A summary of my participation at OSS EU / ELCE 2018

October 28, 2018 ~ toscalix ~ Leave a comment

ELCE 2018 has been a key event each of my 3 years at Codethink. It is an interesting conference from the technical and business point of view. This year the event was collocated again with several others, like the Open Source Summit Europe (OSS EU). It took place in Edinburgh, UK, I city I find particularly beautiful and enjoyable.

CIP, the Linux Foundation Initiative for Civil Infrastructure, has the event as a key milestone. The group organises a booth and a face to face meeting of the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) the day before the event starts. So for me ELCE is a day longer. The other main task for me at this event is supporting Codethink business development and community engagement actions, since I represent the company at the Linux Foundation.

During the CIP TSC face to face meeting, I did a short presentation of one of the projects I am putting effort on lately: BuildStream. I also described the project among several people I know during the event, asking them to try out the integration tool and provide me feedback. The tool has matured quite a lot the last few months and I am interested in collecting feedback from experienced developers and software integrators.

Lukas Bulwahn is leading an interesting effort to create a safety Linux related initiative at the Linux Foundation, including a Safety Critical Systems track at the event. I attended the last day of the conference to these talks. My colleagues Ben Dooks, senior kernel developer and Codehtink’s CEO Paul Sherwood, presented there a couple of topics we have been working on lately. I found the track interesting and learnt a few things. I hope such track consolidates and more automotive companies participate in the future.

Codethink sponsored the event and had a booth to recruit new developers. I backed up my colleague Tim a couple of times during the first two days of the event which allowed me to talk to a couple of of potential hires. It is always interesting to find out what motivates others about the company your are working for.

During the second day of the event I took some time to visit some booths and learn about what other companies are doing, as well as attending to a couple of talks. I also had several interesting meetings and conversations with old friends and former colleagues, visited again the Edinburgh Castle, this time at night, and managed to try a few whiskies from the Highlands. Not everything was to be work, right?

kernelci.org is an initiative I feel attached to since it was born during my time as Director at Linaro, promoted by engineers from my department, specially Kevin Hilman. Time has demonstrated that the project has helped the Linux Kernel tremendously. I hope kernelci.org get a successful second life under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation.

At Akademy 2018 a group of KDE people agreed to put effort in showcasing KDE software at embedded events to demonstrate that Plasma Mobile is a credible option as HMI for automotive R&D environments. At ELCE 2018, we showed Plasma Mobile and a couple of applications on top of a YOCTO based system on a Raspberry Pi 3 with a 7″ touchscreen. Showing the same technologies across different form factors (a mobile, a Pinebook, a laptop with openSUSE and the mentioned RPi3) was impressive. Sadly my RPi3 worked only the first day because it burned. I guess I have taken it to too many events. RIP my dear….

I would like to highlight how excited I got when I saw the KDE booth at this event, the fantastic work that Adrian, Jonathan, Kenny and Paul did there and the significant impact KDE had. Getting out of the comfort zone is never easy, but usually worth it. I am looking forward to show further progress at FOSDEM and the Embedded World early in 2019.

Except surprises, this will be the last event of the year for me. It is time to prepare next year’s agenda. I will see you all at FOSDEM 2019. Thanks Codethink for sponsoring my participation at ELCE 2018.

Back from Akademy 2018. What an event!

August 22, 2018August 23, 2018 ~ toscalix ~ Leave a comment

A few days back I wrote about Akademy 2018 and my expectations and duties at the event. This is a report based on that previous post.

Akademy 2018 in Vienna, Austria, has been the best one in I’ve attended to in recent years. We event got a record number of sponsors, Codethink among them, and some of them for the very first time, which is always a good sign. The organization went smooth, the location was comfortable and several talks were very good. As a point to improve, I would mention the location of the Sunday party (sorry, social event), which was small for so many people.

Codethink as sponsor

This Akademy there were more first timers than in previous editions. Most of them knew nothing about Codethink. So being a sponsor allowed me to talk for 3-4 minutes to the audience, right before the closure, about what Codethink does, specially about the FOSS projects freedesktop-sdk and BuildStream. I will write more about them in the near future.

Representing Codethink also allowed me to attend to the sponsors dinner. I have attended to several of them before, either as a KDE eV Board Member, as the local organiser or as a sponsor representative (SUSE and now Codethink). This one worked very well. I was sit by the openSUSE Leap release manager Ludwig Nussel, former colleague of mine, Chris Lamb, Debian Lead and Alan Pope from Canonical, which allowed us to have interesting conversations about topics like reproducible builds, telemetry in distros, automotive systems, upstream events, etc. I also had the opportunity to introduce BuildStream to them.

Flatpak – Snap BoF

As part of my duties at the event I participated in the Flatpak – Snap workshop to introduce briefly the work Codethink is sponsoring on freedesktop-sdk and BuildStream:

freedesktop SDK 1.8 was just released before Akademy. flatpak-gnome and kde runtimes are based on it.
freedesktop SDK uses BuildStream as build tool. The integration team at GNOME too. So it was about time to talk about the project among KDE people. When it comes to build tools, the key selling point for BuildStream within KDE community is the advantage of creating a single set of definitions (recipes) and get different outputs like flatpaks, rpm-deb packages and hopefully in the future, snaps. Outputs depend on plugins that can be developed and maintained by contributors to BuildStream if they are not already available.
I am happy with the response BuildStream got and hopefully after the coming v1.2 release the project will support some KDE contributors in trying out the tool. It will be interesting also to support the KDE community in building the flatpak-kde runtime.

BuildStream

I introduced BuildStream to several developers. In general, very few knew anything about it which is not surprising since, except among the GNOME community, we have barely made any noise about the project. The coming release will help us to start mitigating this issue. The KDE community produces flatpaks, snaps, .deb and .rpm packages, has Yocto recipes… . A tool set that provides you all these outputs by maintaining a single sets of definitions, being simple to install, update and maintain, becomes attractive at first sight. The challenge is major, but a nice one to face.

Third edition of the Freedesktop Summit?

Several years ago, driven by Alison Lortie and sponsored by openSUSE, I organised the first freedesktop event ever. The following year I participated in the organization of the second one, that also took place in Nürnberg, Germany. During Akademy I talked to some people that might be interested in participating in a new edition. I did have some conversations around this topic at GUADEC too so, although it is still nothing but an idea, I will invest a few cycle to mature it. Who knows, maybe we can organise a third edition of the event next year.

KDE for automotive

As you know, I have been advocating at KDE for putting effort to showcase our software in automotive R&D and pre-production environments, knowing that Qt is the default graphic toolkit in the industry. Last year I provided a lightning talk about it which, together with the improvements in Plasma Mobile, triggered the interest of some developers at KDE, which are professionally involved in Qt companies working in embedded/automotive already. We had a BoF back then and we created a roadmap to shorten the gap between what we had and what would be interesting to show in such environments.

Andreas Cord-Landwehr and Volker Krause has managed to create two Yocto recipes together with the infrastructure to update them regularly. Both had a talk at Akademy. Andreas introduced the audience to Yocto and talked about the created recipes while Volker showed during a lightning talk the plasma mobile shell working on a RPi3 with the Raspberry 7″ touchscreen.

At the BoF we evaluated the technical, coordination and promo actions taken as well as the coming ones. The ultimate goal for the coming year is to showcase at different events KDE apps on top of Plasma mobile on automotive dev as well as to increase the attention of more KDE developers on embedded as a potential target market for KDE software.

I am excited about this progress. I believe putting some effort to move towards embedded can bring more attention and new energy to KDE.

KDE E.V. AGM

I participated at the annual KDE eV AGM (general assembly) on Monday August 13th. As you know the KDE eV AGM is a close doors one, so private. It was a good move to provide room during the event for the working groups to summarise the work they have done. These reports used to be done during the assembly. As consequence, the AGM was shorter.

There used to be a time in which the KDE eV AGM was long and tedious. Over the years we have put effort in making it shorter and more dynamic. Mission accomplished.

openSUSE

It was great to meet all timers but also new openSUSE contributors. I could take some time to talk about points that require some attention in the distro, learn about the improvements on the delivery process that has been implemented on Leap 15, some of the actions in progress and future plans. Finally I did not update the Leap version in my working laptop (a Slimbook) because I had more work than expected during the event. I will update it during the coming weeks. Overall I am happy with Leap 15 in my personal laptop (a Lenovo) so far.

Slimbook

I was happy to see Slimbook booth at the event. As you know I am a Slimbook happy customer. I had the chance to talk to other customers at the event and I would highlight how happy we are with the post-sale service they provide.

Did I mention I would like to have a 11″ SlimNoteBook. I definitely did to them.

Free Qt Foundation

I cannot get tired of telling everybody within KDE and specially outside the community how important is the Free Qt Foundation, not just for KDE and the Qt ecosystem, but also for the entire Free Software movement. I never loose the chance when I am among automotive professionals to highlight the enormous impact that this entity has on their businesses. There is still a lot to do to provide The Free Qt Foundation the attention it deserves. By the way, it is always a pleasure for me to talk to KDE e.V. representatives there, Martin Konold and Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer.

What a great contribution they do.

Thanks to the organisers

I will finish this Akademy 2018 report thanking the organization team who worked hard to make Akademy 2018 one of those hard to forget.

Thank you.

Codethink is sponsoring Akademy 2018 and I am attending.

August 8, 2018August 9, 2018 ~ toscalix ~ Leave a comment

Back in July 2017 I wrote a blog post, published by Codethink, explaining why is a good business to support community driven FOSS events. This post is related to that one.

akademyLogo4Dot

I will be attending to Akademy 2018. It will take place in Vienna, Austria, from August 11th to 17th. I will be there representing Codethink, which is a proud sponsor of this 2018 edition.

I attend regularly to Akademy since, as most of you know, I have been an active contributor, a user of the software, a supporter of some of their activities and/or a KDE e.V. member for some time now. I learn a lot during this event, and not just about KDE related topics.

This edition has several specific points of interest to me:

I am involved in a project called BuildStream, a FOSS integration tool for declarative systems and applications. Currently its main user are the GNOME integration team and the Freedesktop SDK project. We would like to expand our user base among communities like KDE.
Freedesktop SDK are a platform and a SDK runtimes for flatpak apps and runtimes based on freedesktop modules. Several colleagues of mine are behind this project that is about to release a new version.
A year ago, during an Akademy BoF, some KDE contributors decided we wanted to put some effort towards enabling KDE software on automotive. This year the first modest results will be presented to the wider KDE community. I have been preaching about this move for some time now so it is exciting for me to see others involved and making progress.
I will attend to the KDE e.V. Annual General Assembly. KDE e.V. is the organization that supports the KDE community which is an important activity.
I will update my working laptop from openSUSE Leap 42.3 to Leap 15, taking advantage of the presence at the event of a couple of former colleagues from the extinct openSUSE Team at SUSE, and Slimbook, the guys I bought my laptop from. Make sense, right?
Codethink is always looking for talent willing to move to Manchester, UK, or exceptionally, work remotely. Come talk to me if you might be interested.

It will be, as usual, a great event. See you all there.

A weekend at Akademy-es in Valencia

May 14, 2018May 14, 2018 ~ toscalix ~ Leave a comment

This past weekend I travelled to Valencia, the third biggest city in Spain, located by the Mediterranean sea, to attend to Akademy-es, the annual meeting of the KDE community in Spain. At this event we also hold the KDE Spain annual assembly.

KDE España is the legal entity behind the KDE community in Spain and legally represents KDE in my country. We are about 30 members and it was founded in 2009 although Akademy-es started a few years earlier.

akademy_group_photo_2018-05-13_10-10-34

Event highlights

These are the points that called my attention the most at this edition:

Many new faces: although I do not have the official numbers yet, my guess is that we had around 75-80 participants among the three days, mostly locals which means a median of 35-40 people in most talks. Most were new faces. KDE Spain designs this event not so much targeting contributors but newcomers and potential future community members. So having many new faces is a very good sign.
Slimbook: this company from Valencia, sponsored the event and participated in its organization. At their booth, they showed some of their new products. I really liked the new Katana II and the new KDE Slimbook II. They are already selling outside Spain (EU) and they have a small response window when customers has issues with their laptops or owners require an upgrade, even faster than most multinational brands.
- My Slimbook had a little issue with the fan. It was a little noisy and it did not work perfectly. I agreed with the support service to bring my laptop to Akademy-es so the fan could be replaced there as part of the guarantee. Isn’t that cool or what? I got my laptop back in 30 minutes and meanwhile they explained to me the components used, some design and technical decisions they took for my Pro2 laptop and the evolution suffered by the new version of the model, which they were showing at the booth.
KDE Vaults: what a nice surprise! This is a fairly recent KDE future that will be shipped in openSUSE Leap 15, I believe that I will use it on daily basis. It basically allow you to encrypt a folder with standard encryption technology and it is integrated with Plasma.
Mycroft integration in KDE: I was glad to see that a power user like I am will be able to easily install and configure Mycroft in openSUSE Leap 15 and interact with it using the KDE Plasma applet.
Catch up with friends: every member of any community would claim that this is a highlight of a every community event. It is absolutely true. It always amaze my how diverse this group is in some aspects but how our passion for changing the world with KDE holds us together.
Valencia: this is a city I haven’t been often enough, with enough time to enjoy it. I should come in Fallas, the local (and crazy) party week. Paella, party and mascletás, what more can a guy like me ask for?
- Slimbook Paella. What a nice paella we had at the event.
Support from my KDE colleagues: as I mentioned, I am a power user. My technical skills are limited. I have a few minor issues with my openSUSE Leap 43.2 that I am unable to fix them myself. Akademy-es is always an opportunity for me to get support from the experts and fix some of them, or at least get an explanation about why I have that issue, if it is fixed already in new versions or if I have to use a workaround.

Call for action

These are some points where I would like to call for action on them:

High resolution screens represent an issue when installing or booting most Linux distros, including openSUSE Leap. It is also a pain to configure multiscreen set-ups when the difference in resolutions between screens is high. The new openSUSE Leap version, Leap 15 represents a step forward to solve some of them but, from what I’ve heard there is still a way to go. There are several laptop models under $1000 out there already with these type of screens so I assume the priority to solve these issues for distro and desktop hackers will significantly increase. I have hope.
OEM installer: years ago I came to the conclusion that the reason why Linux desktops are not mainstream is because upstream mostly target those users who do not and will never install any operative system in their machines while Linux distros mostly target those who can install their own OS. Both would greatly benefit from targeting mainly the prescriptors, that is, those who install the operative systems of the users either in corporate or domestic environment. Let me put an example. Most Linux distros still do not have a OEM installer. I heard this demand again at Akademy-es, this time done by Alejandro López, Slimbook CEO, as a limiting factor to ship their laptops with some Linux distros pre-installed. I would like to see a OEM installer soon for openSUSE Leap.
Distro upgrade application: openSUSE Leap is a distro for users. Leap 15 is coming and it seems I will have to use YAST to change the repos in order to point to the new ones to upgrade my distro. Asking around, the situation is not better in most distros (they do not have YAST 🙂 ). Upgrading the distro through internet (network) is an awesome feature. Let’s make it affordable to everybody. I would like to see an application in openSUSE to manage this complex feature, making it suitable for any user not just power users. It could be a great opportunity too to inform those users about the benefits of the new version, including those apps that are available for the very first time, together with a simple path to install them.
Applications for Plasma Mobile: Plasma developers are achieving the long-awaited goal to get Plasma ready for mobiles. Now we need applications. Aleix Pol did a call for action on this regard and I fully support his cause. Without applications, it will way harder to make this effort shine.
Not enough women (diversity): although expected, we cannot stay conformist with the result at this event. Women need references to feel KDE as an even more inclusive and attractive place to learn and develop their skills. Maribel García, Directora de la Oficina de Software Libre de la Universidad de Granada (Director of the Free Software Office at the University of Granada), spoke about this, describing the activities this entity is doing to increase the interest among women about Free Software, pointing at an evidence, that KDE can and should do more to help. She also agreed, based on the ratio of women vs men studying Software Engineering at her University, that the root cause is at home and at the High School. She has published a study about this, she mentioned.
- It is not the first time I hear this diagnosis. I know first hand that the KDE España board has made efforts to mitigate the lack of women speakers at this edition. The Board needs more help from the Membership and the wider KDE community. It is in everybody’s interest.

Overall, Akademy-es has been a good one. See you all at Akademy in summer or next year again at Akademy-es. Where? Who knows…

Akademy 2017: it’s great to be part of KDE.

August 2, 2017August 2, 2017 ~ toscalix ~ 2 Comments

After two years absent of any KDE event I was looking forward to see old friends and meet new KDE contributors and supporters. During July 20th and 21st it took place in Almería, Spain, Akademy-es. The following day, July 22nd, Akademy started. I stayed until Monday 24th there, combining my participation at the event with my job. Almería is only a couple of hours drive from my place so there was no excuse this year. I had to be there. 626px-KDE_mascot_Konqi_for_KDE_event_Akademy

I would like to start thanking the organisers for the effort and the success of the event. Well done. I am specially happy to see an old friend, Ismael Olea, back to front. We need more people like you, Ismael, to keep the essence of Free Software intact.

Since I haven’t been contributing lately to KDE, I decided to concentrate my participation this time in letting participants know about the transformation the automotive sector is going through and the opportunities that new, open and collaborative environments like AGL and GENIVI open to the KDE project.

The past few months I have sent a couple of e-mails explaining my point of view on this topic, together with a blog post I wrote a few months back. Hence for most my message was not news. I delivered a talk at Akademy-es and a lightning talk at Akademy about it. You can find the slides on the Conferences section of this site.

A few community members showed interest in the topic so we held a BoF. We agreed of taking some steps forward in order to explore the presence of KDE in automotive forums. Once we have the initial tangible results, I will inform about it.

I am pleased with the Akademy Awards this year. All were well deserved but I am specially happy of the one received by Cornelius Schumacher for his contributions throughout many years to KDE. I am specially proud of having shared with him two years at the KDE e.V. Board of Directors, having him as leader (President). The award received by the KDE representatives in the Free Qt Foundation was well deserved too. Olaf and Martin has done a terrific job over the years to ensure Qt remains open no matter who develops it. KDE needs to promote more the relevance of this foundation and the benefits for the entire KDE and Qt ecosystems. Thanks Olaf and Martin.

I loved to see how KDE Spain has gone through a major change in its board keeping the same energy and enthusiasm. Akademy-es was full of new faces and its impact in the overall KDE community keeps growing. Antonio Larrosa, as the previous leading figures were, is well surrounded and supported. I liked the modest but honest recognition we had with José Millán at the KDE Spain general assembly, for his contribution to the association. Good luck to the new KDE Spain board of directors.

I was glad to see Slimbook supporting Akademy-es and Akademy. Take a look at their laptops. They are beautiful and very powerful. Slimbook put effort on the software side, providing good support on Linux to the hardware they ship. It always a pleasure to see companies I hae had relation in the past supporting Free Software events. Opentia sponsored Akademy-es. Thanks Alberto Barrionuevo. I was also pleased with the KDE e.V AGM results and dynamics. Some changes will be introduced to make it even more fluid next year, opening part of its content to the wider community. A good move, I think. Cheers to the promoters of these changes.

I would like to thank Marta Rybczynska for her contribution to KDE e.V as Treasurer. Marta’s dedication has provided stability and certainty. Good job Marta! Good luck to the new Treasurer and the rest of the KDE eV Board.

Thanks to Codethink Ltd, my employer, for supporting me in attending to Akademy and Akademy-es. It is great to be back.

Tag: kde