Prague Installfest results

Last weekend (2.-3.3. 2013) we had a lovely conference here in Prague. People could attend to quite few very cool talks and even play OpenArena tournament :-) Anyway that ain’t so interesting for Gentoo users. The cool part for us is the Gentoo track that I tried to assemble in there and which I will try to describe here.

Setup of the venue

This was easy task as I borrowed computer room in the dormatories basement which was large enough to hold around 30 students. I just carried in my laptop, checked the beamer works. Ensured the chairs are not falling apart and replaced the broken ones. Verified the wifi works (which it did not but the admins made it working just in time). And for last brought some drinks from main track so we do not dry out.

The classroom was in bit different area than the main track I tried to put some arrows for people to find the place. But when people started getting in and calling me where the hell is the place I figured out something is wrong. This pointy was then adjusted but still it shows up that we should rather not split of the main tracks or ensure there are HUGE and clear arrows pointing in directions where people can find us.

Talks

During the day there were only three talks, two held by me and one that was not on the plan done by Theo.

Hardened talk

I was supposed to start this talk at 10:00 but given the issue with the arrows people showed up around 10:20 so I had to cut back some informations and live examples.
Anyway I hope it was interesting hardened overview and at least Petr Krcmar wrote lots of stuff so we maybe will se some articles about it in czech media (something like “How I failed to install hardened Gentoo” :P).

Gentoo global stuff

This was more discussion about features than talk. The users were pointing out what they would like to see happening in Gentoo and what were their largest issues lately.

From issues people pointed out the broken udev update which rendered some boxes non-bootable (yes there was message but they are quite easy to overlook, I forgot to do it on one machine myself). Some sugesstions went for genkernel to actually trigger rebuild of kernel right away in post stage for user with the enabled required options. This sounds like quite nice idea, as since you are using genkernel you probably want your kernel automatically adjusted and updated for the cases where the apps require option additions. As I am not aware of the genkernel stuff I told the users to open bug about this.

Second big thing we were talking about were binary packages. The idea was to have some tinderbox which produce generic binary packages available for most useflag variants. So you could specify -K and it would use the binary form or if not provided compiled localy. For this the most work would need to be done on portage side because we would have to somehow figure out multiple versions of the same package with different enabled uses.

Infra talk

Theo did awesome job explaining how infra uses puppet and what services and servers we have. This was on-demand talk which people that were on-site wanted.

Hacking — aka stuff that we somehow did

Martin “plusky” Pluskal (SU) went over our prehistoric bugs from 2k5 and 2k6 and created list of cantfix ones which are no longer applicable or are new pkg requests with dead upstream. I still have to close them or give him editbugz privs (this sounds more like it as I am lazy like hell, or better make him developer :P).
Ondrej Sukup (ACR) attending over hangout worked on python-r1 porting and I commited his work to cvs.
Cyril “metan” Hrubis (SU) worked on crossdev on some magic avr bug I don’t want to hear much about but he seems optimistic that he might finish the work in near future.
David Heidelberger worked first on fixing bugs with his lappy and then helped on the bug wrangling with Martin.
Jan “yac” Matejka (SU) finished his quizzes and thus he got shiny bug and is now in lovely hands of our recruiters to became our newest addition to the team.
Michal “miska” Hrusecky (SU) worked on update of osc tools update to match latest we have in opensuse buildservice and he plans to commit them soonish to cvs.
Pavel “pavlix” Simerda (RH) who is the guy responsible for latest networkmanager bugs expressed his intentions to became dev and I agreed with him
Tampakrap (SU) worked on breaking one laptop with fresh install of Gentoo, which I then picked up and finished with some nice KDE love :-)
Amy Winston helped me a lot with setup for the venue and also kept us with Theo busy breaking her laptop, which I hope she is still happily using and does not want to kill us, other then that she focused on our sweet bugzie and wrangling. She seems not willing to finish her quizzes to became full developer, so we will have work hard on that in the future :-)
And lastly I (SU) helped users with issues they had on their local machines and explained how to avoid those or report directly to bugzie with relevant informations and so on.

In case you wonder SU = SUSE ; RH = RedHat; ACR = Armed forces CR.

For the future events we have to keep in mind that we need to better setup those and have prepared small buglists rather then wide-range ones where people spend more time picking ideal work than working on those :-)

Lunch/Afterparty

The lunch and the afterparty were done in nice pub nearby which had decent food and plenty of beer so everyone was happy. The only problem was that it take some waiting to get the food as suddenly there were 40 people in the pub (I still think this could’ve been somehow prepared so they had only limited subset of foods really fast so you can choose between waiting a bit or picking something and going back fast).

During the night one of Gentoo attendees got quite drunk and had to be delivered home by other ogranizers as I had to leave bit early (being up from 5 am is not something I fancy).
The big problem here was with the location where one should put him, because he was not able to talk and his ID contained residency info for different city. So for the next time when you go for linux event where you don’t know much put into your pockets some paper with the address. It is superconvenient and we don’t have to bother your parents at 1 am to find out what to do with their “sweet” child.

Endword

I would like to say huge thanks to all attendees for making the event possible and also appologize for everything I frogot to mention here.

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5 Responses to Prague Installfest results

  1. tampakrap says:

    She refuses to see me again because she’ll have to kill me