Well, it’s already being a week since I’ve returned from Berlin and yet didn’t get time to write my Linuxtag2008 report. I guess I’m the last one 
Left Brussels, Belgium at 23:41 on 30/04 and travelled 9 hours by train to reach Berlin,Germany, I was glad and overjoyed to meet the Blue Men Group. It was also the first time I was about to meet our new Fedora Leader Paul W. Frields.
I’ve finally met ThibaultNorth, who summarized the big picture that I’ve missed with respect to the Fedora Electronic Lab during the first 3 days. We had exchanged several phone calls to prepare his speech and I’m admired his commitment. A real Swiss.
ThibaultNorth accomplished another of my dreams of Fedora Electronic Lab:
Introduce an OpenSource Electronic Simulation to the General Public.
Since the very first day Fedora Electronic Lab was approved as a Feature by FESCo, I exchanged a few emails with StuartBrorson, sharing my thoughts to provide an infrastructure which can provide a means to “market” open source electronic tools. This infrastructure consisted of using the well established Fedora Ambassadors facility to talk about Electronic tools during various events, something that many upstream can’t organize.
This year, the year
- Fedora EMEA was officially (after 2 years of hard work and collaboration) registered as a non-profit association.
- Fedora 9 Sulphur was released
- More universities are adopting FEL applications.
- YOU magazine’s January issue bundles Fedora Electronic Lab Live CD.
- Fedora community has strengthen and excelling in all areas,
GeroldKassube and JörgSimon (our Super EMEA Ambassadors) organized and reserved a slot for a FEL Demo Presentation during the LinuxTag2008.
I’m very happy that ThibaultNorth stepped in and did a demo of FEL applications and introduced the Fedora Electronic Lab. The presentation can be found here.The team work between Fedora Ambassadors, Fedora Board and Fedora Packagers have made this possible. A big thank you. We are now reaching another FEL objective: Upstream’s work has been properly deployed and advertised by Fedora.
It is this type of team work that’s promoting various areas in the Fedora community. During this LinuxTag2008, it can be easily noticed that every Fedora contributor, present, wanted to push his particular field of contribution forward, but for that he needs the help of other Fedora contributor. Despite they are speaking a foreign language (English) to communicate, Fedora contributors were actually talking and discussing among themselves on how they could collaborate to do better. I was talking about FEL. Jeroen, Fedora Spins. Paul and Max, LiveUSBs. Glezos, translations. Jörg, OLPC……There is a great bond between Fedora EMEA contributors. This bond is not only about social interaction, but to bring Fedora to a higher level. E.g: I want a FEL LiveDVD spin and Jeroen wants to push the spins SIG.
We had a chance to talk to Shakthi Kannan from Qvantel. We explored some embedded tools that might be interesting for FEL.
FranscescoCrippa shared, he talked to 3 Texas Instruments guys who were eager to learn more about FEL on Thursday. ThibaultNorth and I headed straight to their booth. We discussed about some eventual inclusion of Texas Instruments electronic libraries into FEL, once the licensing issues are cleared. They were mainly interested in the Embedded side. Thomas.L described his beagleboard.org to us and how it’s easy to use OSS on it.
At the Fedora booth, booth members were helping new contributors subscribed to the Fedora Account System. We have a bunch of new contributors subscribed but without a mentoring program. Their names _for the moment_ have only increased the number of contributors on FAS. Paul W. Frields and I discussed some eventual possibilities to turn those numbers into real contributors. I had the chance to help a new FEL contributor Thomas.R subscribed to the FAS2. Believe me, the subcription process is now every easy.
I missed my Fedora EMEA bathrobe breakout during the Linuxtag2008 social event. So JörgSimon offered me my chance 
One rare photo, I’m in.
At the end of the day, we all gathered to dine together. GeroldKassube noticed one particular _feature_ about ME: “I eat very slowly” After dinner, I was too exhausted to speak. I followed MaxSpevack,Jeroen and Stephen back to the Hotel at about 3hr in the morning.
Chitlesh Goorah
