Tag Archives: fedora

Linux TAG – FUDCon – Berlin 2009

Posted by —

0

Linux TAG: when .org meet .com., the most important opensource event in Europe.

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. :P

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

MemoByte 2009 – Mantova

Posted by —

3

MemoByte 2009 is an event organized by ARCO no profit organization and is focuses on both Computer and Electronic technologies. Basically is divided into two areas: an area like a market of old and new electronic devices (Radio, old computers, transistors, and so on) and an area dedicated to Computer groups and organizations like LUGMan (Mantova’s LUG), Fedoraproject, LUG Parma, and so on.

I brought with me two good ambassadors: Gianluca Varisco and Alexjan Carraturo. Really good choice! We had to travel a lot of kilometres from Milan to Verona and then down to Mantova but thanks to them, the travel was funniest and interesting (particularly funny when Gianluca and Alex discussed about ADSL vs Optical fiber).

The worthy part was our ability and opportunity to plan a lot of things about Fedora-it and fedora ambassador groups.

We brought some Fedora 10 CDs, some Fedora FEL ISOs and a lot of stickers left from FOSDEM (Thanks to Gerold who gave me) and two OLPC (which is always a star).

We met a lot of people that needs information about Linux, Fedora and Opensource software. And we come back with the opportunity of organize a big and (maybe) international event in January 2010 (stay tuned).

Mantova is a good place for fedora to grown, organizators asked me about Linux Day (in october) and the possibility to have gadgets: they are fantastic supporters and we must to invest in that area as much as we can.

June june, what a crazy month :)

Posted by —

0

June is going to be a bit heavy. All weekends are taken:

  • 6th: Memobyte (Mantova): Event related on electronic and embedded systems, with a lot of companies involved in. I’ll be there to support Fedora FEL with some light speeches (during all the day) and a booth with gadgets, USB station. Thanks to Gianluca, Alexjan and Stefano who agreed to come with me.
  • 13th: ConfSL & LUGConf (Bologna): I’ll be in Bologna as two role: as President of LOLUG (no profit organization about Linux) and as Fedora Ambassador. This conference is really important to give a structure and exchange experiences in local user groups. Of course I’ll be there as Fedora ambassador because ConfSL has a lot of ubuntu/debian supporter, so I have to bring some fresh air :)
  • 19th-21th: Byte-code MeetUp (Bormio): The third annual Byte-Code MeetUp, a combination of sessions, talks, workshops, and hackfests in which contributors work on specific initiatives. This year will be some international VIPs :-)
  • 26th-28th: Fedora EMEA FUDCon (Berlin): Fedora user and developer conferences will include two days of hackfests and possibly some presentations, followed by a day of BarCamp.

Symbolic 1.3.0 released

Posted by —

0

Finally, after three months Symbolic 1.3.0 has been release with new cool features and new website.

Symbolic 1.3.0 has three key features:

  • Cloud computing support (virtual machines management over Cluster)
  • Machines provisioning with cobbler
  • XEN console connection through VNC protocol.

you can see it in action on videos published weeks ago:

As usually, any suggestion and/or proposal is welcome! :)

Document Freedom Day

Posted by —

0

“Document Freedom Day” is an event, promoted by the Free Software Foundation, whose aim is to spread free documents formats and the Free Software culture. Last Wednesday I attended the Italian DFD 2009 in Opera (near to Milan, where in 2008 was organized “Liberamente“).

Me and Gianluca Varisco proposed a talk about the core values of the Fedora project, whose aim is to spread the meaning of the 4 foundations in general, and Fedora’s policies around codecs and firmwares in particular – thus covering a wider subject matter, not only documents.

Fedora gadgets

Fedora gadgets

However, I couldn’t stay there all the time because it was a workday. I came during my lunch break and brought an OLPC (the byte-code one), some Fedora stickers and gadgets with me. Stefano Frontori, my colleague at byte-code, accompanied me and he was the official photographer (you will find some photos attached to this post). He’s a very good photographer but he has only one defect: he’s a Canonist (yep, this is a neologism “A person who uses a Canon” :) )

Fedora attenders

Fedora attenders

The initial plan was to do a two-people speech, but unfortunately Gianluca was unable to attend, due to last-minute-problems. I want to thank him: he took care all boring pre-event tasks: put together an abstract, contact the event owners and so on. There weren’t many people, but some interested students (better than 100 bored and inattentive people). I had only 30 minutes for my speech so I tried to do it in a more interactive way, people could interrupt me, ask questions and so on. At the end there was an important question about Fedora hardware support, about the community, and Fedora/Ubuntu comparison.

Me and my talk

Me and my talk

I want also to point out the spirit of the FSF, in this case FSF Italy. Where the hell were they? FSF choose the most ugly day to organize this event (it was a workday, how can you expect a wide audience?), and didn’t send any FSF person.

Fedora ambassadors

Fedora ambassadors

Last but not least, many thanks to every voluntary people who organized this event. Special thanks to Alexjian Carraturo who allowed Fedora presence to this event.

Moving Fedora-it on rails

Posted by —

0

I’m 2 month late to write this post, but on the other hand, I adjusted my thought with last three months experience and give you a better perspective.

When I think about Fedora-IT community origin, I start smiling. I remember clearly when on #fedora-it IRC channel were only two (me and Matteo), and two Fedora Ambassador (Francesco & Francesco). Today we are officially a community. We are about 10/15 people on IRC and 5/7 active Fedora Ambassadors. This is nothing respect to French and German communities but for now is enough.

Since 2009 I have been decided to enhance the community by add short regular activities:

  • We have to do at least one meeting for month (no matter who is the owner or who ask for it, it’s important to keep in touch regularly, have brainstorming, discussions and involving all interested people.
  • We have few localized pages on fedora wiki to keep and track internal informations:
    1. Event page with a list of Italian events where we my participate (for example LinuxDay, Document Freedom Day, Software Freedom Day ,etc). This page has multiple goals: track every event may be interesting for us, give to Ambassador people the possibility to choose which event they want to attend,  Today this page is incomplete but next year we will have a really valuable event list.
    2. Inventory page collects gadget location and owner, this page exist because gadget are distributed all around Italy. This list give you the possibility to know what is available and who ask to.
    3. Meeting page with transcript and summary meeting.

I think we are on the right way.Stay tuned!

Action – Reaction

Posted by —

0

After I noticed about this annoying bug on Xorg that break your keyboard layout (if you are not using US one), and considering some of people with laptop like mine (Dell D630) confirmed it, I decided to save my laptop…so:


[lfoppiano@sboing ~]$ uptime
21:52:13 up 8 days, 3:54, 7 users, load average: 1.14, 1.02, 1.05

Right now I’m surviving :)

Grails 1.0.4

Posted by —

0

I finally packaged grails 1.0.4 on RPM. This minor update fix some bugs and maintain compatibility with previous version. The package has been processed with mock and rpmlint.

You may find RPM & SRPM here:

Please report any error you may find on it.

FOSDEM – What a cool event!

Posted by —

2

This morning Francesco published his report so, right now I’m the last one…

This time was my first attendance to FOSDEM and I was really impressed how many geeks was participating.

I went to FOSDEM with some byte-code colleagues: Francesco, Davide and Marco.
We arrived on Friday at about 22:00 and we missed the social event (which was scheduled for 18:00 (!!!), a bit early for a beer event in a place where is not possible to eat – Delirium cafe).

We decided to eat something near hotel and then we had a beer in the nearest random place in Luxemburg square (near European parliament).

On Saturday we met other ambassadors for breakfast and went to University by cab.
We performed some ordinary set-up tasks: fixed posters on walls, distributed Fedora CDs on other booth’s tables (Jens rulez), prepared stickers, and so on.

I stayed to the booth until 11AM then I had a brainstorming about symbolic future, although we are colleagues in the same company, we usually don’t work in the same place and this meeting was a great opportunity to meet each other by person.

At 17:00, after my speech about Func and Symbolic I met a lot of people. From Italy I met Emanuele, who was my colleague in University, he is really interested in Fedora Electonic Lab and I will take care to give him technical support, gadget, availability for talk, to help him to spread about this fedora spin and bring it in some interested high schools. I met also Robert Lazzurs and Jasper Capel who are working on Func and Cobbler (and they did a really nice Cobbler speech), Stephane and Louis who are working with us on Symbolic.

On Saturday night was planned to go to Churchill’s pub but when we arrived, it was late and no Ambassadors was present inside. we followed again the “nearest-place-to-eat/drink” algorithm, and entered in a really sad and ugly old place. Fortunately the beer was good :P

On Sunday I attended Drupal 7, IPA, Cobbler talks.

The most valuable and important thing in this day was a short experience and opinion exchange with some French ambassadors about community; in my opinion theirs community is the biggest and strongest Fedora community in Europe, so why don’t learn from them?

We Italian are growing but we need to change our infrastructure (I mean our website, which is *null* right now). I have in my TODO queue a post about this argument. Promise.

Francesco, Davide and Marco returned in Italy on Sunday afternoon, I stayed in Brussels until Monday afternoon. On Sunday night me and Lorenzo met Kostas and Pierros and some Greeks guys and went to Delirium cafe (I missed the social event on Friday but I knew it was a really cool place) and we had a really nice evening.
We drank a bit without eating anything, so my remembers was a bit confused :)
We left Delirium cafe and went to eat, on the way Me and Pierros had to “push out some liquids”. After hard searching (there wasn’t “safe” places) we decided to use the FCFS algorithm, so we pissed on a (small) tree in a square near the Bourse (and of course we did a contribution to their grow), then we reach the other in a kebab shop. What a crazy night! :)

On Monday I had a trip in Brussels and I visited the whole city. Some photos will be available on my flickr profile.

When I was in Brussels Airport, I got a coffee at Starbucks and I sat near two girls and I guy (sat in separated tables).
I heard that two girls spoke about “woman stuff”: girls, men, sex, and so on… They was Italian and, of course, I masquerade my nationality and continue to drink my coffee and listen :) It was really interesting.
The funny thing was to saw their faces when discovered that me and the other guy were Italian: priceless.

I went home at 23:00 and I felt asleep in about few minutes.

PS: My english is not perfect, if you find “english error”, and you will, write a comment, I wont publish it but I use it to learn and fix my post :)