The GNOME.Asia Summit is one of the top Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) events for developers, enterprises, officials and general users in Vietnam. The event brings together FOSS projects from Asia and around the world.

The event will feature keynotes, sessions, lightning talks, exhibitions, and a hands-on lab. Topic areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• GNOME 3.0
• Localization & Internationalization
• Mobile platforms and thin clients
• GNOME Communities
• GNOME library and application development
• Desktop deployments
• School software

The event takes place from Nov. 20-22, 2009, in Ho Chi Minh City.

Chairing this event is none other than Mario Behling, President of the LXDE Foundation, and a close friend of Singapore’s FOSS community.

If you are interested in attending this event yourself or know of attendees from Singapore, please kindly indicate in the comments below. It will be great to have a strong Singaporean representation at the event

After talking about the business opportunities with LXDE, Mario is now talking about the community at LXDE.

An interesting fact about LXDE Project is that the founder of the Project, alias PCMan, is actually a medical doctor!

A very prominent member of the LXDE community is Klaus Knopper, also the creator of Knoppix LiveCD. In fact, the recent release of Knoppix has moved from having KDE to LXDE as the default desktop environment.

One of the key messages from Mario is that an Open Source Project need both technical and non-technical members, as well as people with wide diversity in order for an Open Source Project to be successful.

Mario also gave an anecdote of a student in Taiwan who actively contributed to LXDE. This student enjoyed development work and was netted an internship with the Open Source Foundry in Taiwan, due to his involvement and experience with Open Source Development..

Mario also mentioned that he is able to get openSUSE to sponsor usb sticks if anyone is able to produce a light version of openSUSE with LXDE.

To be updated: Details steps on how to contribute to the LXDE project and GSOC LXDE Projects.

Todo: Help LXDE advertise abt GSOC to the Singapore Universities.

Hello from Barcamp 3 SG!

Many of the the #linuxnus regulars had attended Barcamp 3 Singapore held at Ngee Ann Poly on 28 Feb.

It was really nice to be able to meet many irc peeps in real life face to face . More photos here courtersy of Mario

We were also fortunate to meet up with Mario Behling, the President of the LXDE Foundation. Mario is very interested in getting people interested in contributing to LXDE. Currently, linuxNUS is making plans to have Mario down at at NUS for a meetup. So stay tuned!

LXDE Desktop

If you are interested to find out more, check out the LXDE website and wiki.

PS. Photos will be up soon once we can get hold of them