LinuxTag/FUDCon Berlin 2009 – Sunday

Saturday night/Sunday morning, from 02h00 to 03h00 I prepared my slides.

On sunday, I was the only one scheduled for a presentation, while the day was reserved for hackfests. I wanted to take the opportunity (since there are Fedora contributors from various continents) to report back to the community about the progress made behind Fedora Electronic Lab.

Normally, I use PDF for my presentations. But that I was using the slides directly from openoffice3.1. I was surprised with the beamer features it has.

Most of the heads whom I was hoping to attend my Report were not present, I changed the orientation of my Report towards a presentation instead. It is sad, because many people know of FEL as just a collection of EDA tools, which it absolutely not the case. I said this couple of times before. After my presentation, Fedora Italians, Greg, Max,Jeroen and I had a chat in the park about a new way of marketing via Xuropa.

Bert, Jeroen and I spent some time on the spin maintainers’s reponsibilities and wikipages. Wow, Fedora wiki got a lot features since I was heavily using it during the time of Kadischi.

FUDCon is always an exciting moment for a Fedora contributor. I always enjoy good moments with Fedora EMEA members, whom I have great respect for. A big thank you to MaxSpevack, GeroldKassube, JoergSimon and the rest of the Fedora Linuxtag crew for making this FUDCon a success.

Filed under: fedora, Free Electronic Lab, FUDCon

LinuxTag/FUDCon Berlin 2009 – Saturday

Saturday started with a delicious german breakfast with ChristophWickert, SebastianDziallas and a LXDE developer. LXDE was on the table. I was trying to reboot my brain while my body was seeking for a bed. At about 09h15, I followed the Fedora wave to the Berlin Messe.

There everyone was showing me the FEL Flyers , while Mo put a Fedora tattoo on her cheek. I went straight to a neighbouring booth about FPGA, to learn more about the EDA tools they use. To my astonishment, they haven’t heard of FEL. So I gave them a basic introduction of our objectives behind FEL, from my point of view, they were not very enthusiast with it. It was the same feeling when you are asking an Altera fanboy to use Xilinx ISE to timing analysis.

I went to the KDE booth to tell them that FEL is KDE-based and that I want to learn more future power optimizations and boot time optimizations for the upcoming releases. However, I got the confirmation about a theory on KDE developers, “You will never have productive discussion with KDE developers, if you said there is something wrong about KDE.” I have this theory since I was a KDE booth member at CeBit 2007 in Hannover. I was firm on the fact that I was not only a user, but a KDE distributor as well. But the only respond I got was to ask my users to upgrade their hardware. Well, if KDE is juicing to much about Fedora (gnome) desktop, then there is a problem with KDE. I pointed the fact that RexDieter and FedoraKDE had worked a lot to improve KDE’s boot time. The discussion was not going anywhere, so I ended it and head to the Fedora booth. I was a booth staff from 12:00 to 14:00 as per ThomasWoerner’s sheet. There, I showed Mo how I used their early work on Fedora Community website for Fedora Electronic Lab’s website. She instantly pointed out some improvements and suggested a sublogo for FEL.

Then I want to fetch my FUDCon M-size t-shirt from MaxSpevack. Someone stole my M-size t-shirt and finally got a XL I caught JoergSimon and we went to have lunch with AndreasRau. It is always a pleasure to sit down with Joerg and chat with him. While we were heading to Mo’s “Fedora Community” presentation, GregDeKoniegsberg caught us on the hallway asking assistance with the beamer for his presentation. Ultimately, I gave Greg’s my laptop for his presentation and I stayed with him, while Joerg went to Mo’s presentation.

During the last 2 hours of Linuxtag, I went every electronic hardware related booth to learn more about their projects and the set of EDA tools they use. Among those were, Beagleboard of TexasInstrument, OpenEmbedded and a robotics booth. I am amazed that none knew of FEL’s existence. It is a real issue that openhardware community are unaware of the opensource solutions Fedora Electronic Lab provides. Another item on the my todo list.

I went to one of the last sessions (2nd day FUDCon) about the spins with JeroenVanMeeuven. You can read the meeting minutes here. I shared my intention of a possible migration of FEL Livedvd from KDE-based to Gnome based. After that, we headed to the hotel and then with the germans we went to eat real meat. After dinner, some of us went to the Ubuntu BBQ for which we received an invitation at the booth. There, it was very silent. I spent some quality time with Lennart, who introduced himself as the one who breaks my pulseaudio.

Filed under: fedora, FUDCon, linuxtag

LinuxTag/FUDCon Berlin 2009 – Friday evening

I was not supposed to visit LinuxTag this year and but finally I managed to come on Friday evening, 27 June 2009 (special thanks to those who encouraged me). It was also the first day for Fedora’s FUDCon Berlin 2009 session (the most exciting part of LinuxTag09).

I was supposed to give a presentation (about Fedora Electronic Lab) Friday morning, however due to some personal reasons, I could only manage to come on Saturday. My apologies to those who came to my presentation on Friday. However during the week, MaxSpevack and I exchanged some phone calls so that he could takeover my presentation and show how Fedora is the ideal platform to excel in promoting innovative ideas (FEL, in this case) based on free and opensource software. Special thanks to MaxSpevack.

On the way to check-in at the hotel, I met YaakovNemoy, BertDesmet and a few other Fedora contributors. To my surprise, I got the chance to meet JohnMcDonough and his son, JP. Thanks, to JohnMcDonough who reminded me before the freeze of F-11 release notes to write the release notes for FEL. After check-in, I went straight to my room and met my room mate. I was only able to manage a 2 minutes of chit-chat with him when GeroldKassube knocked at the door to fetch me for the Fedora’s social event, FUDPub.

We arrived around 19h30 at the FUDPub. I was shocked by the number of new faces I could not recognized (149 Fedorans subscribed). I barely shared a hug with Max. Most of the usual Fedora EMEA(aside the French) were having chit-chats with their beers. The germans as usual started pointing to me that I was missing something, beer . Out of the blue pizza came to the table, so I took a piece and talked with Kanarip, JP, JohnMcDonough and a few others I didn’t even knew their names. I made a small trip to all the tables saying “hi” to everyone I knew. The waiter came with a vegetarian pizza and no-one was eager to eat it. So I took the pizza to MairinDuffy, knowing the fact that Ray and she have a blog about vegetarian food. Hence I managed to talk to her and JesseKeating for a few seconds, when Kanarip and I engaged into a deep conversation (specially about FEL’s Statistics) and lost completely track of what others were doing. At about 01h00, everyone was gone except the Fedora Italians and AlasdairKergon. In accordance to AndreasThienemann, they went to better places.

Filed under: fedora, FUDCon, linuxtag

Sublogo for FEL by Fedora Design team

During FUDConBerlin09, MairinDuffy mentioned some minor tweaks and recommendations to the design of the FEL website and on Fedora Hosted.

She designed the following sublogo (from official Fedora sublogo template) for the upper left corner of the site so the top header area can be a bit cleaner. Thanks Mo.

Filed under: artwork, fedora, Free Electronic Lab, FUDCon