Tag Archives: ambassador

“Fedora KIT” is near to be shipped

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Posters (infinitive, freedom, voice and “fedora usb station” poster) and Fedora 9 DVDs are ready.

My PIII is right now finishing a lot of tests on “Fedora KIT” DVD.

Thanks to Lorenzo Villani who made the creation script. The “Fedora KIT” DVD basically contains a bootable Fedora with GNOME/KDE, the necessary tools to push Fedora on USB sticks (liveusb-tools and livecd-creator) and 4 live ISOs: fedora 9 kde, fedora 9 gnome, fedora 10 beta kde and fedora 10 gnome (thanks to my crazy-dirty-omgwtf patch to livecd-creator).

By the way, I’m a bit disappointed about LUGs, because when we asked who was interested to support fedora and receive a FREE (as free beer) box with gadget, more than 20 people answered (and we based our orders on that number), but now, we asked the mailing address to send gadget (and a implicit further confirmation), only 14 LUGS answered.  This means that the others were not so interested.

As I told to Max, I will bring to Fedora Ambassador Day all the remains material and I will give to everybody is interested to ;-)

I have to say thanks to Lucia and Anna (my byte-code colleagues) for help me to manage orders and prices.

Linux day 2008 (Italy) final rush /1

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After many months of planning, doing meetings with Italian ambassadors and contributors it’s time to act. Why only now? Because a lot of task were blocked by the Fedora 10 theme selection.

Linux day, will be in October 25th, and, right now will be held in about 77 cities. Next week will start the final rush.

It’s the first time Fedora is promoted in Italy; I don’t know how many people use Fedora and I know only one LUG (the LUG I belong to: LOLUG) which has more than 3 Fedora users.

There are more than 200 LUGS (both Linux User Groups and Free Software Lugs) in Italy but only about 20 of them have shown interest in Fedora. I’ve noticed that even if they don’t count Fedora users among their active members they see Fedora as a new (and fresh!) player in distribution’s universe.

By the way, I my humble opinion, in Italy, there are four LUG’s type:

  • LUG relatively new which mainly supports Ubuntu
  • LUG with old background, composed by veterans hackers which use old glorious distributions, like Slackware, Gentoo, Debian…etc..
  • LUG (IMHO) with a lot of contradictions because their members are old linux supporters but now  MAC OSX supporters (and they consider MAC as UNIX as Linux).
  • Other LUGs not present in the above types.

I repeat to avoid misunderstanding…this categorization is only my personal opinion.

Our main goal is to spread about fedora. We’ll provide (for free) to each LUGs interested:

Our second goal, is to find some people interested and maybe recruit new fedora Ambassadors.

What we wish to receive from people who collaborate with us?

  • a lot of photos
  • videos (if possible)
  • a report (which every ambassador must write)
  • few statistics data (which will be presented during FAD, in November) about:
    1. how many people attend local event
    2. how many key burned

You probably are asking yourself how the organization’s status is. We have made a lot of headway but there is a lot of work to do.

We have a lot of DVD taken from FUDCon Brno which are enough to send about 20 DVD for each LUG.
By the way, I think we must bet only on fedora USB station, but DVDs are needed to make known Fedora for this first time.

For fedora USB station, we have 2 weeks to close all the tasks, and then send it. I will give you a report about work progression soon.

FUDCon – Brno 2008

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I was in FUDCon (Fedora Users and Developers Conference) in Brno, from September 05th to 07th:

Day 1 – 05th September
I woke up at 5:20am (without alarm!! I don’t know how I did it!!), and I met Simone at 6:00am. We went together to Malpensa Airport, one of the worst Italian ones and, so far (in italian we say “è in culo ai lupi”).

After arrive to Malpensa and met Marco, we wait our flight (scheduled at 9:15), and arrived in Prague about at 11:00: Francesco was there, waiting for us (he arrived directly from Dublin). We rent a car and, after 2 hours trip we arrive in hotel.

The hotel was strange, it was more similar to an hostel than an hotel, except for the reception. The most strange stuff was the elevator…without internal doors. Rooms were nice, beds comfortable, IMO the only problem was the too small bath towel.

We arrive in university at 15:00, we caught tram and we asked to people about university, because we weren’t sure about direction, but nobody know anything about it. It was strange and a bit funny.

In university we met Gianluca and other guys I saw in Linux Tag, by the way, most of them there weren’t, in particular the German and French one.

The afternoon wasn’t hard because the hack meeting sessions ended before we arrived; in the evening we went to eat for dinner with Max. He brought us in a nice place he tried the day before.
We spoke about a lot of things, like  and we had a nice dinner.

We complete the Italian delegation when Ugolini Francesco arrived (after 9:00 pm) and we started an Italian ambassador meeting. I reported the actual organization status and a lot of thing we wish to organize, like release events, scheduled in November.
During all time, Francesco was very funny and we laughed a lot (especially about his love issues). :-D

Day 2 – 06th September
 The second day was the most important FUDCon day because there was BarCamp.

I was a bit worried because I had to do a talk and:
a) it was my first talk in English language
b) My English sucks a bit

After Max introduction, all the speakers presented their topic and chose when they wish to speak about.

My talk was about Func (Fedora Unified Network Controller), an awesome software/Python API useful to manage a large network using bash or python scripts and designed to be a basis on new management applications. If you wish to get my slides, you can find here (PDF) and here (ODP).
Marco spoke about symbolic which is basically an open source func-frontend sponsored by byte-code and written in grails, characterized by a lot of features.

I attended the Spacewalk talk, by Miroslav Suchý which was interesting, because I saw spacewalk running, for the first time. Francesco Ugolini spoke about Fedora Localization, and Ambassador issues.

During his presentation there was an interested slide about organized events: EMEA rocks a lot with 39% of organized events, and I think its importance will increase next year.

As last speech, Czech people organized a “Czech crash course” (or survivor course). What amazing and funny session!! Here the video.

The social event was nice, the location was a bit hot but after dinner, we stayed outside restaurant and the temperature was better. About at 22:00, I went with a lot of people in the downtown and I made nice pictures about it.

Day 3

Last day Me, Marco, Simone and Francesco organized func & symbolic hacking session. While I showed func I’d got a couple of bug, one in func delegation and another in jboss module I wrote months ago.

Marco and Francesco worked on Symbolic RPM (they fix ACL to fix func call); Simone and Miroslav installed SpaceWalk.

In the afternoon we returned to Prague and we did a two hours trip in the city.

In conclusion I think Czech crew did a very well job. I think this FUDCon was nice and important because was the first FUDCon in EMEA zone.

If you are interested to see my photos, just come here.

Tech Day

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Warm Up

Checking infrastructure

  • camera                                                                                  [   ok   ]
  • webcam… found two                                                            [   ok   ]
  • fedora ambassador polo                                                      [   ok   ]
  • laptop                                                                                    [   ok   ]
  • presentation….adjusted starting from here [   ok   ]
  • kobold + fedora 9 isos                                                          [   ok   ]
  • posters                                                                                  [   ok   ]

ready to go! :)

Conclusions

I don’t have time for a report, however Gianluca Varisco’s report is good and enought. In few words: nice event.

Here and here you can see photos from this event.

Linux Tag {4/4}

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My last day, my plane hour was scheduled to 12:15am, I leave the fedora ambassadors group around 8:00am and I take two hours to have a short trip in the city.

I went with underground to Postdamme Platz, then I went by walking in the city towards Alexander Platz.

I saw the Brandenburg door, the parliament and some other nice and famous buildings.

When I reached Alexander platx, I caught train to go to airport :)

Linux Tag {3/4}

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FUDCon, FUDCon, FUDCon…yep, Fedora Users and Developers Conference ;-) For us was the most important day within Linux Tag.

Max Spevak opened the FUDCon with a short introduction, after Tribalth North spoke about Fedora Electronic Lab project which aim to packages and provide some electronic application into fedora distribution. This project is interesting especially for schools and universities.

After him, the speech about FreeIPA was unfortunately suspended, so, to cover the hole in the FUDCon program Yakoov Nemroy did a short talk about Smolt.

You can read to the background of this phtos…what Smolt is ;-)


Smolt is a software which permit to users to send to central server configuration details about your computer, this software allow to understand and simplify information about linux compatiliblity.

Max Spevak spoke about fedora community and some interesting point of view about this project.
This is the best photo i never take in Linux Tag, is focused, impressive and expressive :)

Afternoon started at 15:00 with Paul Frields about “Fedora state of union”, continued with Francesco Crippa speech about Func, cobbler and puppet as huge network management solutions and ended with Jeroen van Meeuwen with a talk about revisor, a fedora tool used to make spins and custom fedora distributions.

In the evening we went to an Argentinian restaurant near hotel; we had three new people with us: Dag Wieers and Tim Verhoeven from CentOS, Lennart Poettering and another guy (my memory is a “groviera”, I don’t remember his name) from RH.

After dinner, we went to drink and had a lot of fun.

Paul tried Berlininen Waiss in both available colors: red and green (the red is the empty glass ;-) ).

Paul Frields

Me with Dag and Tim

and in the end of the night we make somestrange pictures :)

I don’t know what we are doing :P

Linux TAG 2008 {1/4}

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Linux Tag is the most important Linux event in Europe and is organized and played in Berlin. Linux Tag is characterized by an huge participations of people (expected ~10000), associations (Fedoraproject, Debian, Gentoo, GNOME, KDE, linux-gamers) and companies (IBM, Sun, Oracle…); in fact Linux Tag slogan is “when .org meet .com”.

My Fedora Ambassador participation was the first outside Italy; when I caught aeroplane I was a little bit scared because I didn’t travel outside Italy since exactly one year. I found a good environment made by nice people: great enthusiasm, great collaboration, great fun…

Wednesday 28/05

I arrived in Berlin at ~10:30 am, and I leave my luggage in my room (we lived in Film Hotel, with every room dedicated to an actor. My room was dedicated to David Niven, I don’t know who is, but Francesco was more lucky with Audrey Hepburn).
After arriving to Linux Tag in Messe Am, I met some fedora ambassadors and I took a look about stands of other associations/companies.

Fedora booth was wonderful: all people wear the official ambassador polo (my polo was a gift from Max, thanks again), two OLPC, one Asus eeePc, stickers, t-shirts and our powerful innovation USB stick creation station.

Fedoraproject stand

Our powerful USB stick creation station (thanks to Matteo Castellini for kobold).

Francesco e Matthieu while checking USB station

In the afternoon, after I attended the Aaron Seeigo’s talk about KDE 4 I stayed for about an hour near our booth to check USB station and OLPCs; I took a bit of my time to went to the stand in front of our: linux-gamers.

I loved that stand, there was two FlightGear’s stations with 3 monitors, cloches and pedals each one, connected by network as multi player game, in addition, the server was able to draw aeroplanes on the real world, using a google maps based application.

Me

Francesco

Freets on Fire with Guitar

At 16:00 I attended a talk on LVM. It was strange to see a speaker from Red Hat using an Apple computer (with Fedora 8 virtualized with VMWare), by the way this talk was interesting and showed a lot of stuff I didn’t know about LVM.

LVM Talk

After half of afternoon, my email addiction took over me and I needed to connect so I came on Development room (a room with tables and wired/wireless networking) with Francesco. In that room I found and meet other fedora ambassadors.

Francesco, Yakoov, Stefan, Andreas, Jeroen and Fabian

Gerold, Max, Paul, Yakoov and Sandro

We leave Linux Tag building at 19 and, after a pause in hotel, we went to an Italian restaurant and we ate pizza. I ever been thought Italian food is not so good outside Italy, I ate pizza without salt, I saw people mix pasta and ketchup (OMG!!!), however in that restaurant I ate good pizza so I decided to review my policy.

Fedora ambassadors after a wearying day are going to eat
(sorry but I forgot to change ISO, so I take photo using ISO 800)

Thibault and Pavel (my room-mate)

Matthieu and Stefan

After dinner, we stayed in that restaurant to speak and drink beer, I saw for the first time “Berliner Weiss”, a special drink from Berlin ().

About near 12am, me and Francesco returned in hotel but while we was on street, we decided to made a short trip in the quarter close to us; we travelled for about 15/20 minutes until we reached the old church devastated by second world war bombing and kept original as after war.

I took a lot of photos in this day but criteria like Ubuntu’s policy…high quantity, low quality ;-) so more than 70% was deleted :(

During those days I understood the level of my english, so I decided study it to arrive to FUDCon and other events a bit more skilled ;-)

[to be continued...]

Fedora 9 Release Party Report

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Probably you have already read the great Francesco Crippa report’s. I want to try to write my report in a different mode, to give you another vision about yesterday day.

As Francesco said: it was great! I completely agree with him, it was a great party, with more people than other events we organized time ago. About 40 people, in our city 40 people to a Linux event are a lot.

Poweron

My morning start with some tests on kobold for usb live creation station…

… and preparing GNOME foots to use it as track for people who come to event because the location was a bit hidden from the street…

After that, me and Lucia went to supermarket and bought some snacks and drinks (especially beer, of course ;-) ) and we stored it in a secure place:

This good snack is cooked by Lucia, who, with other people, bring something homemade, to party (cakes in particulars, but also short snacks):

12 hour after, we prepare ourself to come to Lodi: here you can see Daniele and Gianluca in the elevator during transport to event location:

yum install fedora9releaseparty.noarch

It’s time to prepare event. All things (bottles, dishes, food, cakes) need to be placed. Room need to be fedorize with posters.

service fedora9releasepartyd start

Me, Francesco e Gianluca start event with a talk about Fedora 9 releases notes and fedora SIG. My photos from here are not so good, so I steal a couple of Francesco’s one ;-)

After talk, I take place on Fedora 9 usb creation station:

I love beer…

service fedora9releasepartyd stop

Now it’s time to start to clean the place…This is Stefano…our frend, fedora user from 2 week and LOLUG active member ;-)

2:05 AM …

Shutdown

It’s time time to return home, after cleaning location event and terminate event day shutdown ;-)

I’m satisfied of this event. A special thanks to Lucia, Francesco, Gianluca, Daniele, Raffaele, Marco and other LOLUG people who help me in event organization. I reach home at 3:10 AM and today at 8 AM I was ready to go to work. :)

Now I want to sleep :P

Fedora 9 Release Party

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Party + Linux + Fedora = Beer + food + Social ;-)

I’m proud to announce first Italian Fedora 9 Release Party scheduled for 13 May 2008. We will be in Lodi (south of Milan) in Via P.Gorini 19.

We will provide food and drinks and fedora USB creation stations (powered by kobold), unfortunately we don’t have time to print CDs/DVDs, so we will bet on USB creation stations technology.

Don’t hesitate to come! Remember also to bring with yourself an USB key with at least 1Gb of free space (if you have data, kobold preserve it, but is better to backup it before ;-) )

More information (in Italian language) here. Thanks also to other LOLUG members to support us.

I hope we will meet there ;-)