FOSS.in 2009, Dec 1-6
{long read}

I just attended FOSS.in. I presented a talk there on Fedora-ARM

Here are few of my impressions...

It was a great experience, this is just a few things that I can put into words.

"Enterprise SUSE", thats the first advertisement banner I saw right after getting out of the flight on Bangalore airport. Oh right, I was here for FOSS.in

It was a 5 day event, packed with talks, workshops and workouts.

The great thing was there was wifi in the venue, for all the 3 halls and the workout floors.

There was a surprising interest in embedded space. Quite a few talks on the embedded architectures and lot of folks interested to do things in this area too.

On the very first day I met a few folks who were looking for the Fedora-ARM talk. I received some very constructive feedback. It was interesting to meet people who have been using the Fedora-ARM distribution and to understand how they use the distribution, what their work environment is, and the problems that they face.

Another thing that I noticed was the strong penetration of netbooks. I saw a lot of Asus EEE PCs and Samsung NC10 netbooks with people. Pretty cool things, small, mobile, good battery power. I should get one of these. Or should I just wait for an ARM one?

Another thing that I observed was that many speakers used a cool kind of presentation template and I was wondering what they used to create such presentations. Turns out, you can do it in latex-beamer. Yo! So here was my first attempt at the same. The complete presentation is available here I converted part of my presentation to this format. And then it was just mechanical so I left it half way through. But now that I have the skeleton, I'll just use the same thing for other presentations henceforth.

Day 1 was mostly introductions, and settling-down in the venue.

I met a lot of Fedora and KDE contributors. Mether, Kushal Das, Pradeeto, Shreyank, Susmit, Joerg Simon to name a few. I talked with Sayamindu Dasgupta, who happens to be one of the OLPC maintainers about their plans for ARM. He echoed the common concern of availability of 3D graphics drivers for ARM.

I met another person who chatted with me for quite a long while about the problems he has been facing with Fedora-ARM. They seem to have about 10 Sheevaplugs, doing some kind of measurements. He also wished to offload a lot of his stuff (spamassassin, apache, lamp stacks etc.) to the plug using Fedora-Arm. He mentioned he'll show up the next day, but I guess that never happened. Anyway his feedback was good, I'll look into integrating that.

This is how a typical talk looked like at one of the smaller halls.

I attended Sayamindu's session on ebooks.

Dimitris Glezos conducted the first keynote about Building a disruptive open source project (I hope the presentations are uploaded by the time this is published)

All the keynotes throughout the event were awesssome!

Day 2 was the Fedora Project of the day.

I delivered my talk on Fedora-ARM to all the blue-crowds wearing Fedora T-shirts. There were quite a few questions. Rahul Sundaram promptly scheduled a package build of the gnote package, that he maintains on the ARM koji. We had to open-up the dist-f13 build tag for this to work, since this was the first package build for F13. Jitesh landed in Bangalore on this morning, and was at the venue all dressed in formals from head-to-toe :-)

I delivered my talk on Fedora-ARM to all the blue-crowds wearing Fedora T-shirts. There were quite a few questions. Rahul Sundaram promptly scheduled a package build of the gnote package, that he maintains on the ARM koji. We had to open-up the dist-f13 build tag for this to work, since this was the first package build for F13. Jitesh landed in Bangalore on this morning, and was at the venue all dressed in formals from head-to-toe :-)

While talking with Rahul again the point of becoming a "packager" for Fedora came up. We should really get this fixed asap. Currently sending ARM patches upstream and waiting for the corresponding packager to include it is a time consuming thing. Many of them just don't get committed upstream thus increasing our load to keep moving them forward from release to release. Simon gave a talk on OSSTMM and he mentioned that were few utilities waiting to be packaged for Fedora. We asked him to send us pointers for these utilities so that we could look at packaging them for Fedora.

For most of the day I was in the Fedora POTD auditorium. And I also attended James Morris' talk on SELinux

The keynote talk was by Harald Welte! He talked about the openness status of GSM and protocols in this domain. It was a very educative talk highlighting a lot of problems and loopholes in the current communication systems that we simply do not consider usually.

Jitesh and I then went out for dinner to the much-talked-of Forum mall here in Bangalore. After having a look at all the beautiful things at the mall, we had a South Indian dinner at the locally well-known place, Anand Adiyaar Bhavan. I just love south-indian food, and here I was having the same for 5 days and nights. This was fun!

We then went to Corner-House the desserts-place. Jitesh dared to order the "Death-by-Chocolate" with the above result.

Day 3 had some biggies in store.

A Pulseaudio (Jitesh had some experiences while building this for Fedora-ARM) Internals talk by Lennart Poettering. This was a very good talk where he highlighted various problems that he faced with the Linux infrastructure while working on the pulseaudio package and the lessons that he learnt from these. I would recommend it if you do any kind of userspace programming in Linux.
And then Harald Welte's workout on GSM-protocol analysis, and including wireshark dissectors for the protocol.
In the meanwhile I heard from Kushal Das that the txtr reader uses Fedora-ARM 11 in their product. This was a surprise to me. On top of it one of the members of this team was scheduled to deliver a keynote today.

Milosch Meriac, delivered the keynote. Turns out he was a member of the awessome team that did this. He is also associated with the openbeacon.org project.

txtr has its own additional rpms available from http://reader.txtr.com.

Day 4 wasn't too much w.r.t. talks/sessions for me.

I used this time to have a long talk with Milosch about how they use Fedora-ARM for txtr. I was really pleased to hear it getting into a commercial device. Looking forward for this device to come out. They have a pretty open process. The hardware architecture has been documented, so also the SRPMS are available from their website.

The keynote by Philip Tellis was again great! All he basically did was show how he just wrote some of his code for fun and learned from it.

This was followed by a Rock show by a local band BluesB4Sunrise. And that was followed by a dinner party for speakers.

Day 5 was closing time... (And I am now running out of steam)

I attended a talk by Lennert Poettering on Linux Filesystem heirarchy and another on S.M.A.R.T.. A few session of the GNOME POTD were also great.

Finally the Raghu Dixit show ended the event. It was a really geeky rock show, with the tweeter wall at the back on the big screen and the rock show in the front :-).

Overall, it was a very inspirational event that inspired everyone to perform, contribute more and pick up tasks to do in the Open Source area. And I could spread the word about Fedora-ARM and collect some constructive feedback on the same.