Chemnitzer Linux-Tage was this year again a great event. The mainly german speaking visitors enjoyed a well organised fair of mixed open source community and business booths, talks and workshops.

On the Oyranos project booth discussed old friends various colour management topics and concepts. We felt that colour management terms and concepts inside the open source community are behind the awareness of other comparable graphic techniques like for instance font rendering. The more I find it amazing, that there is a core of users, which try hard to understand ICC techniques.

One topic with neighboring openSUSE people was of course the strong rose awareness around colour management during the recent discussions on the KDE core-devel list. What I found encouraging is, many people inside the KDE community see it important to collaborate. And so I think we in the OpenICC community should accelerate on our formal recommendation efforts for sharing colour data and configurations. An other related point was made, that it would be not helpful to stall projects in a too long wait for constructive discussions to come to live. I tried this sometimes and see now that balance between discussion and start for actual work could be improved. Good to get so many feedback about OpenICC core stuff in great face to face discussions.

With openSUSE’es Tom I discussed his improvements on the new open build service (OBS) search page layout, which is a great ongoing work. But much to my surprise he could point me to a nice and long wanted OBS feature, which I now integrated into the Oyranos download pages. That is, OBS provides embeddable download instructions for each distribution package of a project. These easy instructions show end users, how to install the desired software including all dependencies from OBS. Thanks for this valuable hint, which makes our colour management packages in OBS much more accessible to our users.

Looking around I found the mageia distribution interesting and would find it great to see this distribution integrated into OBS once a successful version 2 comes out this spring. But of course there are other interesting distributions out there to integrate into OBS. One advantage of OBS for me as a maintainer is as well, that I can test my packages prior to release in one go.

On the FFmpeg booth we discussed the idea that 3D lookup textures are a very simple way of exchanging colour transforms. I will surely look deeper into this and want to find a useful format to exchange 3D shader data for OpenGL textures. In CompICC a 16-bit PPM image helped for debugging. Lets see if we can find a more common and useful format to reuse.