Linuxtag Germany (Berlin) 2011 -- recap
Dear everyone, we've had the great oportunity of presenting Debian at the LinuxTag 2011 [0] with a booth, kindly organized by Annette, that we shared with Kanotix [1] and aptosid [2]. Our working together was fun and productive as we had a lot of talks with each other as well as with guests that asked about our relationship and Debian and its derivatives in general. It was refreshing to see how many normal users care about giving back and partly even know about ongoing discussions in Debian. We've had many discussions about 'rolling', its possible implementations, its effect on users, often even if it would bring back users that nowadays use Ubuntu. Speaking of which, I, personally, found it interesting how many users see Debian as the great effort but for some reasons prefer Ubuntu as their desktop system. Particularly, when a single missing package (for instance some funny desktop feature) would make the difference. We all encouraged users to use 'reportbug', share their experiences with Debian, help improve it in whatever way they can think of. Almost all of them figured they could do something, even if it's simple stuff. We can't fix bugs that we don't know about was possibly the most repeated sentence during the four days of the event. And it seemed to make sense to them. :) Another interesting topic was appreciation of the work of others, (seemingly) completely unrelated to Debian. For instance, while most of our guests at the booth cared for stability, thorough planning of releases, the Debian package management etc. and therefor don't like using distributions that don't profit from that -- when it came to interesting, new efforts like '/run', they all appreciated how other distributions (or projects in general) go a different way and by that work on things everyone can profit from in the long run. I, personally, never saw that many people give credit to projects they usually don't like much for whatever reason. I liked how this development in our community improves Free Software more generally than just single projects. All in all, that were great four days. I don't know about official numbers about visitors or anything. But I do know that we all had fun, that we've met new, interesting people as well as the old guys from the last few years. I'd like to thank Annette for making the effort and organizing everything, Alex for shipping the merch stuff to us, and -- of course -- all our helpers at the booth, be that DDs or total newbies. I can't list them all -- sorry -- but rest assured, we've had an interesting, refreshing, and big team of about 10 to 15 people everyday who offered their help. Everyone (as far as I know) was free to see whatever talk they liked (except for Zack's talk that everyone wanted to hear), and we still kept the booth running. Thanks to all of you who registered on the wiki page [3] so we were able to plan; thanks to all who just jumped in whenever it seemed neccessary. And special thanks to those who worked just as hard and literally just started getting to know Debian better! Great fun; you should consider coming to next year's LinuxTag! Hauke [0] http://www.linuxtag.org/2011/ [1] http://www.kanotix.com [2] http://www.aptosid.com [3] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEventsDe/2011/LinuxTag -- .''`. Jan Hauke Rahm j...@debian.org www.jhr-online.de : :' : Debian Developer www.debian.org `. `'` Member of the Linux Foundationwww.linux.com `- Fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe www.fsfe.org signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Linuxtag Germany (Berlin) 2011 -- recap
Hello, On 05/21/2011 10:45 PM, Jan Hauke Rahm wrote: We all encouraged users to use 'reportbug', share their experiences with Debian, help improve it in whatever way they can think of. Almost all of them figured they could do something, even if it's simple stuff. We can't fix bugs that we don't know about was possibly the most repeated sentence during the four days of the event. And it seemed to make sense to them. :) this is amazing, indeed. And I experience fairly frequently, too. From my observation the issue is less the picture than the immediate appreciation that there are folks caring for their user experience so much that the decision towards Ubuntu feels safer. We can react to this in multiple ways: * get more artists attracted to Debian and encourage them to contribute in some way that we may not even foresee, yet it's art after all. How to render Debian more attractive to artists I don't really know. What comes to mind: o a Debian blend for art? o better visibility of authorships for contributed art throughout the system, to help the artists' promotion? o competitions, prices? * strengthen the concept of Blends more for various communities. This may help to ensure more complete workflows for various user groups and increases the likelihood that because of particular ties between users and developers the one or other piece of glue code may find its way into the archive, which may not fit to any particular package but ist just helpful in some way, * do nothing * ..? All those changes would need to come from those who use those packages. No idea how this could be triggered. And it may not be clear if an active effort to recruit contributers for from the core of the project is truly in our interest in the first place. Steffen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4dd83b3e.4060...@gmx.de
Re: Linuxtag Germany (Berlin) 2011 -- recap
On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 6:22 AM, Steffen Möller steffen_moel...@gmx.de wrote: * get more artists attracted to Debian and encourage them to contribute in some way that we may not even foresee, yet it's art after all. How to render Debian more attractive to artists I don't really know. Valessio Brito has been trying to push this a bit through things like art.debian.net. What comes to mind: o a Debian blend for art? pkg-multimedia folks were thinking about starting some blends, I think this could fit well there. o better visibility of authorships for contributed art throughout the system, to help the artists' promotion? The chosen desktop themes in desktop-base get good coverage in the more popular desktops (GNOME, KDE etc) but things like GNUStep, openbox, awesome don't use the default themes yet. o competitions, prices? Some competitions happen at art.debian.net, for example the recent Debian and Debian women mascots * strengthen the concept of Blends more for various communities. This may help to ensure more complete workflows for various user groups and increases the likelihood that because of particular ties between users and developers the one or other piece of glue code may find its way into the archive, which may not fit to any particular package but ist just helpful in some way, +1 I plan to start some game-related blends at some stage. I need to dig a bit more into the technical side of blends first though. http://wiki.debian.org/Games/Blends -- bye, pabs http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/banlktimvhwg3c-wrc55ukbiryrdz4ra...@mail.gmail.com
Re: Linuxtag Germany (Berlin) 2011 -- recap
On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 09:43:33AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote: I plan to start some game-related blends at some stage. I need to dig a bit more into the technical side of blends first though. IMHO it would be a good idea to use Debian Jr as template for what you are planing. We should agree to sit together at DebCamp (if you will join) to push this together. Kind regards Andreas. -- http://fam-tille.de -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110522045922.gb17...@an3as.eu
Re: Debian hardware certification
Hi, I started a thread on debian-private, because I didn't know where to post. So there's already a (very short) discussion that started. Here's my original message: On 05/21/2011 07:11 PM, Thomas Goirand wrote: Hi there, I didn't know where to post, so I'm posting here. Let me know where I should post, if I'm doing wrong. I was at the (China Cloud Computing Conference) in Beijing the last 3 days. There, I had a chat with Nick, from chinaskycloud which works tighly with SuperCloud (a Supermicro subsidiary in China). We talked about the possibility to have their hardware being certified as compatible with Debian, and have them advertize about it on their website product pages. The plan would be to test the hardware (probably with a live CD using a KVM over IP). If it doesn't work, see what driver isn't present, and if the backported kernel has the fix. If it does, in some cases, we could add a patch in a Debian point release, if it's not too intrusive. Having a hardware certified program would increase adoption of Debian among server users. It will also help Debian fans to buy the correct hardware they need. So: 1/ Do we have already such hardware certification program? 2/ If we don't, can we start one? 3/ If we make one, can someone volunteer to make a logo? 4/ Is there any volunteer to test hardware, as only me doing it wouldn't be enough? 5/ Could we create a front desk for such a hardware certification? Your thoughts are welcome. I'll wait for suggestions until I reply to Nick. Thomas Goirand (zigo) And here's my follow-up with some of the answers: On 05/21/2011 08:00 PM, Bastian Blank wrote: They can already declare Debian a supported system. They have to do the support for that and can work with Debian to get the work done. That's what we were discussing. Who should they get in touch with? I am not aware of any front desk for such hardware certification. They are even allowed to use the Debian Open Use Logo to show this. My point wasn't to use a normal Debian logo, but a new one specifically for the purpose of saying that Debian runs on the hardware. are you aware that all of the supermicro motherboards with built-in KVM-over-IP functionality provide that functionality with the support of an on-board processor which runs an embedded linux-based system? supermicro attempts to comply with the GPL by publishing the tarballs provided by supermicro's upstream vendors: ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/GPL/ but i would be hard pressed to tell you how to use those tarball dumps to produce the firmware images provided for actual usage on individual controllers here: http://www.supermicro.com/support/bios/firmware0.aspx more importantly, the tarball dumps and firmware images contain non-free blobs (in particularly, compiled java byte code). I agree that is a big issue, and we should never vouch for that. However, that's not the goal here. while i prefer supermicro products to those produced by their competitors, i would object to the use the use of the term correct hardware here or the use of the debian project's name to officially endorse a product containing non-free software. The issue is that we wont ever find a server with a fully open BIOS, at least not tomorrow. Intel didn't make the same kind of announcement as AMD did with coreboot support, so it's going to get hard to get things totally open. And the IPMI thing is tightly related to the BIOS (the BIOS can change the IP of the KVM over IP). I however agree. I think we can set different level of correctness. One that would say Debian has been tested and it runs on the hardware (boots, network is working, hard driver controller works), and another one that certifies the product as open source compliant and we endorse it. The later could come after the former. On 05/21/2011 09:53 PM, Marco d'Itri wrote: Hardware certification does not just mean that the OS boots, but that if there are any driver-related bugs the entity who certified the software will fix them. This is precisely the goal. The discussion I had with Nick was to let DD have access to such hardware, and see if things can get fixed if there's issues. I already did such a work testing a patch for the network driver of X8STi-F (thanks to the help of some people on the kernel lists), and the result was that the Intel e1000e 82574L network driver patch from 2.6.27 got backported in the Debian 2.6.26 kernel, and included in Lenny 5.0.4 point release (as it was a small, non-intrusive, patch). This was done thanks to the help of my Californian hardware supplier that gave me access to the hardware. What I'm thinking about is doing it on a bigger scale. I do believe that the kernel team does good enough work to fix issues by the way. They did in the past... Thomas Goirand (zigo) P.S: Please keep Nick as Cc, as I don't believe he reads debian-project@lists.debian.org. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to
