FAD EMEA 2012 Rheinfelden

For the first time since I become a Fedora Ambassador, I participated to the 2012 EMEA FAD, traditionally hosted by Gerold Kassube in Rheinfelden (Germany), in the wonderful Beuggen Castle.

Main body and chapel at the Beuggen Castle

Now, as a mountain lover, I have few expectations from a trip through Switzerland: one is great landscapes, the other is snow. I was not disappointed on both accounts!
In fact, despite the Rheinfelden region is usually not very cold, we were welcome by nice snowfall. Of course that made it harder to reach Rheinfelden (me, Gabriele and Robert shared a car from Milan) but it also meant we woke up on Saturday in this environment:

Almost magical...

If you have not even been in a FAD you may now wonder what it looks like; basically, it is the place where Ambassadors discuss current issues, identify potential improvements and try to come up with a plan to reach goals. In the process, if anything turns out to be broken, we fix it right away.

Christoph made already a nice summary of the main points we touched during the event. In particular, I would like to note we will be trying to expand the range of Fedora branded goods to give away (as swag or otherwise). We also discussed several other items, like the need for more local events, and an expansion of the new Ambassadors mentoring program so new guys will find an easier way into the project. Additionally, we will be run a census among our fellow Ambassadors to understand how they feel about the program, what they are doing and what the project could do to help them more.
Finally, we will encourage all Ambassadors to host an annual get-together type of event in their own country in order to have a tighter local community.

Of course, no FAD is complete with a solid social part. In this case, the real treat was the dinner we consumed on Saturday at the blindekuh (blind cow) restaurant.

The main feature there is a large dining room completely surrounded by thick, black drapes so the room is in absolute darkness. For good measure, you have to leave in storage cabinets at the entrance everything that can emit light.

Luckily enough, reaching your seat and getting your food to the table is not a problem because waiters are blind, but managing to keep calm and consume your dinner is another story! This was a really strong experience and after a while I started to feel a bit weird, something in between drunk and scared. Of course, I was also consuming beer but I'm sure the darkness was to blame...

All in all, my first FAD was a great experience and I look forward to next year for another one. I would also like to thank all the FAD participants for a fun and productive week end: in particular Gerold for organizing our stay and for the great dinner at blindekuh, and Gabriele for driving 5 hours straight in the snow with his brand new winter tires.

LinuxCon 2012 Barcelona Report

I am happy to host the report from the latest Italian Ambassador joining the program, Giuseppe Palestra,  who broke the ice by participating to the LinuxCon 2012 in Barcellona. Well done Giuseppe!

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LinuxCon 2012 Barcelona Report

The conference started at 8:00 am with registration of attendees. Me and
the other fedora ambassadors (Alvaro and Ruth) arranged the booth and at
9:00am keynotes started. After the keynotes we waited at the booth for
contacting the conference visitors. After the keynotes I started
presenting myself to other people close to our booth, Red Hat people or
correlated Fedora Project people principally. There were a lot of
interesting talks during this day but I decided to partecipate only to a
little subset; the most interesting for me in LinuxCon was "Virtual
Machine snapshots: Overview and Illustration of Different Types of
Snapshots With libvirt/QEMU". In this day started also the Embedded
Linux Conference Europe 2012 and for me the most interesting talk was
The PF_ZIO: Using Network Frames to Convey I/O Data and Meta-Data hold
by an italian professor Alessandro Rubini.

A lot of stickers and about 30 DVD (Fedora 17) was distributed in this day.

6th November

The second day starts with keynotes at 9:00 am and at the end me and
other ambassadors were ready to speak with a lot of people at the
booth. People were very interested to our OLPC XO with Fedora, people
tried our operating system and appreciate it. In this day I follow 3
talks and the most interesting i for me were "Introduction to oVirt
Virtualization Management Platform." In the afternoon I attended the
dinner offered by Intel, at the dinner all attendees got surprised by
the participation of Linus Torvalds. :)

About 30 DVD distributed.

My experience at the booth of Fedora Project has ended, but my
commitment will continue...I knew a lot of enthusiastic fedora people,
especially from Italia, Russia, Finland, USA and with some of these I
entertain relationships about Fedora by email.
I will hope to attend at other conferences to see again the interesting
people I met in Barcelona.
Special thanks to Ruth and Alvaro.

Giuseppe

git bash prompt in Fedora 18

If you are a git user, chances are your are using a customized bash prompt,
which is usually defined in ~/.bashrc like this:

PS1='[\u@\h \W$(__git_ps1 " (%s)")]\$ '

In case you don't know it, the __git_ps1 is a handy function provided by the git package to show relevant git repository information (branch name, merge status, etc) right at the prompt.

For instance, this is what the prompt looks like when I cd into a git checkout:

[giallu@qbert gittest (master)]$

Today, after updating one of my development boxes to (the not yet released, but we're getting there...) Fedora 18, I started seeing this error in all my terminals:

bash: __git_ps1: command not found
[giallu@qbert ~]$ 

I found that the problem is caused by the move of the __git_ps1 function, from /etc/bash_completion.d/git to /usr/share/git-core/contrib/completion/git-prompt.sh

So, in order to fix the issue, you just need to edit your bashrc like this:

. /usr/share/git-core/contrib/completion/git-prompt.sh
PS1='[\u@\h \W$(__git_ps1 " (%s)")]\$ '