed Linux users, system administrators, guys attending the Open Street Map (OSM) project, a hand full of freelancers and developers of the zope project.

The talks were pretty interesting and full of requests: Carsten spoke about the Mozilla project, Kai about working with DTP applications on Linux, Florian about OpenOffice.org (told us some secrets ) and Volkmar about the OSM project. Of course, in conventions like that the requests go like: What is your business model?, Where do you get your salary from?, What does the project do with your committed data? Interesting enough, isn’t it? The atmosphere thankfully was very laid back.

We thank Jan from GET AG for attending and sponsoring the rides of the long-distance attendees, also MaFi for the canvas an Henrik (yasni.com) for the projector. Not to forget Karsten (SPIZZ) for the location, the Internet connection and the nearby bar.

As we agreed, the next Open Source Meeting Leipzig will take place in about quarter a year (Feb?). And yes, you are allowed to bring your proprietary friends then

See more pictures of the event here:
http://picasaweb.google.de/floeff/OpenSourceTreffenAm23November2009InLeipzig
http://picasaweb.google.com/carstenbook/OpensourcetreffenLeipzig231109?feat=directlink#

On November 23th at 7 PM the First Open Source Meeting in Leipzig will take place in the cellar of Cafe SPIZZ. Florian Effenberger from OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V. and Carsten Book from Mozilla Corporation will attend and speak about their projects. This evening will be held in a similar style to Webmondays.

Many thousand programmers in the world code free software in their spare time or supported by their companies. They follow the principle of Richard Stallmann, who proclaimed already in the early 60th that program code is nothing else than thoughts and thoughts are free. From this, the GNU project evolved that produced the first open source applications. The most prominent examples are the operating system Linux as well as the Mozilla project with the Firefox browser or the office suite OpenOffice.org.

Today, open source software is stable, secure and functional. More and more public and private organizations in many countries are keen using it. Also the European Union as well as several German Federal Ministries support the usage of open source software and thus boost the competition between the software producers.

Hashtag for Twitter: #osstreffen
Wiki: http://ostle.musterdenker.de/
XING: https://www.xing.com/events/opensourcetreffen-leipzig-431162
facebook: http://www.facebook.com/#/event.php?eid=184149739903

Of course, you have to announce your new blog posts over Twitter. A cool twitter client is not the worst idea – I personally decided to run Twhirl for this purpose because Twhirl is able to run multiple accounts.
As Twhirl is based on the platform Adobe Air, you first have to install this one.

1. Go to http://get.adobe.com/air/, download it to your /home/ folder.
2. Open the command line and type chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
3. Type chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
4. The Adobe Air installer will open up now in a new window. You will have to confirm the terms and conditions.

Time to install Twhirl:

1. Go to http://www.twhirl.org/ and click to the install button on the right hand side.
2. Again, an install routine opens up (inside Adobe Air). Choose your options for the Twhirl installation here.
3. A twhirl instance now should pop up. Enter your Twitter name(s) and your password here and you are done.

If you are in business, your companies’ IT policy is perhaps to run Microsoft products like Windows OS only. Although you might have a bit of freedom in this manner (let’s say because you are presenting on Open Source software fairs and need to run a Linux for this case) the switch might be not that easy thinking about Microsoft Exchange, Skype, VPN, Microsoft Office and so on. For me, it is really fun working on Linux and I would like to switch over completely as soon as possible. That’s why I ran Kubuntu as a parallel operating system.

Somehow, I got rid of running KDE on my Ubuntu installation and so I decided to install the Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10) on a Gnome basis and I was really surprised about it’s simple handling. By the way: Gnome was suspect to me all the times I tried it before. Today I believe it was only about a simple and stupid marketing effect: I didn’t like the combination of brown, purple and orange on the desktop…

So now, let’s beginn with the Skype installation.
As you might know, Skype is proprietary software but obviously everybody in IT uses it. Nevertheless, the installation on Ubuntu is possible even including the update services. First of all you have to implement the Medibuntu sources to your sources.list file running this command on the terminal:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list \
--output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list &&
sudo apt-get -q update &&
sudo apt-get --yes -q --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring &&
sudo apt-get -q update


As a next step, install the Skype application:

sudo aptitude install skype


Despite Skype is only provided with version 2.1 on Linux, you are done mate! Somehow you will be connected to your colleagues, friends, etc. in this first step. More to follow.

After my one-week-trip to Barcelona (maybe another blogpost will follow about it) I will go to Freiburg next week, gladly taking part in OXID’s Partner Day 2009 on October, 27th. As usual, a lot of OXID partners will come presenting themselves, discussing about OXID eSales news and attending the so called “Best Solution Award”, an award for the best shopping cart software implementation split up into different categories like design or technical implementation.

Actually, the most valuable events will happen between the talks: Getting in touch with the guys implementing OXID shops day by day and face to face with the clients, will bring more insights during the coffee breaks and in the smoking corners. As I feel that some of our (esp. old-established) partners did not get the Open Source strategy yet I, as the community dude, hope to can bring over this spirit mostly in personal conversations.

Looking forward to see all that mates I know mostly from telephone or Skype conversations, especially our foreign partners to come from Czech Republic, Lithuania, Saudi-Arabia and India.

Alright, you’re not registered yet? Here we go [German]:
http://www.oxid-esales.com/de/partner/partnerworld/anmeldung-oxid-partnertag