First, I wish you all a great year 2012! I will hopefully manage to write a more detailed overview of the progress made with the DeforaOS project in 2011 soon; but first, I would like to announce the following.

In November last year, AFUL [1], a French FOSS user group, launched the AFULTab contest [2]. A group of associations, companies and private individuals are sponsoring and awarding a competition, aiming at the development of an Open Source tablet system.

I am glad to announce that DeforaOS was selected and will be entering this competition, which will take place until May 1st 2012. During these four months, the development will therefore focus on the user experience of the DeforaOS desktop environment [3] on tablet hardware, while trying to integrate the distributed environment [4] and VFS project in particular [5].

This effort will be performed on top of a NetBSD base system [6] with packages from the pkgsrc [7] and pkgsrc-wip [8] projects, where parts of the DeforaOS software stack is already available. This would also be a great opportunity to leverage, extend and push the wstablet driver [9] into NetBSD.

Last but not least, this effort is also part of the Research & Development program of DUEKIN Consulting [10].

[1] http://www.aful.org/
[2] http://aful.org/metamorphose/the-afultab-contest
[3] http://www.defora.org/os/wiki/3426/Graphical-environment
[4] http://www.defora.org/os/wiki/3427/Distributed-environment
[5] http://www.defora.org/os/project/3304/VFS
[6] http://www.netbsd.org/
[7] http://www.pkgsrc.org/
[8] http://pkgsrc-wip.sf.net/
[9] http://netbsd-soc.sourceforge.net/projects/wscons/
[10] http://www.duekin.com/