fisl day 2

arrived yesterday at 13:30, went straight to the hotel and had a shower then hit the fisl 7.0 show floor. first stop was the infomedia booth where zack and i did a televised talk show (our own helio was the host). it went rather well and is an interesting way to get the word out. i've seen quite a bit of community-driven mass media outreach since coming here, ranging from informational booklets that are distributed in the thousands to the public to videos. i think the rest of the free software world could learn from the people here when it comes to getting the word out on a grass roots level.

i'm up in about 45 minutes to talk about kde4, and am hoping to be able to hack in some opengl support for the plasma icon demo i'll be showing. thanks to mandriva, i'll have a laptop with video out to do the presentation on ;)

i'm sitting in the insigne booth writing this, which is a local kde-based distribution. most of the computers on the floor (including all the public terminals) here are running kde and aside from the three macs at the infomedia booth, i haven't seen any proprietary operating systems. very nice.

i also just found out about an 80,000 system installation of kde in schools here in brazil. i'm sure it is common knowledge amongst the brazillians and even other latin and south american groups, but was news to me. i keep hearing about more installations in this part of the world along with various development and business initiatives. they really deserve more attention as role models and case studies down here...

oh, and the countryside is beautiful as well. not that i've seen much of it yet. mostly a stroll through some neighbourhoods around the hotel we're staying at in porto alegre last night and some very nice panoramas through airplane windows. hopefully i get to see a bit more of the outside world before i leave on sunday.