Spot pitches his ideas for a Fedora RPG.

J5 explains his vision for Fedora Community

A large crew of us had lunch at a nearby Greek place.

The lightning talks were given in front of a standing-room only packed room.

Smooge pulls out his wallet.

Back at the hotel, Mel continues her hackfest coverage with interviews.

Ryan cooks up some beefy wonder.

Game night was very popular

More games!

Settlers of Catan

Mike & Ricky

I learned a lot of good photography tips from Tatica!

Fedora infrastructure folks hack on stuff

So many people…. this picture doesn’t even cover it. So many people at this FUDcon!

PULP!

Barcamp talk proposals during the kickoff session.

Diana’s anthropology report on Fedora.

Sebastian and Mel during the Education session.

Chris’ talk on cloud management.

Dennis and Greg smile for the camera!

Justin, Peter, Kyle, and Dave at the hotel lobby

Will during the meet the Anaconda team talk.

Here’s my notes from the ‘Meet the Anaconda Team’ session at FUDcon Tempe today. Note that these are notes and not really polished (I apologize, I figured it’s better to post this sooner than wait for perfection lol.)

David Cantrell and Chris Lumens started the session by going around the room and introducing everyone on the team. They talked a bit about their storage testing framework (Chris did a separate session on this), and how Anaconda is pretty hard to get started with as a contributor, but the testing framework is an easy way to get involved – submit test. This can be even more helpful than submitting code patches and the test system is easy to contribute to. I didn’t catch how exactly / where to submit tests though; I didn’t catch Chris’ session on that.

David also pointed out the Anaconda features page on the wiki:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Features

This page is how the team organizes their work. They are open to entertaining ideas for additional features to work on. You can see the UX redesign on the list – this is something I’ve been working on with Luya.

After pointing that out, various members of the team talked a bit about the stuff they’ve been working on lately:

Will Woods talked about how pygtk is going to go away in general. pygi is coming and with it gobject introspection, which makes API generation automagical. It’s almost exactly the same as using pygtk. If you just change the imports for a given piece of code, it may just work. But theres some knottiness so he is going through all of the UI code to figure out how this migration will work. We have custom widgets that won’t port cleanly, so maybe look at glue and UI code. Different implementation of bindings should use less memory in theory. There will be no pygtk for gtk3, no pygtk for python 3, so we need to do this anyway. For the most part, it’s trivial, except for the difficult pieces. Since we have the UI redesign going on too we’ll get some housekeeping done here and a new UI. When we build out new/different screens, we’ll need to use more glade, too. Procedurally-built UIs suck.

Martin Gracik talked about he is working to solve another problem with anaconda – tree compose (anything involving the tools that generate initial ramdisk and install image / install script)s today – called buildinstall is pretty hacky and involved the creation and maintenance of two manually-maintained static lists- one of packages needed and the list of dependencies (calculated manually – yuck!), then a static list of files that needed to be included in the buildroot. If anything moved (for example, rm moving from /bin/rm to /usr/bin/rm or something like that), the image created wouldn’t work. So Martin Gracik has been heading up lorax, a replacement for buildinstall.
Right now, lorax is a separate python project – which is a big improvement. When we need to change how install images are generated, we can do that independent of a given anaconda release. Lorax is a transparent change but a big step – Fedora 15 will likely be composed using it and it will save a lot of manual maintenance worl – Lorax will make tree composition nicer.

Radek Vykydal is working on network changes for future Fedora releases. Anaconda now uses NetworkManager to handle all of the networking during installation now. Before that, anacondaused libdhcp. We won’t talk about that. Before that it used punk, and we won’t talk about that either. NetworkManager has allowed us to not have to have our own network knowledge, but has introduced some complications. We get wireless support for free using NetworkManager… only for stage II. for stage I, if you don’t want to use NetworkManager’s UI, there’s only basic support. The initial loader – it asks where do you want to install fedora from, what network interface… we have to communicate with NetworkManager behind the scenes and produce our own interface to make that happen. We might move some steps from loader to stage II. A change this work has introduced that a lot of people don’t like – we no longer have the forced configure-your-network screen during installation. You do a network install, and anaconda used to ask you how do you want to set up your network devices. We do that now… nm-connection-editor… but we don’t do it by default. By default, if you used the network during installation, that’s enabled on the target system. So this causes an issue: if you install from optical media, when you boot the desktop it won’t connect to the network by default. This is a call made in favor of server installs where automatically connecting to a network isn’t always a smart thing to do. Radek added back the ability to configure the interfaces, but the default is to mirror the settings used during installation – if you’re using optical media, you’re not using network (unless you configure additional repos which is a way around the issue) so you’re not using network during installation and that is mirrored in the default system configuration. People on servers don’t want to enable all network interfaces on machine by default.

Dave Lehman did a lot of the storage rewrite work that was first available in Fedora 10. Now he is working on enabling install to a disk image file… you can use dd or create a raw file using qemu-image… can pass –image=path/to/that/file… run anaconda from command line and end up with installation sitting in your image file. Working on figuring out how to get that image to work for live cd compose. James Antill asked how is hardware detection / emulation handled, for KVM to be able to boot the imgae. It turns out that eEvery piece of hardware that Fedora supports is in the init.rd and will be detected at boot up. GRUB is on the beginning of the image file – point KVM at it and it should be off and running. Overall we want to make Anaconda as flexible as possible.

Brian Lane has taken over the Live CD pieces for Fedora. The current live cd support we have… is whipped together. His goal is to build on the storage rewrite and Dave’s image install stuff, to try to consolidate install paths to use anaconda to do live media image creation. right know live image installs uses live-image-create, a thin layer on top of pykickstart. It works and is implemented fine, but is sadly a different path so we end up with different installs with different bugs than we would get if anaconda was used. A single code path would be easier to maintain. If we use anaconda to do dvds and live cds and virt, installs will be more reliable / consistent and there will be less problems. The existing livecd install just dd’s the image it booted on, dd is added to target disk, uses resize to fs to grow filesystem. We may not be able to get around that cuz it’s fast and everybody wants fast. Packages makes things slower. Eric Sandeen investigated how this works and found we have two resizes happening: when we create the images to make the isos AND when we are putting it down on the final disk image.

Ales Kozumplik is working on having anaconda run in multiple threads, so anaconda’s UI won’t block anymore while performing various operations. (Yay!)

We finished the session with a group photo! Woo! And those are my notes. Hope they are helpful!

Luckily I am actually not a great photographer, and Milan’s portrait came out pretty dark (see above.) So we went over brightening up and white balancing the photograph, then we started the work of making it into a hackergotchi.

Here is the hackergotchi we came up with, although it is not compliant with Nicu’s dropshadows so I’ll have to fix that:

Next I demoed a couple of lesser-known FLOSS graphics tools – Alchemy and MyPaint – and showed a workflow using Alchemy for idea generation then importing it into MyPaint and sketching over it. We came up with this evil armored dragon dude, but my drawing style tends to be cutesy so the sketch on top made my evil dragon dude look not-so-evi:

Anyhow it seems at least the hackergotchi section of the talk may have actually been useful – Adrian came up with a hackergotchi for Jef during the session with a little bit of help from Jef (I talk too fast ).

There’s a lot more to talk about FUDcon Day 3. This is my FUDcon day 3 album so far, and I have more to add to it.

Then we noticed an odd item in the vending machine on the train platform on the way to FUDpub. Adam is very hopeful:

Finally after getting a bit lost, we made it to FUDpub:

Finally I was able to meet some of my coworkers from Red Hat Brno from the Satellite & Spacewalk team, Miroslav and Mirek:

The vegetarian dish was delicious roasted vegetables including peppers, eggplant, and potatoes. I also enjoyed the beer; it was a light wheat beer:

Thomas Woerner noticed a little tiny kitten in the hallway by the bathrooms, and it ended up running into the women’s room! Some of the restaurant staff rescued it (so cute! Cute kitty, now we just need a pony and FUDcon is complete!):

We had some discussions about software freedom on the way back to the hotel and in the hotel lobby, mostly Spot and Dave Crossland with others chiming in

FUDcon Day 3 blog post coming soon.

So I gave my Gimp & Inkscape tutorial session in the afternoon. For the hour that I had I went over by 30 minutes or so, but my very patient audience stuck around (thank you!) I had a lot of problems with OpenOffice.org, because whenever I attempted to minimize it to give a demo, it would crash. Everytime I tried to restart it, it would take a long time recovering the slideshow, and then I would have to fix the setting for the display to output to the correct screen all over again, and then find my place. My presentation required a lot of back-and-forth. Yes my audience had quite a bit of patience.

We went over:

• Bitmap vs. Vector graphics and which to use for what task
• Gimp: Masking photos, and ‘painting’ with a photo as filler
• Gimp:Layer Blending mode effects
• Inkscape: Importing bitmaps & using the text tool to create lolcats
• Inkscape: Important shortcuts
• Inkscape: Advanced text handling
• Inkscape: Shapes, Paths, and Nodes basics

Here’s the files:

• Inkscape & Gimp Tutorial (ODP format, 22 MB)
• Inkscape & Gimp Tutorial (PDF format, 5.4 MB)

FUDcon Day 1 Evening

A group of us headed back to the hotel to drop off all of our heavy bags. Adam and I also switched rooms to accommodate Dave Crossland, since my original room had an extra bed. Then we headed out for a nice Thai restaurant close to the hotel and had some very interesting conversation and delicious Thai curries!

FUDcon Day 2

The day stared off waiting for Jared’s keynote to start – I used the time to show Jared displacement maps in Gimp and also show Jens how to create a hackergotchi using masks

Then came Jared’s keynote:

FUDcon Day 2: Design Team Workshop:

Then I attended the Fedora Design Team workshop where we discussed the F14 schedule, some ideas on where our team can go in the future, and also a nice discussion from Dave Crossland on the state of free fonts and his proposed model for growing the font commons.

The basic framework for what what talked about regarding the design team’s focus future:

• artwork (graphics in Fedora, icons, marketing collateral, website graphics, etc.) <= we definitely do a lot of this
• design (interface design, usability) <= we need to do more of this
• advocacy & freedom <= we use free tools to produce free works using free content resources and promote all of them.
• teaching & recruiting <= we need to teach the usage of our tools, create SOPs (standard operating procedure) documents & tutorials so folks can help themselves and so we can train new recruits, and we need to recruit new designers to join and help out in FLOSS in general.

Here’s some of the things Dave Crossland went over:

Since we had some concerns about training folks who get FLOSS but not design how to understand design, Dave recommended trying an approach like the The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams. The book basically breaks design into four principles, easy to remember via an acronym:

• contrast
• repetition
• alignment
• proximity

The C.R.A.P. principle: design which doesn’t use these principles is C.R.A.P.

He also recommended the approach to usability in Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, and The Elements of Typographic Style as a good primer in working with type.

Some ideas he had for efforts to free existing design content is to create an advocacy site that goes over the reasons a font author would want to use OFL or a photographer to use CC-BY-SA as a license and the benefits these would afford them and to use this resource in reaching out to the creators.

On the fonts front he told us about a bunch of projects of interest – he mentioned the open font library – although note as he explained it’s not in good shape right now and a change of web framework is being contemplated for it. He also talked about some of the big wins for openly-licensed fonts in FLOSS with the current webfonts movement – the standard right now is non-DRM, and in order to comply with font redistribution licensing agreements, it seems open fonts will be favored a lot more (less complicated to use due to licensing) over proprietary fonts. He is currently working with Google on their webfonts project to help bring more freely-licensed fonts to the web.

One of the stories he told us that was a driving factor for him to get involved in freely-licensed fonts was about an Adobe presentation he saw at a fonts conference. They drew out a map of Russia. Russia uses Cyrillic, but there are some glyphs that are less common in Cyrillic that are specific to certain regions of Russia. Overlaid on the map then, was the marketing research for Adobe’s Pro fonts Cyrillic – showing the areas Adobe knows they can make a profit from font licenses, showing the areas they thought they could make money, and the areas they believe they could not. For the areas they didn’t think they could make money designing Cyrillic glyphs specific to those regions, so they did not. As Dave said, this is a real problem for those communities, and one that they could solve for themselves with a font commons. The recipe for success here is that those designing the extra glyphs have:

• A emotional investment – it’s their language. If there are no glyphs for it, they cannot communicate digitally.
• Knowledge of how to do it – or access on how to learn it. Dave is working on a project to this end to provide freely-available materials on how to create fonts.
• Access to tools that make it possible – we have font-forge, the UI is more of a builder’s tool than an architect’s tool, but it’s sufficient.
• A business model or a dedication to volunteer – you have to support yourself.

Dave has some ideas on better business models for fonts to help address that last point. Fontography can be a lucrative graphic design specialization – you can create a font and treat it using a physical product model, spend a year creating it and then wait for the ‘royalties’ (licenses) to roll in. Another way to work is a commons-based method, where rather than designing a font from scratch for every client – an expense process meaning only the largest, richest companies can afford custom fonts and smaller companies can not – a designer can use the commons of freely-licensed fonts as a pool of raw material to which they can add special customization’s to a client’s specifications, make a modest profit from the changes, and then contribute those changes back into the commons. So on and so forth. Then the business model supports both the fontographers and the commons.

I’m really Dave made the trip out to visit our conference and I’m really excited about the projects he’s working on to help expand the commons! (Plus he created one of the fonts we now use for the Fedora brand: Cantarell! )

FUDcon Day 2: Lunch

Spot, Jesse, Michael, and I treked down to the HILTL Vegetarian Buffet, an eatery recommended by my Swiss native co-worked Marco. The food was simply amazing, I must have sampled 12 different dishes, didn’t quite know all that I was eating, but it tasted amazing.

HILTL also had a projector with a twitter wall up, so Spot decided to help recruit more FUDcon attendees:

By the way, there is this amazing Swiss sweet dish that seems to have yogurt, fruit, and Muesli in it. I don’t know what it is called, but it is amazing and I am addicted to it. Here is some I had at the HILTL, with some mango pudding as garnish

FUDcon Day 2: After Lunch

I went to the Design Suite workshop, Spot’s licensing talk, and Jared’s VOIP talk where he showed a live demo of a running Asterisk server:

Next I believe it is off to FUDPub

>Today’s full photo album is available, and as always watch for updates. (I’ll probably make one tonight after FUDpub.)

Spot’s workshop on how to make RPM packages had a full-house audience. I was able to create my first-ever working spec file from scratch, hehe. (Usually I only rebuild from SRPMs or make franken-spec files by tainting specs from other packages.) So now I understand a whole lot more what all the different sections and default lines mean.

FROSCamp Exhibition Hall

Lunch

Reminder:
My album for photos I’m taking today at FUDcon Zurich is open now; check it throughout the day for updates.

My album for photos I’m taking today at FUDcon Zurich is open now; check it throughout the day for updates.

Spot and I took a red eye Wednesday night from Boston via JFK to Zurich; we arrived in Zurich at right around noon on Thursday. I tried to send txt messages to folk; my UK pay-go Vodafone gets a signal from Swisscom but I can’t make or receive calls and text messages. (Any UK pay-go folks have hints?)

We ate lunch at a place Sandro Mathys recommended called Adler’s Swiss Chuchi, where we enjoyed delicious Swiss fondue! By chance we met up with Bert Desmet and his housing host Melanie and enjoyed some chat and drinks with them.

Then we headed over to ETH Zurich, the site for both FUDcon Zurich and FrOSCamp 2010 Zurich. Jesse, Jared, and Adam helped set up the conference, and then we headed back to the hotel before Spot fell asleep.

Zurich is a very beautiful city, I’m looking forward to seeing more of it over the next few days!