Sandro Mathys

Like fellow Fedora contributors Jeroen in 2008 and John in 2009 I’ve been selected one of the five RHCE of the Year 2010 – the one for Europe to be more specific. Looks like someone at Red Hat really recognizes that (Fedora) community work is very useful for a RHCE’s daily business. My entry for the self-nomination really mostly consisted of my work I did and still do for Fedora including organizing FUDCon Zurich 2010. Beside that I also mentioned organizing FrOSCamp 2010 Zurich and that my $DAYJOB involves lots of Spacewalk/RHN Satellite administration and some RHEL/Fedora related tasks. As far as I remember my entry that’s really been iall to it.

So after I sent in a small text (500 chars tops IIRC) with the above facts I got a call last Friday asking me whether I’m still free June 22-25 as the winner is needed to go to the Red Hat Summit 2010. They told me I was one of the last 3 or so before the winner is chosenand they needed to make sure they’re all available during the summit before the final decision is made. Today then I got another call informing me that I’ve been selected and to clear the administrative stuff (as Red Hat pays the winner the flight, hotel and fee for the whole summit).

I feel I own the community a lot in receiving this award as a single person couldn’t achieve that much particularly since I’m no experienced open source developer. Also it just wouldn’t be that much fun to do all this on my own. Thank you to everyone involved in Fedora and Spacewalk (including all those upstream folks), to all the folks involved in FUDCon Zurich and FrOSCamp organization and whoever else I forgot to mention. Of course my thanks also go to Red Hat for rewarding me with this great honour and for the invitation to the summit – and again to recognize the work the community does (and to support that work)!

I hope to see as many of you at this year’s Red Hat Summit in Boston and FUDCon/FrOSCamp in Zurich as possible!

Last but not least my congratulations to the other four RHCE of the year 2010. As of this writing that page says the winners will be announced May 17 but this has not happened yet.

So you might have read my announcement or heard of FUDCon Zurich 2010 and FrOSCamp 2010 Zurich in any other way. It’s true the organization is pretty quiet so far but that’s mainly because we’re working on tasks that mostly consist of face to face meetings or investigating locations. We couldn’t really involve the community in this but we’ll try to make the process more open in the future. But there’s some things the community can already do to support us and make sure this are becoming great events:

• Spread the word. This is more important than you could ever imagine. We’re known well over Switzerland’s borders already and we mostly get positive feedback from everyone so far but there’s still lots of people and projects that don’t consider to join us yet while they really should! We created basic FrOSCamp flyers recently which you’re always welcome to print yourself (monochrome is fine) and distribute at work, school, local businesses and most importantly every FOSS event you’re attending.
• Be bold and answer the open calls for: projects, hackfests, talks, workshops, sponsors, volunteers – and soon also artists. FUDCon hat its own call for talk/workshop sessions, by the way.
• Design the FUDCon shirt or buttons, pretty please!
• Make sure your community friendly company considers donating money (i.e. sponsoring either event). We know that this shouldn’t be about money but let’s be honest – more money can make those events better. It might allow us to add some free catering or paying for the first round of FreeBeer. And that’s really just the beginning, there’s lots of things (more) money could help us with. Particularly as for FUDCon we will be able to get more Fedora folks to the event the more money is left after all the other bills are paid.

Speaking of money reminds me to thank our first sponsors (namely Swiss Puzzle ITC and Italian Byte Code – both long term friends of both the FOSS & the Fedora community) we’ll soon be able to announce more details about the Wired Dreams Party and FUDPub!

More information about most of those topics should be available on the respective pages. Where information is missing or insufficient you can always leave a comment here or drop me a line (red at fp.o or at froscamp.org).

Get social and follow FrOSCamp on identi.ca, Twitter, XING, LinkedIn and Facebook! There’s also #FrOSCamp and #fudcon-planning on the Freenode IRC network if you feel chatty.

As previously announced FUDCon EMEA 2010 will take place in Zurich in September. Back then we’ve not been ready to accept any kind of sessions. This is just a quick update to let you know there’s now a section on session in the wiki.

Fixed Agenda

On Friday and Saturday we’ll have a previously fixed agenda. If you want us to schedule your talk or workshop on one of those days add your session to this table.

BarCamp

If you rather bring your session to attention at the BarCamp on Sunday, just be prepared to present it early in the morning and hold it just afterwards.

Hackfest

There’ll be hackfests going on all FUDCon long, so there’s always something to do even if no talk attracts you at any given time of the day.

Sponsorship

We don’t know yet how much budget we’ll have available for sponsoring individuals travelling and lodging nor what the exact criteria for sponsorships will be. What we know already is that only people will get sponsored that actually contribute to the event, talks and workshops being the best way. If you don’t plan to give a talk, make a workshop, help out at the FUDCon info booth or something like that, don’t even bother to set the X in the $$$ column in the pre-registration table or to request sponsorship.

It’s time to announce two events that will take place in September in downtown Zurich, Switzerland that among more share the head organizers (Marcus and me).

FrOSCamp 2010 Zurich

FrOSCamp is an annual multilingual two-day event that will take place on 2010-09-17/18 and evolves around an exhibition, talks, workshops and hackfests in the world of free and open source as well as creative contents, also including open standards/systems and digital sustainability.

Currently planning is in its early stages but the most important points have been or are close to be cleared. Various calls are open: volunteers, projects, talks, workshops, sponsors and more are coming up soon, like the call for hackfests. We’re in negotiations with LPI Central Europe to offer cheap exams and we’re preparing a key-signing party. More is to come – stay tuned by subscribing to the various mailing lists and/or joining #FrOSCamp on Freenode.

Note that the event takes place in the German-speaking part of Switzerland but aims at an international audience. Therefore you’ll see different languages on the lists and in the channel.

FUDCon Zurich 2010

FUDCon EMEA is the annual Fedora Users & Developers Conference for Europe, the Middle East and Africa and will take place on 2010-09-17/19 and features talks, hacking and barcamp sessions related to anything in the Fedora ecosystem of end users, contributors, upstream, downstream, etc.

Planning started some months ago but we did not get the official “go” until earlier this week. We therefore have conference and hotel rooms ready but were not yet able to plan what the agenda will look like and stuff like that. Nevertheless pre-registration is open and more details are added to the wiki on a daily basis. We’ll try to get the agenda outline, the call for talks, the call for sponsors and FUDPub information online ASAP. Soon bi-weekly IRC planning meetings will be announced but discussion is already possible on the FUDCon planning list.

Shared Spirit

Both events heavily focus on free and open source software and related topics. We therefore encourage the participants of FrOSCamp and FUDCon to mix up, work together, discuss, exchange and whatever else might help to have a productive time together. Fedora is a major Linux distribution and FrOSCamp will feature many of their upstream projects and also some “competitors”, other Linux distributions and UNIX derivatives – it’s always good to sit together and speak about issues or chances!

Shared Location

Both events take place in the same building on the premises of the ETH Zurich on their Zentrum Campus in downtown Zurich. Zurich can be very well accessed by airplane and train from all over the world. The international airport is approached by most major international airlines and just about 11 minutes away from Zurich main station by train. The main station is a destination of direct trains from many major cities of Europe including Berlin, Paris, Milan and Vienna and it only takes about 14 minutes by tram from the main station to the CHN building, the primary event location.

The shared event location makes it even easier to work together and will allow a single agenda featuring the talks of both events so the audience of both events can fully profit. Of course there’ll be Fedora-dedicated rooms and rooms for all the projects participating at FrOSCamp but there’ll only be one shared keynote room.

Shared Party

On Friday, 2010-09-17 there will be a party after the first event day just next to the primary event location featuring free (as in creative commons) music by live bands and delicious FreeBeer (again as in creative commons). Need to chill a bit after a long event day? Get a beer or two at the party! Need to get lose of some energy because you only sat around all day listening to all those interesting talks? Move to the party’s dancefloor!

FUDPub

On Saturday, 2010-09-18 there will be a party in the evening in the midst of downtown Zurich and everyone participating in FUDCon is very welcome to join us. There’ll be beer and some snacks and a great possibility to just have some fun together before the last day of FUDCon begins. More details are TBA.

We look forward to seeing you in September 2010 in Zurich for our events. Everyone is welcome and both events are free of charge.

During this year’s FOSDEM in Brussels my workmate Marcus and I gave a talk about Spacewalk. Well, he did the talking and I just clicked through the slides and the WebUI to be honest. Anyway, I just wanted to make our slides publicly available and point to the video that was recorded.

The slides are released under CC-BY (please mention “Marcus Moeller”, “Sandro Mathys” and “[of the] ETH Zurich”). Oh, we had to remove logos and stuff that is owned by the ETHZ, that’s why the first slide looks so empty.

As for the video’s license, I have no idea. You’d need to ask the Debian folks about that I guess.

Update: slides no longer give a 404.

I just gave the freshly released F12 Beta (Gnome x86_64 LiveCD install) a quick try on the very new T400s. Works very well out of the box, congratulations to everyone who worked on making this happen!

Working: ethernet, wifi, DP, Fn-keys (backlight, suspend, volume, battery, screen lock, wifi), suspend on lid close, dock

Not working: Fingerprint Reader (no surprise in newer Lenovos), Fn-key to hibernate (suspends instead)

Not tested: Bluetooth, eSata, microphone mute key, on Dock: 2x DP and 2x DVI, eSata

Will probably give the F12 Beta installDVD a try tomorrow.

Dear Lazyweb,

At our university professors tend to stop doing paper and pencil based exams and do them online (i.e. web based) instead. For this purpose we need a safe environment which allows browsing a certain site (i.e. the server on which the exam is) only. Additionally people should be able to bring their own laptop, boot some liveUSB/liveCD/PXE system and start the exam.

That system MUST:
- Be Fedora based :)
- Disallow the user to do any network traffic except to that one server (on ports 80/443 only) – the system itself should of course be able to do DHCP, DNS,  et al.
- Disallow any networking over anything but Ethernet
- Disallow access to any local storage (HDDs, SSDs, USB-keys/-disks)
- Disallow the user to run anything but Firefox (even when Firefox prompts to open anything) – or a more secure gecko based browser(?)
- Use matchbox-window-manager
- Have as little software as necessary
- (Be easily update-/upgradeable)

This does not have to be 100% secure (well, not possible anyway) but as secure as possible without doing really nasty or time consuming stuff. After all the students sign some paper after the exam to confirm that they did not cheat.

Anyone ever done something like that? Any ideas, pointers, help is welcome and much appreciated!

I guess SELinux is the best way to limit the user that much. I think xguest does some of the above, but not all. Not sure if we can use sandbox (-X) for our purpose. But I never did anything like that and wouldn’t even now what to start with and how to best do something like that.

Maybe it would be enough to just throw away some udev rules, not provide any application but Firefox and use iptables.

Oh, and what’s the best way to bring all this onto a live media? What tools are nowadays used to easily create some custom live system? We’re not sure yet whether we’ll use liveUSB/-CD or PXE (or both?) so this should work for all. No need to make it installable, tho! :)

Dear Lazyweb,

Next week, I’ll visit Amsterdam together with my fiancee for the first time. We’re really looking forward to that trip but one thing we’re not yet clear about and that’s where we hope to get yourr help:

What things should we absolutely see/do in Amsterdam? They should be free or cheap I guess. Oh, and really only Amsterdam – no nearby places or whatever…well, there might be exceptions.

Your tips/help in this matter is much appreciated!

Dear Planet Fedora,

Back in 2008, we planned the FAD EMEA 2008 and needed some extra money. To raise this, I contacted persons I knew from companies that use mainly OpenSource/Fedora to earn their money. This was a successful idea, as Puzzle ITC from Bern, Switzerland donated as a notable amount.

To drive this further and allow (or rather help) Ambassadors to raise money from companies willing to give something back, I set up a wiki page regarding this matter. Soon, this was not about cash only but about any sort of donation/contribution. I also presented that idea to the attendees of the FAD EMEA 2008 (and to some random people in #fedora-ambassadors) and the feedback was totally positive. It was then decided that it’d be a good idea to invite every project/SIG/whatever within the Fedora Project to add their ideas/needs.

Unfortunately, I didn’t push this any further since then. But it’s time to do something!

So, please take the time to read the draft of my input so far. Note that it’s only about Ambassadors so far (and is in their namespace, too). But I think you can get the idea and most of this can be rewritten for the whole of Fedora Project. Also, there’s already a generic ‘contribute‘ page – but there’s not lot on it.

By the way, the page is intended 1) to contact companies we know are using Fedora/RHEL to ask for their kind contributions and 2) to point companies asking us how they can help to a big list of ways to do so. The result should be, that no company can say ‘there’s no acceptable way for us to contribute to the Fedora Project’, just because there’s so many ways!

I therefore request for two things:

1. Do not edit or move the draft page (or generate another site out of it) just yet! I’d like to collect all the inputs, organize that a bit, discuss it further were necessary and then set up another draft.
2. Bring in your comments! Does your team need ‘manpower’, ‘paying a bill’ or ‘money donations’ from (potential) contributors, too? Do you have anything else a contributor could help you with? Is there anything else that shouldn’t be forgotten about?

I welcome all your comments – by comment to this post, by e-mail (red at fp.o) or in person (e.g. during LinuxTag 2009 or FUDCon EMEA in Berlin, at FrOSCon or at OpenExpo).

I wonder if we should create a ‘rebel’ group within the Fedora contributors’ community. They do things Ambassadors and Marketing likely wouldn’t.

First idea goes like this: a small group of some ‘rebels’ walks through a train with lots of people with laptops (e.g. intercity between Bern and Zurich). Everyone sitting in that train with a laptop in front of himself get a Fedora LiveCD (i.e. thrown on his keyboard without any further comment).

Whenever that group sees someone already running Fedora (not necessarily easy to detect when walking by), that person gets a Fedora t-shirt or another Fedora-branded nice-to-have thing.

(this is not really a serious post, but why not do it anyway? – more ideas welcome, anyway)