One thing is sure. This will be my last Linux Fedora.

Instead of reinstalling I just update with preupgrade. So far so good. Apart for a crash in the kernel during the boot, some errors in the configuration of the Xorg, kernel panic and random problem here and there, hammering, I finally managed to make it works.

Gnome 3 looks good.

I will write something about it soon.

Recently I got a new laptop, and I decided to perform a new installation from scratch of Fedora 14. Keeping the same base system, probably wouldn’t have worked well at all, because the new machine was quite different from the previous. To avoid problems I kept the backup of the old laptop’s configuration.

I have to say that the first impression was normal: neither good, nor bad. I was not impressed. Although the operating system got some improvements during last years (hardware recognition, software stability), still is not enough to compete with other operating systems.

The time of Windows XP/Vista is crap is ended. Windows 7 has an acceptable quality and good stability. It hurts to say but the competitors for desktops solutions are now quite stable and good-looking. In the last releases of Fedora for example I didn’t see a feature list with important news.

Looking at the future I really don’t see very good prospectives, at least in Desktop area. Until companies are starting to invest money in development and stop talking bananas on developing communities nothing will change. The big opportunity of “Linux on Desktop” was during the last two years but was a fail not because of Linux, but because of the fail and not modern concept of net-books.

Now the market left is shared between iPhone and Android. Ignoring the first which is declared and clearly closed source, Android is open source just for marketing, not at all in the philosophy.

We will see. I think 2011, for the first year, Linux will start loosing market share, in favor of tablet, pad and smartphones.

My first event, LinuxTAG + FUDCON in Berlin, 2008

After new year’s eve I had in mind to try to start write more on the blog, but is quite hard. I wanted also to write this post post because is time to make my decision official.

I’m officially leaving the Fedora community, namely the ambassadors community which was the one I was more involved. I want to say also thanks to everybody I’ve met (virtually and not), because it was really nice to know you and to have this experience.

I really liked the Fedora community and the ambassador spirit. Unfortunately nothing is forever, and since some months ago I had the necessity to change, because different factors, some on my side, (basically my priorities are changed) and some related to fedora itself: I cannot not to mention the bad change of Red Hat policy and governance, despite people struggling about the independency of Fedora, is influencing the whole Fedora system (in good and bad).

In these two years, I learned a lot, I got a lot and I had the opportunity to give lot. Of course I had good and bad moments, successful and failure projects. The growing of the Italian community was one of the most evident failure that I remember, but I have to admit it was even better than a success, because I learned more from this failure than anything else (anyway other people, after me, are doing the same mistakes).

In conclusion I want to say again Thank You to everybody I’ve met. As I said also before, nothing is forever, don’t exclude the fact that soon we can meet again.

In advance I can say it was a beautiful experience.

I arrived on Friday afternoon and I met the other fedora ambassadors for the EMEA Ambassador meeting, let me say meeting face to face is worthy more thatn 1000 characters typed on IRC. It Was a pleasure to see a lot of  new faces and meet again all the veterans after long time. A lot of Greeks and a lot of people coming from The Netherlands.

On Saturday afternoon I gave a speech on Groovy. It was a really base introduction starting from a Java code. The room was completely full of people, and let me say the java room were only from  people really interested to, it was far from the whole event, so every person there was more interesting. At the end the talk went pretty well. I was so nervous and I made a lot of mistakes while typed my code live, I also broke it swapping missingMethodException and methodMissing().
Anyway the good news for me is that globally groovy is a technology that still gain a lot of people, considering is not anymore the hottest one (I mean the one under the reflectors, like Scala is right now).

I didn’t follow any talk, I spent all my time talking with a lot of  people in particular Fedora ambassadors, to have improve my network with them. This time my english was much better and I could contribute more with my thoughts.

I stayed almost all Sunday at Fedora booth. I left it just to have help from sspeitzer to flash it with cynogemod. We dumped it and we were close to start the flash, but I needed to backup my data before so we didn’t go further. I still trying to syncronize my calendar but seems no calendar alternative applications are available on Android (and this sucks).

The social events were really amazing, we went twice to Delirium Cafe and I can say Belgian beers are amazing! I Love them!

What it will remains impress in my mind, from this FOSDEM, it will be the friendly spirit and the coperation we had. It was impressing how we managed the booth and the organization, in particular was terrific the cooperations cross-distribution we have with other guys from Debian, Centos… I believe the decision of the FOSDEM organization to mix the distributions rooms was a good choice.

It was worthy for my coming to this event, I went home with a lot of new ideas and  motivations.

And I discovered that I love Brussels!

Other photos here.

Before talking about the conference, I would like to talk a bit about the story of this event. Since I had the first contact and we got introduced to the possibility to have an active participation there, I was convinced on the importance of it. As Italian ambassadors we had to consider it as a key event.

Everything was possible thanks to Emanuele, friend and university mate, involved in some NPO of the area: LUGMan, Protezione civile, ARCO, etc. During MemoByte 2009, he introduced us to this fair and propose a huge Fedora participation.
I attended the Summer edition on August with Davide to have a look at the area and a better idea of the place. I was really impressed about it. Basically, the exposition area is divided into two parts: the exposition and the conference room with spots for 250 people.

The initial proposal and idea was to fill the conference room with talks during all the fair; I could say my best wish was to have Chitlesh Goorah speaking about Fedora FEL.

Unfortunately (and sadly) the Italian community didn’t answer very well (when I proposed it I got as answer only complains about the distance, the place, this and that…and so on…), so we (me and Emanuele) decided to do something lighter, less heavy (even for who organized) and with less resources required: a booth in the exposition area.

The (dream) team was composed by 5 people: Me, Alexjan, Marina, Davide and Lorenzo. The plans was to get there on Friday evening (I arrived on Saturday morning), stay there until Sunday evening. Due the impossibility to came back every night I arranged to sleep in an hostel near Cerea.

The exposition was really good, basically full of electronic, used stuff, radio amateurs, and various mixed booths. Indeed it was full of people; the organizations estimate around 10000 ~25000 people attended the event. We got also a really nice position, we were placed near the entrance, where all the people passed by after entering in the area.
A lot of people stop by and try the computers, ask questions and talk with us; statistically speaking most of them were above 40 years old, but I saw also some young people (not so many anyway).
The most common question people asked us were: “why not Ubuntu?” and “what are the differences?”; someone asked also “What is Linux?”. Next time I’ll bring a “fedora starter kit” with the most Frequently Asked Questions.

I really like the way we handle this event. My organization was a bit confused at the beginning because 1000Km distance are not handy but the team did and excellent job. In fact I cannot to say thanks to Stefano, who didn’t join us but did a fundamental job by helping me, like my right hand.
On my side, there are a lot of stuff that have to be improved, we manage successfully to get some CDs and DVDs (thanks to fedora) but due to some problems I couldn’t print the latest 4 foundation banner, we used the old Freedom, Voice and Infinity one.
Next time I want to design and try a new gadget concept. Instead of having CDs and DVDs I want to prepare and give a transparent plastic CD cover without a CD/DVD inside, but just information about:
• what is fedora
• how download and burn it
• how to join

Why this? Because, in Italy at least, most of the people who ask for CD/DVD don’t really need it, they need only the cover and the information printed on it.

Last but not least, this, for now, will be the last even I’ll organize in Italy. I’m now busy on FAmSCo stuffs and I still have to getting in and being more productive. Moreover the distance doesn’t help me, and I would like to see if the Italian community can walk without me.

I also decided to give my Ambassador polo, which is really big for me (I’ll get a new one two size less) to Alexjan. Like Max give to me for my involvement in Fedora, I’ll give to him because he is really doing good stuff for Fedora.
I have to congratulate with him and with all of the team, for the passion, the care and the effort they put on this event: I have to give my welcome to Marina, who will join our ambassador community.

In conclusion, this event was double worthy. Looking the relation with the outside world, we spot in a prolific (linux speaking) area and will give us opportunities to have at least two/three events per year. Looking internally we enhance our team, our relations, I believe having a face-to-face speaking was 10000 better than talking only via email and fortified your relation for present and future.

You can find additional photos from the event here.

I finally want to do something different for Fedora, writing less code and start getting some responsibility, in order to grow in some aspects I’ve seen before.

Many many compliments to who have been elected and also for who haven’t, I’m sure next time will go better

My long-terms goals are really simple (and you can find it in the link above) and world wide:

• Keep FAmSCo up to date on Local groups activities/problems/improvements;
• Improve communication within and outside the FAmSCo and the fedora ambassadors project
• Help Ambassadors with events organization, supporting Ambassadors ideas and initiatives.

Vote vote vote (for me of course)

Now finally the Italian community may have a cool website which will be the official italian place for fedora.

Why VOIP? VOIP has pros and cons. On communication we get a lot of advantages: fluid discussion, lot of time saved, less typing, my brain while I have to moderate a IRC meeting, and so on. By the way VOIP is a pretty new technology and is not yet simple to use, crappy software, firewall issues are two of possible problems.

After a lot of time testing different account and software I found a possible combination that seems to work fine!

In Linux world we have basically two softwares: Ekiga and Twinkle. I used Ekiga for a while without great results. I though that twinkle was crappy, but after Paul Friedls told me it works fine, I tried and he was right! Despite Twinkle has an horrible – old 1999 style – Qt3 interface it’s faster and stable (and support pulseaudio!!).

Enabling VOIP account on Fedora Talk

Read here.

Configuring Twinkle with Fedora Talk account.

You can find the same informations on this useful video, made by Clint Savage.

When you start Twinkle first time, you can choose to use the wizard or the editor configuration.. Using the editor, you have to choose the name of the profile, then you arrive in a form to fill with information about the user (here the official guide).

In the User tab:

• Your name: insert your Fullname
• User name: your fedora username
• Domain: insert the domain, for fedora Talk use talk.fedoraproject.org
• Realm: leave blank
• Authentication name: use your fedora username
• Password: use your fedora voip password that’s different between your FAS password, you will find in your Voip FAS section informations

In the SIP server tab:

• Registrar: talk.fedoraproject.org

In the Presence tab, you can enable “publish availability on startup” (not sure is implemented in the fedora talk infrastructure)

Using

You can do some tests calling:

• 1001 (1001@talk.fedoraproject.org) that read you some sentences
• 1002 (1002@talk.fedoraproject.org) that’s a echo test service

For conferencing you can take a look here.

Troubleshooting

Here some information about some problems that con occurs:

Flash: Ensure flash and adobe s**t is not running before you start twinkle/ekiga or a call. If yes, you will not be able to use the audio device and (my proposed solution).

Microphone

Remember to enable the microphone. Some computers, in particular laptops have two input channels: mic and front mic (the jack mic and the embedded laptop mic respectively). To enable it you should use (i use and it works) alsamixer, but with pulseaudio when you launch it, you see only the pulseaudio channel. To see the below layer (ALSA layer) you have to use:

alsamixer -c 0

and, using TAB key go to Capture tab and modify input source from mic to front mic or vice versa. You can modify also input volume and other settings. enjoy!