A small group of seven (mainly) Debian Installer contributors took the opportunity to meet in Extremadura (Spain) for a hacking session on the graphical version of the installer, and particularly to discuss the present and the future of the Debian graphical installer. Hosted by the kind folks representing the Region of Extremadura, the meeting started on Wed 18th in the Creofonte building in a sunny and friendly Casar de C�ceres. The group was composed of five D-I contributors and two upstream developers involved with the development of the graphic libraries used by the installer; a very friendly and pleasant atmosphere built up very soon and accompanied the whole meeting, both during the work sessions, the meals and informal activities. During the meeting three local people involved with Linex, the derived distribution used in Extremadura, were present and were very helpful The facilities, both the work rooms and the dormitory, were excellent. The Creofonte building has several work rooms, a large auditorium with sound and beamer and other rooms like a library. Lunch and dinner were had in an excellent local restaurant although our experience was that this took a bit too much time. This was discussed with the local organizers. One morning we visited a local school to see how Linex is used in practice. Of course there were some system problems which made it impossible to see the system used by teachers to manage a classroom, but still the excursion gave us a nice overview. On Saturday afternoon we visited the impressive historical city center of nearby C�ceres. Unfortunately this was the only day the weather was less than perfect: the city was shrouded in fog. The limited number of attendees made it possible to work closely together on various issues and discuss various topics. A summary of the topics discussed follows. * gdk-directfb backend into gtk+ mainline: Mike Emmel, after merging his patches for the Cairo library into Cairo mainline, took some time to get in touch with the gtk+ maintainers and submitted his code, links and various patches; this was really the last piece missing and, after about three years, there'll soon be an upstream version of the libraries ready to be debianized. Sven Luther, Attilio Fiandrotti and myself are already experimenting with the above libraries. This was certainly a major achievement. * mini.iso based on gtk+2.8.10 libs: Attilio and myself were able to build a very unofficial but useful g-i image based on the very latest graphic libraries. Myself and Sven Luther got the building scripts up to date. * Frans Pop's presentation about d-i: the presentation was supposed to be useful mainly for the upstream guys, but at the end everybody got a very useful introduction on the installer buildsystem / internals. * VT switch bug fix: #339379 was finally fixed with the help of the upstream guys, Denis Oliver Kropp in particular. * Various usability issues were discussed: we mainly focused on how the future features of the g-i should look like (the terminal is one of the example that comes to mind). * Frans set up the i386 build environment and debian-cd to create Business Card CD images for the graphical installer. * wiki pages were polished, mainly the building scripts and the font page with the help of Eddy Petrisor. I'd like to thank again the organizers (Dario, C�sar, Jos�), the people who looked after us in the Creofonte building and all the attendees who turned the meeting into a total success. Regards, Davide
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