This year’s Desktop Summit is taking place at Humbolt University in the middle of Berlin, one of the most interesting cities in the world. This makes it a prime starting point for taking a tour of the city. For this reason, we’ve designated some time on Thursday, August 11th for taking day trips.

When you come to registration on Saturday you’ll find representatives from some of the best tour operators in Berlin. Here’s what will be on offer.

• Walking Tour (€10): Hit the pavement with the guides from Insider Tours. They’ll give you some great insight into some of Berlin’s most interesting places.
• Bike Tour (€18): For the two-wheel inclined, the folks from Fat Tire Bike Tours would love to show you around.
• Segway Tour (€45): Hey, we’re all geeks, so maybe you’d prefer seeing Berlin from a gyro-balanced electric transporter. The folks from City Segway Tours can help you with that.

You should also feel free to book tours with other tour operators on your own. We’ve listed a few on the wiki for you.

Oh, and remember to sign-up for the Football and Volleyball matches taking place Monday, August 8th, 7-9pm if you want to play.

So the Desktop Summit is quickly approaching. In only 5.5 weeks you’ll all be arriving in Berlin getting ready for some great talks and good fun. In order to make your time in Berlin as productive and enjoyable as possible we try to keep you abreast on what’s happening here. As a public service I’ll summarize some of the more recent and pressing items.

Accomodations

Some of the deadlines have passed to get the conference rate at selected hotels. However, some still offer this rate till tomorrow (June 30th). So head over to the accommodation page and book your room. Berlin is very popular in the summer, so get your room booked early… meaning now.

Registration

If you’ve not registered yet, please do. For us, as organizers, it helps a lot if you register as early as possible. For you, though, it’s even more important. Pre-registering will help you get through the conference check-in faster, get you into the parties (beer!), and will be needed for a few other things we’ll be announcing soon.

Workshops and BoFs

The last four days of the conference will be all about getting stuff done. We’ve got lots of space for ad-hoc workshops and BoFs but are offering to let projects and groups who know they want to get together a chance to get there sessions onto the official schedule. The deadline for this is this Sunday (July 3rd). So go propose a session now. Btw, there seem to be a lot more KDE sessions proposed so far than GNOME ones. So, please propose your sessions GNOME folks!

Volunteering

The local organizing team will not be able to make this a great conference without help from the community. We’re looking for volunteers to help us with many aspects of the conference. If you’re able to help in any capacity please head over to our volunteer wiki page and sign up.

Even if you can’t make it to the conference but are familiar with Berlin you can help by going to the wiki and simply creating and filling pages with information about Berlin that’ll help attendees enjoy their stay.

Sponsors

Our sponsor page has gotten a little more colorful recently. Thanks to all our sponsors for making the conference possible.

Keynotes

Last but not least, we’ve announced the keynotes for this year. Check out interviews with Thomas Thwaite (designer and technologist), Claire Rowland (user experience guru), and Dirk Hondel (Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist at Intel). In addition, there will be one community keynote from both KDE and GNOME each; details coming soon.

As always more info to come so keep an eye on the news. Hope to see you in Berlin.

Today, we’re announcing the start of the Desktop Summit t-shirt contest. We want designs that go beyond your typical conference shirt which finds its final resting place in the closet or drawer once you’ve returned home. We’re looking for designs that reflect the passion and energy of the Free Desktop communities that The Desktop Summit represents.

The selected design will be made available for purchase to the 1000+ expected attendees. The money raised from the sale will be used to support The Desktop Summit. Please submit your design before 23.55 15th May UTC. See the rules for other submission details.

The Desktop Summit is happening in Berlin from the 6th to 12th August. It is free to attend but you need to register. If you are attending you may want to subscribe to the discussion list to talk to others who are going, we also have the IRC channel on freenode #desktopsummit.

… and you can be too…even if for only one night. That’s right! Tonight is the GNOME 3 Berlin release party.

In case you don’t think you’re invited Lennart added this to the wiki page…

Who’s invited? Everybody! Whether you are a GNOME user, a GNOME developer or a GNOME contributor, you are invited. And, in fact, you are invited if you are into KDE, too. Whether you are young or old, have long hair or short hair, you are invited. If you speak German or English, or French or Spanish or any other language of this world, you are invited. In fact, it’s kinda hard not being invited.

So don’t be shy! Come celebrate with us tonight @ c-base at 19.00.

Related posts:
Berlin GNOME 3 Launch Lounge
Berlin GNOME 3 launch party: Update and reminder

Let this be the last blog post to make you feel guilty for not yet having submitted a talk proposal to this year’s Desktop Summit in Berlin. The deadline to submit your proposal is TOMORROW (Mar. 25th, 2011).

If you have contributed in any way to one of the many Free/Libre Desktops, we encourage you to submit a talk proposal. There are slots available for Lightning Talks (3 min), Normal Presentations (30 min) and Long Presentations (45 min). Don’t be shy or modest. Write up a short proposal and give the selection committee lots of tough decisions to make.

If you need help or have questions you can get in touch via IRC on FreeNode in the #desktopsummit channel or via email at ds-team [at] desktopsummit (d0t) org.

The GNOME Berlin community is inviting you to come celebrate GNOME 3, the first major release of GNOME in almost a decade. The event will take place on Friday April 8th @ 7pm at the world-famous c-base.

You can find current info on the event’s GNOME Live page or on Facebook.

We’ve scheduled a couple talks and some entertainment for the evening. (Expect updates!)

Talks:

• Exploring GNOME 3: This talk will discuss the new features in GNOME 3 with a focus on the GNOME Shell.
• Making GNOME the OS: Lennart Poettering, of PulseAudio, systemd, Avahi fame, will discuss turning GNOME into an OS.

Entertainment:

• Daniel Holbach, of Ubuntu Community and hugging fame, will be performing a DJ set.

As a service to the community, Lennart will be available to fix anything you think he may have broken on your system.

The GNOME Foundation has supplied us with a limited number event goodies to distribute, so get there early to claim yours.

We hope to see you there!

We slept in the new flat for the first time last night. As usual, at least in Germany, it’s going to take a few weeks to get DSL connected. In our case, DSL gets connected on the 30th. This used to be the time when I’d fall into a deep depression due to withdrawal issues. However, this time is different.

For the time being I’m using the awesome new feature in Android 2.2 for sharing a mobile internet connection. Impressed with how easy it is to set up. It’s as easy as turning the feature on and setting the access point name and passphrase. Once that’s done up to 8 computers can connect as they would to any wireless access point.

Unfortunately, my mobile data plan only allows up to 200MB at 3G speed after which it gets throttled down to GPRS speeds. But it’s better than nothing and once DSL is finally connected we’ll be rewarded with 50Mbits down and 10Mbits up. That’s about 8-9 faster than what we had in San Diego for only a little more money.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ll be moving back to Berlin at the end of May. Making the move has become even more exciting after learning that I’ve been chosen as one of the new trainees for Openismus. Since Murray has made the announcement, I thought I’d introduce myself to the community.

First of all, I should state that I’m American despite what the umlaut in my last name would suggest. My last name was Wilson before taking my wife’s last name just before our daughter, Vada, was born a couple years ago. I met my wife in Berlin and am very familiar with the city, having lived there from October ’99 until late 2005. I love Berlin and am excited to be moving back.

In a few weeks I’ll be graduating with a BS in Computer Engineering from San Diego State University. While in school I interned at a small company programming mostly in C++. I learned a lot from my work there but feel like I’ve got lots more to learn.

I’ve been a long time GNOME user after being converted from KDE at about the 2.4 release. Before starting school I’d occasionally submit bugs for Ubuntu and GNOME. I even attended GUADEC in Stuttgart where I met lots of interesting folks and got really inspired. But, alas, school started and free time vanished. We then sprouted a family which is a timesink, but such a wonderful one. Having a chance to learn and contribute on the job is a chance I couldn’t pass up.

I’m very much looking forward to the opportunity that I’m getting at Openismus to learn about and contribute to the projects I’ve been following so closely for so long.

Thanks Murray and Openismus.

Since I’ve already told family, friends and finally work, I guess I’ll now tell the world. Annika, Vada and myself will be moving back to Berlin on May 27th. We came to San Diego with the intention of moving back once I was done with school, but after living here and befriending so many great people it was a little hard to finally carry through. Annika grew to love the weather that she thought she’d find monotonous and we really like the South and North park areas of San Diego. But, alas, we’ve got tickets and only a few days after I receive my degree we’ll be gone.

I’ve also put in my notice at work. I wasn’t able to work that many hours anyway due to my school schedule. Dropping the few hours I was working will hopefully make the last two months here less stressful. I learned a lot in my 2.5 years at Geodetics. I’ll miss my co-workers but I can firmly state that I won’t miss programming with MFC.

There is lots to do before we are able to leave. Next week is Spring Break and in addition to wrapping up things at work, I’ll be busy putting things on Craigslist and Ebay. Eventually, we’ll need to get rid of the car and do something with my Vespa. I don’t want to sell my scooter but I definitely can’t afford to send it over; at least not now.

I feel like this move may be our last. Ever since watching the fall of The Wall on TV in 7th grade, I’ve been intrigued by Berlin. After having lived there I fell in love with it and I feel it’s where our small family will be staying for some time.

Now that I’ll be a little less busy I hope to start blogging again. Once I’m in Berlin I’ll have lots to blog about. More on that later.

On Sunday I installed Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper) at Sprachenatelier Berlin e.V. a small language school in Friedrichshain. It took all night and I’m still not finished. Someone had installed a Tomcat server that was serving a custom jsp app. Having never installed tomcat nor having ever developed Java Server Pages and only finding out about it when I arrived I didn’t have enough time to do all the other thngs plus learn about tomcat and install jsp apps. So I installed Ubuntu on the 4 “student” computers and left the 2 office computers for some time in the next couple days. On Monday in the comfort of my own home I learned about Tomcat and I had everything running in an hour or so. I also wasted a good amount of time ridding the single duel-boot Windows install of viruses and spyware.

I’ll do an Ubuntu 6.06/Tomcat install how-to soon. No, really… I promise.

On Tuesday Annika and I packed a picnic and went to the Fan Mile to watch the Germany vs. Italy match. Of course, Everyone knows the outcome of that. I was so looking forward to the penalty shoot-out. Oh well. May Italy suffer a humiliating defeat in the finals. They are such whiners; falling at the slightest touch. I’m hoping Portugal wins it all now.