Linux TAG is the first event I attended with Fedora project. My participation, this year was short, just the weekend, for the FUDCon.

As usually FUDCon was interesting and funny I met a lot of new people (the world is small but the people are many) and of course I don’t remember all their names

I arrived Friday night to – I discover the day after – Tegel Airport (instead of Schoenefeld) and I reach the other guys that were exactly in the same place of one year ago “en passant”, and of course Italian Restaurant.

The FUDCon was introduced by an interesting, as usually, keynote of Paul Frields then Barcamp sessions started. I wanted to present something but the schedule was decided the day before when I wasn’t yet arrived. Too bad.

I attended QA and git for hackers, fedoracommunity, Design for F12, Symboli 2.0 and Simon sessions talks.

I have to say thanks to Mairin to change the abits of people and bring us far from “en passant” (of course we need more woman). Sorry guys but I like to change restaurant sometimes

I also discovered why is not a good idea to say “I have a flickr account” to dutch people.

You can get some photos from my “yahoo photo” account.

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

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

In the OpenSolaris stand I spoke with a MySQL guy about past rumours and the possibility to have closed source part inside MySQL; as far as I remember he said: “Is impossible to say. I can’t say yes, but… of course, I can’t say also no”.
We spoke about the OpenSolaris community: management, development model and other stuff. I think is quite similar to Fedora community (but, of course, fedora community is better ).

During this day me and other guys enjoyed to see problems about biometrics controllers; Marco Ziesing tried to set up finger recognition but it didn’t work only for him! (LOL).

Software require to pass your finger on the sensor for three times, to allow it to memorize information: for me and other guys after third time, the cursor return and all goes ok, but for him, after third time, the program crashed….and he won also a set of kernel ops.

These are two OLPC in the Fedora booth, it’s a nice computer:

In the evening we went to a social event, organized by Linux Tag; all ambassador who paid EMEA fee receive a bathrobe as a gift. All EMEA member at Linux tag decided to dress their bathrobe to go to social event: simply wonderful.

Social event was located in a strange but nice place, maybe an old farm: unlimited drinks and meals, music, people etc..

and…shadowman appeared 

The place was divided into two main parts: inside the building there was a big table full of food, and a place to sing and dance, unfortunately the temperature was warm, so some people went in the outside part. The outside part was a small garden with some tables and a place where people grill meal for us.

Nice day and evening

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...]