Fedora Electronic Lab and Upstream developers were represented by Laurent Charpentier, whom I sincerely thank for his presentation last friday and booth attendance. Photos in this blog post are from Animatrix30.
Report of the JM2L 2009 event in Sophia-Antipolis, France – Nov 27-28 2009
by Laurent Charpentier
The JM2L event (Journée Méditerranéennes du Logiciel Libre), dedicated to opensource software, took place at the University of Nice-Sophia, France.
Sophia-Antipolis, one of Europe’s largest technology parks, is home to hundreds of high tech companies, primarily in information technology, telecommunications and biotechnology fields.
Exhibitors came on Friday morning to set-up the booths. We had about 15 booths including one for Fedora Project (and Fedora Electronic Lab sub-project).
Booth setup:
Doors opened on Friday afternoon with a good mix of visitors coming from the University (students, teachers) and professionals from the Sophia technology park.
The event had 30 conferences, 6 technical workshops. Several rooms were also set-up for Linux installation (“install party”) and video games (“LAN party”).
At the Fedora booth I presented Fedora 12 and Fedora Electronic Lab 12, the latest version of these distributions. Most of the Fedora visitors at the booth came to know about FEL. HDL design, simulation and PCB design were among the fields of interest. I gave some demos of Kicad (PCB) and KtechLab (simulation). I also had questions about Fedora distribution: what is Fedora? what is Fedora compared to Ubuntu? I also had one installation to perform on a (old) Samsung X30 notebook, but the F12/F11/F10 live CDs failed to run (X server failed to run). It worked however on Ubuntu the previously installed OS.
On Friday I gave a presentation of Fedora and Fedora Electronic Lab (presentation is available on FEL’s website, pictures on flickr using “jm2l09″ and “fedora” tags). I had about 20 persons attending the presentation, some of them were Electrical Engineers from local semiconductor companies (Infineon, Texas-Instruments, ST-Ericsson, …). The attendants were very pleased to know about the FEL initiative: it is now easier to find opensource tools that are ready to use.
Some of the questions were: why some projects are not included in FEL (systemC, Scilab, openaccess, …)? It is due to licensing restrictions. Does FEL work closely with FPGA vendors to use/integrate opensource tools into their design flow?
Overall, JM2L was a good event promoting opensource software and strengthening the opensource community. JM2L had a lot of conferences including technical sessions and workshops to present opensource software to a broad range of visitors.
Laurent Charpentier
Filed under: events, Free Electronic Lab
Chitlesh Goorah
