Monday, October 29, 2012

FAD Milano report

We held the FAD event in Milano last Saturday, where a few Italian Fedora contributors gathered to show interested users and wannabe how to participate to various teams of the Fedora Project.

Robert Mayr, website team
In particular, we had Andrea Veri (infrastructure), Robert Mayr (websites), Samuel Iuri (design), Mario Santagiuliana (localization) talking about how their teams work. Moreover, a talk about contributing to the kernel development was held  by Federico Vaga and Massimiliano Bugni shown how to handle Fedora respins both for home and office usage.

About me, I tried to quickly describe the importance of packaging for the whole distribution, then invited interested parties to gather in another room for a practical session. For this, I restructured an older presentation I gave about packaging, adding more workshop type material from both Tom Callaway and Miroslav Suchy. The resulting practical session lasted well beyond the original schedule of one hour, but I think it was well received, and the few but very interested users asked many questions and raised interesting topics for further discussion.

SWAG!
The event run along with the Linux Day, the main FOSS event in Italy held in more than 100 cities. With this arrangement we hoped to gather more participants as a result, but in the end this did not really work as expected. However, I quickly counted about 30 'heads' just before my introduction so in the end I think we see the glass half full and be happy for putting together a great team. I'm sure we will be able to do more wonderful events in the future!

Of course, no event is complete without a good team dinner. And in fact we had a nice one, where we commented the day and discussed plans for the next events in front of pizza and beers. Like these:


My personal PRO/CON list

PRO: location. Very nice and spacious. I think it was evaluated for the 2011 FUDCon in Milan but for some reason it did not work.
PRO: presenters. I  never saw them in 'action'
PRO: organization. Marina and Gabriele anticipated every possible need, so the sessions run smoothly.

CON: concurrency. We need to try it again on a different date, without competing with other Linux related events in other cities (this surely prevented some contributors from traveling)
CON: the University have a policy of 'no signs out of bullettin boards'. This made directing the people to the event more difficult than it should be. We could buy some outdoor standing Fedora banners, and use them to direct people in cases like this.
CON: tight schedule. Practical sessions lasts longer than regular talks, so we were forced to do it concurrently with other talks. I hope next time we can do a full day event with a single track so people do not need to pick just one (and I will not miss friends' talks!)

Friday, October 26, 2012

Fedora al Linux Day 2012

Ci siamo. Domani è il giorno del Linux Day 2012 in tutta Italia.


Qualche settimana fa avevo proposto di inviare materiale marketing Fedora a chi ne avesse fatto richiesta. Oggi sono felice ti confermare che potrete trovare il nostro materiale ufficiale (come quello che vedete qua sopra) ai seguenti eventi.

Non fateveli scappare!
Fedora al Linux Day 2012.
Grazie a Giulio Erler (arkanoid) per la mappa

Milano
Torino
Roma
Napoli
Teramo
Cremona
Imperia Oneglia
Enna
Tito (Potenza)
Avola
Lonate Pozzolo
Ivrea
Urbino
Inzago
Perugia
Orvieto

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Fedora 18: Yum non aspetterà più PackageKit

A quanti di noi è capitato almeno una volta di dare un comando a Yum per vederlo in attesa a causa di PackageKit?

Personalmente a me accade abbastanza spesso.

Finalmente, grazie ad Elad Alfassa, da Fedora 18 ciò non accadrà più, poiché grazie ad una patch è stato corretto questo fastidioso bug.

Il nuovo comportamento prevede che Yum abbia la precedenza, quindi, anche se PackageKit sta svolgendo un'operazione, verrà sospeso per permettervi di operare separatamente con Yum.

A mio parere un altro piccolo, grande miglioramento per Fedora.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

FUDCon Paris 2012

Robert Mayr (robyduck)
Although I was the only italian guy who at the end decided to attend the FUDCon event in Paris, I enjoyed it very much and I hope to be present also at the next one. Let's see how it was for me:

Saturday 13th october, Day 1


I woke up at 3:15 am (!) and arrived at Paris Beauvais at 8:10 am. From there I moved to the city and before registering to the event I went to the Arc de Triomphe for taking a picture .

At the Eurosites George V I got my Fedora badge and started looking for some known faces, but the operation “matching Nickname -> face -> Real Name” was not very easy at the beginning.

As I didn’t know anyone (it was my first FUDCon) I decided to explore the rooms reserved for the talks, because the first day the main event in Eurosites George V Business Center was the Open Forum. Finally I went into the main room, where Robyn Bergeron was talking about her keynotes and where the most of the attendees were listening.

Generally I would say that the target of the first day where more the new users, while the other two days were more technical and dedicated to Fedora Contributors.

After the keynotes were finished I started presenting myself to as much guys as possible and so I slowly did the match nick/face/name, one of them was Kèvin Raymond who was so kind to host me at his apartment during the FUDCon event. It was really useful and nice speaking with the persons directly after having spent so much time chatting on IRC or Mailing List.


In the afternoon I decided to attend the talk held by Marek Jelen about Openshift, it was very interesting and I'll soon try to deepen the arguments which he talked about.
When finished I went to the Infrastructure talk (pingou or Pierre-Yves Chibon) and 'How to be a Leader in a non gerarchic structure' like the fedoraproject.org is (Christoph Wickert).


It was time to go around in Paris before going to Fudpub, so I started a little tour with Fabian and Gerold in which we met also the hungarian guys. We also decided to eat something before joining the others at Fudpub and then continued eating a lot of french Pizza and drinking 2-3 liters of beer...


 Sunday 14th october, Day 2

The second day was held in the Citè des Sciences and it was a very beautiful location. We started presenting the talks planned for the day and so I jumped all the day from a talk to another.


I attended the talk held by spot (Tom Callaway) about the end user experience and what we could expect from the future. It was quite interesting to hear his opinion about this topics. Obviously I heard the presentation of the websites team by shaiton (Kèvin Raymond) ad then also the XFCE environment by cwickert, who gave us also some background about the development of this DE.


I appreciated very much the swag session, where I got the necessary material for the event we are going to organize in Milan at the Linux Day. I'm able also to give some swags to other LD locations, where other ambassadors will held some talks about Fedora. Thank you Jiri and Robyn!


In the afternoon I attended the Kernel talk and then the discussion about EMEA ambassadors held by Fabian Affolter. As we actually have only one mentor we solved this problem proposing new mentors and this was very important. We also discussed about improvements of the mentoring process, because it should be easy to do but at the same time filter the candidates avoiding to have too much inactive ambassadors. In the end the only thing we can do is to try to do as much as possible, and events like the FUDCon are motivation to do more.

After the talks I departed, because monday I had to work, but thank's to the french organization team for this event. It was really nice and well organized, now I'm looking forward to next year...

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Verso Fedora 18, con yum

Dopo i ritardi accumulati da Fedora 18, grazie sopratutto ai problemi derivanti dalla riscrittura di Anaconda, ho deciso che ormai le componenti più critiche per il mio utilizzo (GNOME in particolare) sono stabili a sufficienza per poterci lavorare. Ma il problema è, come aggiornare?

Normalmente partirei con una reinstallazione o preupgrade, ma in questo momento l'idea di affidarmi in qualunque modo ad anaconda non mi attrae. Rimane quindi un solo candidato.

Friday, October 19, 2012

Fedora Activity Day a Milano

Come sicuramente saprete, il 27 Ottobre si tiene il Linux Day, classico evento autunnale con decine di manifestazioni in tutta Italia.

Quello che invece forse ancora non sapete è che la comunità Fedora italiana sta preparando nello stesso giorno un evento dedicato a tutti quelli che vogliono saperne di più sulla nostra distribuzione, come è costruita, come si fa partecipare e tanto altro ancora.

Quindi, se siete interessati a partecipare o semplicemente curiosi di incontrare alcuni dei membri italiani della comunità questa è la vostra occasione!


L'appuntamento è a Milano, alle ore 14 presso il Politecnico di Milano, Edificio 3 "Gino Cassinis". Le aule dovrebbero essere la S.0.2 e la S.0.5, ma quando sarete sul posto troverete senz'altro le indicazioni da seguire.

Durante il pomeriggio non mancheranno talk e sessioni pratiche; queste ultime riguarderanno la partecipazione al team di traduzione e la pacchettizzazione  di programmi in formato RPM, quindi non scordate di portare il vostro laptop!

Sul wiki Fedora troverete la pagina con tutti i dettagli dell'evento (in inglese)

Colgo l'occasione per ringraziare Marina Latini (deneb) e Gabriele Trombini (mailga) per aver preso in mano le redini organizzative, nonchè tutti quelli che hanno dato la loro disponibilità a collaborare al successo di questa iniziativa.

La locandina del Linux Day Milano

Thursday, October 18, 2012

tracker can eat a lot of disk space

And when I say a lot, I mean it

$ du -hs ~/.cache/
4.3G /home/giallu/.cache/

$ tracker-control -r
Found 303 PIDs…
Found process ID 1416 for 'tracker-store'
Killed process 1416
Found process ID 1418 for 'tracker-miner-fs'
Killed process 1418
Setting up monitor for changes to config file:'/home/giallu/.config/tracker/tracker-control.cfg'
Setting database locations
Checking database directories exist
Checking database version
Checking database files exist
Removing all database/storage files
Removing first index file:'/home/giallu/.cache/tracker/first-index.txt'
Removing last crawl file:'/home/giallu/.cache/tracker/last-crawl.txt'
Removing database:'/home/giallu/.cache/tracker/meta.db'
Removing journal:'/home/giallu/.local/share/tracker/data/tracker-store.journal'
Removing db-version file:'/home/giallu/.cache/tracker/db-version.txt'
Removing db-locale file:'/home/giallu/.cache/tracker/db-locale.txt'

$ du -hs ~/.cache/
591M /home/giallu/.cache/

Monday, October 1, 2012

Renaming an OpenShift application

The OpenShift service from Red Hat lets you easily start and build web applications with common languages and frameworks such as Node.js, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, and Java.

For example, creating a new Django application is an easy 3 step procedure:

Create a python-2.6 application
rhc app create -a django -t python-2.6

Add this upstream repo
cd django
git remote add upstream -m master git://github.com/openshift/django-example.git
git pull -s recursive -X theirs upstream master

Then push the repo to openshift
git push

So far so good.

Unfortunately, if you later decide to give your new application a more meaningful name you realize there is no command to do so directly. I've found this procedure quick and effective:

Create the new application with the correct name, using the -n option will not clone the new repo:
[giallu@novo django (master)]$ rhc-create-app -a newname -t python-2.6 -n

Note the git url it gives you in the output, then issue:
[giallu@novo django (master)]$ git remote set-url origin newurl

Push your repo to the new url
[giallu@novo django (master)]$ git push

Finally, remove the older repository:
[giallu@novo django (master)]$ rhc-ctl-app -a django -c destroy

Optionally, you can rename your top level directory to match the new application name.