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Fri 30 May 2014

FUDCon Beijing - Day 1

Posted by ankur in Tech (836 words, approximately a 4 minute read)

Registration and getting started!

We didn't quite make it to breakfast on Day 1. We'd overslept and headed straight to the conference. Registration was swift - the volunteers had everything already set up already - project booths, registration booths with our IDs, t-shirts, swag and the rest.

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My tag

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Somvannda at the Fedora Booth

The conference begins

We headed into the main hall for the opening sessions. Emily introduced Kat and Jaroslav who welcomed the attendees and officially kicked off the conference. The hall was quite full, which was really good to see.

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Emily introduces Kat and Jaroslav

Once the welcome sessions were over, Tobias talked about Gnome 3.12+. He informed the audience about the planned features in future Gnome releases, such as Wayland support and colour tinting to improve accessibility. Jaroslav and Jiri introduced Fedora.next - the different products, a little bit about COPR and the new ring system that we're using.

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Tobias speaking about Gnome 3.12+

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Jaroslav and Jiri introduce Fedora.next

Track sessions

This gave way to the track sessions that we'd all registered to present. The Fedora track was in conference room 8.

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The FUDCon Banner

Fedora Videos

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Nitesh presenting Fedora Videos

Nitesh started the track with a session on Fedora Videos. The idea was to introduce the project to people. We had quite a good discussion too. Here are some things we found we could work on:

  • Can we translate the captions to our videos using transifex?
  • Can we also place videos on a website that would be available in China?

Both should be quite doable really. We hadn't really thought about these before.

Fedora websites

Robert introduced the Fedora websites project next. He discussed how it was set up, and the ideas on Fedora.next. He intended to show the audience a quick session on submitting patches to the team, but the limited bandwidth didn't permit us (The Fedora websites git repo is quite large).

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Robert presenting the Fedora Websites project

We did get a few tasks from this session too:

  • Completion of the Ask Fedora skin, so that it can be better integrated with the new Fedora.next hub style website
  • Someone asked if the Fedora easy fix page could be translated into multiple languages

The Ask Fedora skin is almost complete, but it still needs some work. We discussed how the easy fix page could be translated, but it doesn't seem to be straight forward since it harvests information from the trac and bugzilla instances. The static content could be translated. We need to bring this up with infra, see if anything can be done.

FirewallD

Zamir took a quick overview of FirewallD. He discussed both the command line and the GUI interface. I knew most of it, but it was quite a bit of information for new comers.

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Zamir presenting FirewallD

Ansible

Fedora infra is switching form puppet to ansible. Aditya introduced ansible with a quick tutorial. He discussed the logic behind the switch and answered a couple of other questions that the audience had. The infra team is planning a FAD to convert the remaining puppet modules to ansible. There's quite a bit of work to be done if you're looking to get started with infra.

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A quick introduction to ansible

Conary

Martin spoke about Conary. In spite of it being around for quite a while, I'd never heard of it before. Martin discussed the usefulness of conary. It was quite interesting. I met Martin later during the celebration dinner and talked about it a bit. I told him about rpm os-tree that I've been reading about on the mailing lists. I don't understand them much, but they did seem slightly similar to me. Martin said he expects to work a lot more with Fedora in the future.

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Martin talking about Conary

ROS on Fedora

The last session for the day was mine. I introduced ROS and why we'd like to get it packaged up for Fedora. The audience wasn't using Fedora on their systems already so I couldn't really do the hackfest that I'd intended. I ended up showing them how to make a hello world package on my system. The audience was quite interactive, and I received quite a few interesting comments and questions.

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My session on ROS and packaging

End of a busy day

All in all, it was quite a busy day. The talks were most interesting. We, all the Fedora folks, decided to head out to dinner. I managed to find a nice little Mexican pub on Google and we took the train out to it. We weren't really sure if navigator would get us to the right place, but it luckily did. We had some food - Aditya and Nitesh ordered a gigantic pizza. Jaroslav, Robert, Jiri, Somvannda and I got ourselves burgers. They were quite good. Of course, there was beer - an entire tap. It was quite a good place. The waiters understood a bit of English too.

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Dinner and beer

We got back and went straight to bed. It was quite an amazing, hectic day.


 
    
 
 

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