Let’s start from the beginning: On Friday I took the train to Dortmund where I met Bert, Yakoov and Gregory. Bert gave me a ride to Chemnitz. When we checked in at our hotel, we met Jörg, but he was in a hurry to get back to his parents, who live not far away from Chemnitz. After the check-in we met with Sven and his friends at the Ratskeller to have some delicious food. Thorsten called me and showed up just a little later and half an hour later the Xfce people arrived too. While I already knew most of them because I met Enrico last year at OpenRheinRuhr and Dominic, Michael and Simon happen to be Fedora contributors too, I was very pleased to meet Fabian Nowak. I know him for quite a long time, but we never met in person.

After finishing our meals we walked over to the Turmbrauhaus (Tower brewery) for some beers. There were quite a lot of people from different projects there, CentOS, Debian and the FSF just to name a few. They all were sitting around a really long table, chatting, drinking and having fun. In another room Jörg Schilling had dinner with two lawyers friends.

The next morning we arrived at the university where the CLT takes place. Robert and Jörg already built up the booth on Friday, so there was not much left for us to do. I decided to have breakfast first. The catering at CLT is really impressive, people even call it the “Chemnitz Catering Days with Linux talks“.

The Fedora booth at CLT 2010

The Fedora booth was pretty busy all day, so I didn’t manage to attend any talks or help the at the Xfce booth. I talked all day long, it was loud and crowded, and in the evening at the social event I nearly lost my voice. The problem was that I had to give my LXDE talk on Sunday. So I left the social event early and got back to the hotel with Jens to cure my voice.

On Sunday I was much better again. Although speaking loud was exhausting, I managed to do my talk and it seems people liked it. After the talk a lot of the visitors came up to the Fedora booth in order to get the Fedora LXDE spin on a USB key. Next year we should also do an Xfce talk to gather more attraction.

After the first round of people was served with USB keys and live media, I burned some Xfce media and headed over to the Xfce booth. I felt really bad because I could not spend that much time on Xfce, but I know that they had enough people to do well. Nevertheless I would have liked to spend more time with Enrico, Fabian and the people from the Fedora Xfce SIG.

Later that afternoon I had to repair the display connector of the Fedora video beamer and I needed a tong. Instead of asking all kinds of people for a tong I went straight to the debianforum.de booth and of course, they had what I was looking for. Debianforum.de never disappoints you! It was also nice to meet the guys from Debianforum.de again. The first time I met Sebastian in person was last year at Chemnitz and I owe him and his forum so much.

Another person that I was happy to meet is Sirko. He used to be part of the CLT organization team, but last year they had some disagreements. I cannot comment on that, I was just lucky to see Sirko again.

As you can see: Chemnitz Linux Days are a place to meet the German Linux community. I even think it is the best Linux community event in Germany. I enjoyed it last year, I enjoyed it this year and I will definitely go there again next year:

But there were also two things I did not like:

• Simon’s talk about OSSTMM and the Fedora Security Spin was rejected although it would have fitted perfectly into the forensics track.
• The German Federal Foreign Office rejected Hiemanschu‘s visa for no reason. It would have been awesome to have Hiemanschu at the event because then the three people involved in the F13 Security Spin (Jörg, Hiemanschu and me) would have been gathered at one place.

Anyway, there is nothing we can do about these problems, so let’s focus on the positive aspects. For me the two most important things are

• Fedora had a very strong presence at CLT: If you count in all the people (even the ones not doing official booth service or the ones serving at the Xfce booth), we were 13 Fedora contributors (in alphabetical order): Bert, Christoph (myself), Dominic, Gregory, Jens, Jörg, Marcus, Michael, Robert, Simon, Sven, Thorsten and Yakoov.

The Xfce community at CLT 2010

• The large number of Fedora contributors at the Xfce booth also proves that we are doing a good job with the Xfce SIG. The number of Xfce users in Fedora is growing and so is the number of Fedora users in the Xfce community, for example in the IRC channels. I’m looking forward to Xfce 4.8 because I’m sure the new release will help us to make Xfce even more attractive.

Looking forward to rock Chemnitz next year with Fedora and Xfce. Maybe we will even haven an LXDE booth, who knows?

Policy proposal: contributing to Fedora should be FUN

This may seem like a joke, but it is not I kindly ask of FESco to seriously take this under consideration.

I would like FESco to codify into a policy that contributing to Fedora should be Fun, and that to further that goal any existing and new procedures for Fedora should be balanced in how much they negatively impact Fun versus how much gain is expected from them to further the goals of Fedora.

This is going to become an interesting FESCo meeting on Tuesday i think…

… hilft auch kein Schokoriegel.

If I want KDE or LXDE, it should be part of the installer.

Actually Xfce and LXDE are already part of the installer, they are just not on the install media. But when you suggest to include them in the DVD, then the same person tells you that:

You’re only thinking about you and your images aren’t you? What happens when we put your stuff on the DVD?

As a spin maintainer, you can’t do right.

We arrived at 10:00 and doors were to open at 11:00, but when we built up our booth, the first visitors were already showing up. At 10:30, there were already a lot of visitors and at 11:00, the small exhibition room was overcrowded. It got a little better once the talks started, but the whole day there really was a lot of people. I guess nobody expected such a success, especially because the weather was really bad, still a lot of snow in Oldenburg.

Our Booth consisted of two tables with two laptops and two XOs. The XOs served as an eye catcher and attracted a lot of people. Fedora was also very interesting for them because we and Sidux were the only real distributions on the event. The rest was ether projects such as Cacert and OpenOffice or companies. We gave away round about 80 Fedora discs (Live media and installation DVDs), stickers and a few T-Shirts.

The event took place at KDO, (Communal Data processing Oldenburg), which is a joint-venture of Oldenburg and the surrounding counties that does all the IT services in the area in public administration, schools and so on. They are already using Linux a lot, but unfortunately only on servers. Only 2 of their employees run Linux on their workstations and I was glad to hear that one of them uses Fedora.

I was happy to meet our fellow contributor Robert Albrecht again, whom I hadn’t seen for a long time. Robert did an interesting talk about Verinice. I did a talk too, and as you may have guessed already it was about Fedora, more precisely about our foundations and development model. The title was “Fedora – community driven development”. I originally prepared it for Chemnitz Linux Days, but it was rejected due to the large number of submissions (BTW: My LXDE talk was accepted). I will upload the slides later. Although I had one of the last slots at 17:00, the room was still full of people, not a single chair left. This and the interesting questions and discussions after the talk make me think that the audience really enjoyed my talk.

I also met Dr. Claudia Neumann again. She is really amazing: She is not only a medic but also a programmer and she ported APW Wiegand to Linux all by herself. We had a nice conversation on the social event that took place in the evening. We had dinner and some beers and altogether it was a really nice and successful event. Thanks everybody for making it happen, especially to Frank and the other guys from KDO and the sponsors, namely to LWsystems, Univention and bytemine. Three cool companies dedicated to Linux and FOSS. With their support we can make the 5. Linuxinformationstag next year even bigger. Looking forward to see you there!

FAD Niederrhein 2010
March 27 + 28
Mönchengladbach, DRK-Begegnungsstätte Wickrath

You don’t have to be a Fedora user or contributor to attend (Enrico isn’t ether). Instead, Fedora Activity Days are supposed to bring benefit to the upstream projects that we support, in this case Geany, LXDE and the OLPC. And maybe even your project, you just need to join us.

If you would like to attend, please add yourself on the wikipage. More workshops, hack sessions or talks are highly welcome. Lets make this event a truly successful one!

Via: Mether’s Fedora Blog

But we felt like we could make things better. Currently most decisions are made by the maintainers (Kevin, Adam and me) ether on IRC or by mail. Of course we listen to feedback we get from users, but we want decision-making to be more transparent. That’s why we now have a mailing list of our own: The Fedora Xfce List, a place where users and developers meet.

We also want to revive the Xfce SIG IRC meetings. We did that in the past but somehow we didn’t find the time to do it regularly. In order to find a time that fits everyone, I started a poll. If you are interested in joining our meetings, please respond here.

So if you are using Fedora and are interested in Xfce

• subscribe to the mailing list
• attend our IRC meetings
• join the SIG
• have fun!

I will continue to work on improving Fedora and I hope to succeed in that together with the other Fesco members. I will focus on improving cross-desktop interoperability and on simplifying the feature process and the workflow for co-maintainership of upstream developers. I’m looking forward to serve the Fedora Project as a Fesco member. Let’s get to work!