I’ve been in release frenzy mode lately. Yesterday, we managed to get eBox 0.7.1rc1 out! This (pre)release fixes tons of bugs, adds PDC support and features a installer based in Sarge Debian Installer + 2.6.12 kernel. And a few hours ago we have released Battle for Wesnoth 1.1.1, with lots of new features, graphics (see new castle) and enhancements. Are you one of the few who hasn’t tried Wesnoth yet?

After a bunch of trains, subways, planes, buses and taxis I’ve finally arrived at Oaxtepec (Mexico) to attend DebConf6, the annual Debian conference. Besides doing some Debian work, having some fun with long-time-no-seen friends and enjoying the swimming pool, there are several interesting talks I’m interested on:

• SELinux UML instances, by Manoj Srivastava
• The X Community - History and direction, by Keith Packard, who has been involved in X development since the 80s
• Experiences with large Custom Debian Distributions installations, by Knut Yrvin (Skolelinux)
• Scratchbox 2, cross-compiling in Debian, by Riku Voipio
• Debian and the $100 laptop, by Jim Gettys
• debian-installer internals
• several interesting BoFs about optimizing boot time, libapt-front, embedded Debian, …

Time for lunch here!

So I was having these great holidays in the beach with some friends, getting a tan, swimming in the sea, chasing some fish wearing really-big-nose water goggles, drinking beer by the seaside, … but I had to come back to Zaragoza to take my driving license exam. I’ve gone to the driving school today to ask what time was the exam taking place exactly, and I’ve been told that the exam has been moved to Monday (can this happen in any other European country besides Spain?). As I only have holidays this week, I can’t attend my exam next Monday, and thus, the whole thing sucks, specially the getting-back-from-holidays-sooner bit. To keep my karma up and given the fact that I’d some free time to spare as I no longer needed to study for the exam, I’ve visited some bookshops and purchased some books (namely, The Ages of Lulu, Fahrenheit 451, The adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Notes from a Small Island), and then I’ve gone to the park and read for a while (actually, I’ve finished reading Wilt, by Tom Sharpe, which I started reading yesterday in my way back from the beach). I’ve thought about blogging about the books I read, although I’m not sure if I’ll manage to do it. In the end, it has been a nice day and I’ve come home quite relaxed again. With regard to free software stuff, Wesnoth 1.2 is going to be released really soon now, as well as KOffice 1.5.2, I’ve already registered for Akademy 2006 in Dublin, I created my first attempt of flake plugin some days ago, …

I was waiting for my flight to Mexico in Barajas and suddenly realized that I still needed a book to try to make a bit more pleasant the 13-hour flight I was about to take. I was looking for a “light” one, something funny and quickly readable. After looking for a while, I chose Brand new friend, by Mike Gayle. Mike Gayle writes a kind of chick lit for males (actually for both genders, I would say). In this book, a guy (Rob) is asked by his long-term girlfriend to leave London to live with her in Manchester. Besides having to move, that also means leaving behind his best friend. At this point the book shows how difficult can be to find new friends once you’re past your “university years”. Rob tries to meet new people quite unsuccessfully for a long time, but he eventually finds a friend, who happens to be a “she”. From then on, the book revolves around the question: “Can a man and a woman just be ‘best friends’”? The book fulfilled my expectations (which were low ), it was funny and I had already finished reading it when we were flying over New Orleans. Definitely not a life changing book, but a compelling read nonetheless.

Woah, tons of time without blogging again, and too much stuff to write about, I’ll be brief Last month has been great , I visited London for three days with some workmates, then I attended DebConf6 in Mexico, and the two weeks I’ve been in Zaragoza (my home city) since I was back from there have been also great, enjoying a lot with friends. For Battle for Wesnoth fans, we’re heading towards 1.2 now, which will be our second stable release ever, and should be out in mid-July. Be sure to help us trying out our latest development release, reporting bugs and so. Today I’ve made a donation to the Swedish Pirate Party, I really expect they can get themselves in the Swedish parliament, and then I should consider moving to Sweden

So that’s all, my three-year relationship with my wonderful (ex)girlfriend finished as fast as it started and a bit more painfully
To be fair, it has been really great, which just makes the whole issue a bit worse just now, but at least I don’t have the feeling of “having lost my time”, which is a really good thing. I’m kind of devastated now, but discovering that you have tons of great (old and new) friends ready to help you through it and that FLOSS development still inspires you, makes things look really brighter. In addition, I’m going to finally get rid of long-time procastinated items in my todo list, like getting my driving license and improving my spoken English. PS. Wesnoth 1.1.2 is out!
PS2. Oh, I’ve just known about ETA cease-fire, now that’s good news, well, not for all.

My last blog post was over two months ago. I guess that’s enough to get an idea about how busy I’ve been lately (or for how long can I procastinate blogging ). In my free software life, there has been a new Wesnoth release, 1.1, the first post-1.0 one, and 1.1.1 is really near and has plenty of new features/graphics. Besides Wesnoth, I’ve built KOffice 1.5-beta packages something like a hundred times in the last two weeks, the first fifty were targeted for Sarge, in order to get klik bundles that could be shipped in the OpenDocument Fellowship CD that was going to be distributed somewhere. The next fifty ones to get a nice KOffice 1.5-beta for current unstable/experimental users. I’ve also sponsored adept and katapult uploads to Debian, and they’re already in at last. KDE in Debian also has KDNSSD enabled now, using avahi as backend. In real life, besides working, I’ve moved to a new home, in fact I’m living on my own home for the first time. And the best news, I’m living with my girlfriend . In these two months we’ve already bought a Playstation 2, a DVD/DivX player and a bike-in-a-bag. After struggling with several companies we already have DSL (4Mb, weeeee!) and I’ve already ordered a Mac Mini to have a nice Debian server. We’re also waiting for a Lego Mindstorms RIS 2.0 PS. I already have a flight for Debconf6! See you in MEX

So, at last, after lots of months of frenzy development, eBox Platform is out, released under the GPL. Basically eBox platform includes a framework to create modules which control system services and lots of already available modules to setup network configuration, firewall,
NTP, DHCP, proxy cache, Jabber, file sharing, mail, … and more! Of course, using Debian as base distribution And yup, it has been developed by my company. We really expect somebody find it useful and step into eBox development. For a quick run, you can consider trying the eBox Live CD (btw, mirrors are welcome).
:) Update: For those interested, eBox is written in Perl, using Mason to write the HTML templates, thanks to Rhonda for talking me about Mason for the first time

XOrg 6.9 RC1 was released some days ago, and yesterday David Nusinow uploaded it to Debian experimental. XOrg 6.9 RC1 features EXA, a new 2d acceleration architecture for X11, developed by Trolltech KDE hacker Zack Rusin, that should improve Composite performance a lot. I tried again xcompmgr, kompmgr and transset and they behaved a bit better than they did the last time I tried, but it’s still not acceptable for permanent desktop usage. I’m really looking forward to the next XOrg releases