Episode: 1698 Title: HPR1698: FOSDEM 2015 Part 2 of 5 Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1698/hpr1698.mp3 Transcribed: 2025-10-18 07:55:13 --- This is HPR Episode 1698 entitled Fatsim 2015 Part 2 of 5 and is part of the series interviews. It is hosted by Ken Fallon and is about 46 minutes long. The summary is OpenMandriva Majakt, Debian, puppet, often called Diaspora. This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honest host.com. Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15. That's HPR15. Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An HonestHose.com. Hi everybody, this is Ken again, I'm at the OpenMandriva project and I'm talking to you. Hi, how are you doing? What's your involvement with the OpenMandriva project? I've been a developer on this project for the last two years. I'm maintaining a lot of packages just to jumping in there, ever something is needed. I'm primarily maintaining our toolchains. Okay, and what is OpenMandriva for people who don't know? OpenMandriva is a Linux distribution that is aimed primarily at desktop users but also at developers. So we are trying to be as easy to use as possible while also being a technically sane system that everyone can develop on. It's history is in Mandrake if I'm not mistaken. Yes, that's right. So what happened? A lot of things happened. So initially, Mandrake Linux started out as being a fork off Reddit Linux that included KDE at a time when Reddit said, no, we don't want to do this. And then it developed a life of its own attracting more and more changes until essentially the Reddit heritage is no longer visible. Then at some point there was a legal trouble over the name because there was a comics trip called Mandrake to Magician and they owned a trademark on it. So the distribution changed its name to Mandrake. And a few more years later, the company that was running Mandrake, went out of business and we turned the project over to the open source community and now it's open Mandrake as a pure open source project without corporate backing. So why would I use this rather than running Fedora or something? That's a good question. The other distributions are doing a pretty good job as well these days. But there's a couple of really unique things about Open Mandrake. One is we are totally focusing on KDE and LXQT desktops, not so much on GNOME and the other things to find in other distributions and we are using more modern toolchains. For example, in our account development release, we are transitioning from GCC to Clang as the primary compiler. This is probably not very interesting to desktop end user but for the developers we found that Clang provides much more usable feedback when there's a compiler or a compiler warning and just recompiling the distribution with it has helped find around 150 bucks. Oh, very interesting. And does everything compile with it or have you run an entirely thing that just simply won't work and you still need to use GCC? We still use GCC for a couple of things and it's not like GCC is bad compiler. But most of the things just compile some others either use broken code like relying on some non-compliance that GCC tends to accept. Some other stuff just uses GCC specific features like nested functions, getting rid of those is sometimes a little bit complicated. But we only ran into one package that actually cost a compiler bug that just cost a compiler error that shouldn't be there. And what's your stance on like the Debian projects tries to keep everything free? Do you have closed repositories for non-free software or how does that work? Yeah, we like to keep everything free. But at the same time we think that people should also have to freedom to keep their old hardware that they purchased for use these windows. So we make drivers and stuff that are not available in the free world available in a separate repository and people can install those easily. It's not an ideal solution but it's a good step in a transition towards a totally free world. Yeah, gotcha. So what else have you got in your stand here? What are you showing off today? So this laptop is running our account development release, the one that has been built completely with playing. You can see the LXQT desktop here that's a relatively new desktop environment in the lightweight. There is a QT in the beginning. Yeah, here we have our current production release 24.1 running on one port which is a super cheap arm-based development port. So that's a relatively new port traditionally we've been only in the X86 world but now we are starting to support arm and also AR64. And how have you many people working on the accessibility of that? How accessible is your distribution? We don't have that many people working on accessibility yet. So in the first steps we have to make it really usable for 99% of the people and then once we are really satisfied there we will also work on making it better available to the other people. Yeah, the problem with that logic is that you never get ready for the 99% so there's very little focus on that. But if people were to submit bugs related to we do have because we're a podcast obviously we have a lot of accessible people with accessibility issues listening to the show. So I've been told to ask these questions so bear with me. If they were to identify a bug in OpenMandriva that prevented something like Oracle running or an accessible text-to-speech engine. Is that something that you would be at least open to fixing? Yeah, most definitely. I mean if there's some volunteer who wants to work with us on it that would also be great. Right now we are interested in it, we will fix bugs, we will accept contributions but we just don't have to manpower to do everything at the same time. Gotcha. Okay, is there anything else that are you going to be giving a talk here or are you going to be on the boot the whole time? Yes, tomorrow I'm going to give a talk on our Switch from GCC to Clang. So lots of details there like what particular package has had any problems or how we are supposed to fix them but you can do to make code compile and where we found bugs. Okay, excellent stuff. Thank you very much for the interview and a good look with the presentation tomorrow. I think they're all going to be online for our listeners so if you're interested in this C-Lang talk I'll try and put a link into the show note. Okay, thank you very much. Hi everybody, this is Ken here, we just moved from Opamandriva and we're talking to Magia and your name is? Sorry. What's your name? Oh, I'm Anikola. And who are you here representing? I'm representing Magia distribution. What is Magia? Oh, it's a big story. Magia in fact is a fork fork distribution from Mandriva. Okay. So we are now for five years nearly and we just we worked with most of the old Mandriva community and we are trading to do the best to have a nice distribution for users. So what is it based on? What's the desktop? Well, we decided not to decide anything so we are providing GNOME, KIDI and light environment like enlightenment and XFCE and things like that. Okay, and it's an RPM based distribution, but it's you can't install RPMs from Fedora for example. Yeah, it's the RPM distribution and you have to use the Magia RPM. You cannot mix with other distribution because there are specific builds on specific libraries so it would be a mess if you use some other RPMs on it. Okay, and what did you relationship with the Open Mandriva project which is right here beside you? Well, frankly speaking, we have no relation for now because where the things were a bit tricky when the fork happened. So we decided not to have such discussion to avoid bad discussion between people. What is beginning to cool down a little, I hope? Yes, yes. At least you are the next door to each other. Fast and people love to do that. So are you going to be giving any talks here yourself? No, not this year. Have you in the past? I had one year that I think was a second year to present a Magia and explain people why we did that and how we are organized. Okay, and why would you would you recommend that I would run your distra? Why would I want to? We try to make this community very friendly on every side. I mean on user side, on developer side. So we do not have a big expectation when you enter the community and you can learn how to package, how to test and things like that. So we try to learn people how to make open source and that's a good deal, I think. Okay, fantastic. Do you have, we have, because we're a podcast, we have a lot of people with accessibility issues, whose vision is not the best. So how accessible is Magia? We try to make it accessible using all the open source stuff for it and as we are based on Mandriva we had people in some years ago who made some work, for example in installer and things like that, to make it accessible. Maybe we are not good enough at this and it's always the same problem. We are looking for users to test and make some feedbacks and so we need these disabled people to help on it and so if someone wants to help us then it will be great. Okay, so if some of our users identify bugs, they can just file a bug and then you will react to those. Okay, you heard it here, folks. Listen, thank you very much for the taking the time and good luck with the rest of the show. Hi everybody, this is Ken Fallon and I'm like the kiddie stand on them talking to. Hello, I'm Jonathan Riddle. Your name sounds remarkably familiar, it seems almost as if I recorded an interview with you last year. I seem to remember yes that I was on the interview last year and I'm back again this year for another fact that follows them. Excellent, so what has happened for those for the few people who don't know what kiddie is, can you give them a quick rundown? We're a happy open source community making quality free software for the end user and the major change in the last year is you've released a new version of Plasma. Plasma 5 are our flagship desktop products. We're demonstrating it today, it is beautiful, functional, it has all the nice slightly sushi bits that people are expect out of software these days but it retains the same familiar user interface, you know where your application menu is, you know where your task wears, you know where your system tray is, so it doesn't revolutionize the layout in the way that many people try and many people go, I don't quite understand this. So it's all very intuitive for people to use. Okay and do you have the hardware requirements like Noem has or can you happily go along with relatively low spec hardware? I wouldn't like to disparage, no of course, but it's built on cute which is the world class graphical toolkit and that is wonderfully efficient. Of course these things sit on top of a large complex stack so it always depends on things like the X drivers and one day it'll be ported to a land any day now and that will solve everybody's problem. So it works very nicely on the end hardware where I use it on a netbook and I use it on other rubbishy stuff but of course experiences will vary depending on other bits of software that it depends on. And the underlying you're still based on the Ubuntu infrastructure? Well there are many KD just shows, I happen to work on Kubuntu which is the original and best community flavor from the Ubuntu project and we work very closely with KD as an upstream which is why my Kubuntu banner is right next to the KD install here. So I'm both a release manager for KD plasma and I'm a release manager for Ubuntu and specifically for Kubuntu and we now have daily packages of all the plasma five and other KD software that's been ported to Q5. We build those every day and so the developers who want to try the latest software make sure their bugs are fixed. They come to us because we are building their software on the Kubuntu continuous integration system and that means that when a KD release happens we've already packaged it because we package it every day automatically so we like to think that we work very closely together and very well together and I've heard that the Qt5 is a lot better from an accessibility point of view. Yes Q5 implements various internal programming interfaces for accessibility and it means that it talks very nicely to Oracle for example which is the screen reader tool and we've our plasma five desktop that has been made so that all the widgets talk nicely to Oracle behind the scenes and it means that Oracle will literally talk to you when you bring it up so blind people, visually impaired people can use desktop in the way that they're used to. And if you notice a bug in this you can submit it to the project and it will get dealt with in the form of some time. Of course and we have a wonderfully active plasma team who are working on this and so you can report bugs on bugs.kd.org. You can come and chat to us on the on IRC channels. We have a Google Hangout meeting every Monday so you can come and chat there and tell us your experiences and we have Google Hangouts unfortunately isn't accessible. Oh is it not? Oh I'm very sorry. Then do you have IRC? Then we have IRC clients and we are happy to use any other communication medium that is requested. Excellent. How was the sponsorship working now? It was relatively new last year. Has it stabled out? Are you comfy with the whole way the funding your funding in particular is going? Kubuntu is an open-source project. KD is a community project so to that extent it doesn't depend on any given company and the projects are all relatively independent. Kubuntu of course did have its primary sponsors being canonical. They stepped back from a lot of parts of it and now Blue Systems sponsors a lot of it and that's working really well and because they sponsor both Kubuntu and other stuff in KD it means that I get a chance to work with KD so I'm working in a Barcelona office now. KD has an office there and it's for use for any KD community members so we have people who come in to work on whatever projects they have and it means that they're able to ask for help by tapping somebody on the shoulder rather than hoping that they can help them over our sea which is often a lot more efficient. Fantastic. Thank you very much Jonathan. Are you giving the talk here or are you going to be still composed? I'm going to be on the stall. On weekend there's a talk about Jay Compre which is a project that is new to the KD community and has been ported cute and cute quick and Android so we're demonstrating KD software and Android today. Show me that. What does Jay agree? It's an educational software that has various games and educational apps for learning but I'm not sure if the demonstration has been set up yet but it's an example of KD software. I come back. We don't just make software for the KD Plasma Desktop or Linux Desktop, we make software now for Android and other environments too. Also Windows which seems a bit odd to me. We're a free software community. Freedom is what we do and if people want to make it on Windows, then that increases the use of our software. Excellent. Look, thank you very much for the interview and I'll catch up with you next year. Thank you. Hi everybody, this is Ken. Just left the KDE booth. Now we're at the Debian booth and I'm talking to David Brebner. David, what is Debian and what is your involvement with Debian? Debian is distro, so a Linux distro. I guess everybody who's listening to something called Hacker Public Radio knows what a Linux distro is. It could be a good assumption. So Debian is I guess one of the largest community based distros. So it's in some sense both community and although not everybody likes the word, it's also a political organization in the sense that it has goals which are not purely technical. So it has goals connected with software freedom and everybody has of course slightly different ideas about what this means. So that's I guess the short version of what Debian is. You're one of the longest running distros out there. You're one of the longest running Linux distros. Right. Right. I mean not as old as a software for example or I mean one, we would lose a contest of who is the ancient mariner of distribution. So it's been a busy old year. There's been some controversy in the Debian community. Sure. I guess I've been around long enough to see this sort of thing come and go. So as has Debian as a whole, I mean myself I've only been a developer since 2005. So and involve for a few years more before that as a volunteer. But this was my first big political storm. So I know what was it about? You can give people a quick rundown. So like most Linux distributions Debian recently decided to switch to system D as a default in its system. And this was not an easy or obvious decision for us for various technical reasons. So Debian tries to do things in particular. We support several radically different kernels which I mean we're actually the not just a Linux distribution. We also have heard effort and BSD based kernel effort. And these are in some sense left out in the cold by by system D or I mean I don't want to sort of reignite the whole thing. But certainly there's no support for non-Linux kernels out of the box by system D. And it seems unlikely that there will be upstream much support for non-Linux kernels. I mean that's more or less my limited understanding part of the sort of explicit design parameters of system D is that in order to do as good a job as possible on Linux to not try and do other things. Okay both life will continue. Of course and I so I mean there we lost a few developers and I guess I it's hard to know and along in a volunteer project. I mean you have one or two people who visibly say all right well I'm you know not going to be involved with Debian in the same way anymore. But I guess the bigger question is the sort of you know thousands of people contributing to the project. I think that there are many people for whom it turns out that this from a sort of technical perspective life goes on. I mean people got very emotional or passionate I guess. I mean whichever word has the sort of more neutral connotation in this context. I mean emotional sort of implies that reason was thrown out the window which I one could discuss but maybe I don't want to. So yeah I mean I think the project the project will carry on and I don't know that I mean. What are the what are the BST and the other kernels going to do? That's a new system D system 5 and it so I mean heard is actually just starting to use system 5 in it. They had some home brew thing so I guess don't continue with that and there is some I don't know they're very I'm not very closely involved with the BST effort but there are various technical ideas flying around. I think those ports have in mind you know non-expert opinion have a bigger problem of just lacking critical mass of users and developers and so we know the system D is one thing but the bigger question is why can't we get all the packages built on on these ports right and so from my point of view that's the more serious question as to the viability. So are you going to be working on the standard? No I'm just here to talk to people and see some talks and just another post am attendee. I leave all the minions here too. I wouldn't say minions. So Christian is actually a big organizer he won't admit it but he really is. He knows how to point. Right you saw he just delegated excellently but so no so Christian is doing a great job of keeping things going in Berlin on the local level. Okay listen thank you very much for the interview. Hi everybody this is Ken I've just spoken to the Debian project and I've mostly down to Puppet the Belgium users group. I'm talking to Johan. So what is Puppet and what is the Belgium users group? Puppet is a configuration management tool and we are representing here all user groups all over the world but since this is a home run I'm here presenting that. You've picked the short straw I guess. So what is Puppet? You have an awful lot of books here it must be a very important thing. Yeah it's it's kind of important because with Puppet you describe your infrastructure and then you deploy it. It's like coding your infrastructure that's in one sentence what Puppet is doing. So it's for data centers and bringing up servers. For every environment small environments at least if you have two stations to manage two servers then you already can use Puppet. The benefits of Puppet is standardizations. Quite a lot of public modules are already available you're well tested and you don't do it manually those days and if you change you do have quick changes Puppet can do that for you. That's the great benefit of it. Okay and this seems to me as I said you have a lot of books here which one would you recommend to the newest newest person to probably be a good intro. A good book at the moment the Beginnings guide for Puppet 3 is very good. There is a new one out from Packlip essential Puppets and that's a great one for beginners. The Pro Puppets it starts also for beginners but it advanced in a quick space so it goes very fast. I recommend it for if you have played with Puppets a little bit then go for the Pro Puppets. The most advanced Puppet book is Extending Puppets. That's a great one if you work with Puppets for a couple of years. Perfect. Thank you very much for the interview and enjoy the rest of your show. How was your last one? I'm at the Own Cloud Boot. Now for the two people that don't know what Own Cloud is. First of all tell us who you are and what Own Cloud is. Hey I'm Jan I'm a designer for Own Cloud and Own Cloud is basically a self-hosted file sharing and sync application. Essentially it's like an open source replacement for Dropbox or Google Apps that you can just put on your server and sync. What you do files, you do mails, you do contacts. We do files, we do a calendar, we do contacts, we don't do mail yet. We're working on an IMAP client but that's not released yet. We also do news like a Google News Reader replacement, notes, all that different stuff and the great thing is people can submit their own apps and we have an app store so it can be extended in any way. What sort of a machine would you need in order to run this? Just the usual server like preferably with a lamp stack so that's a pervert configuration and then on Cloud it's written in PHP and JavaScript so you can just dump it on the server just like WordPress for example then install it. With the MySQL database we recommend and then you can just run it. Installation is super easy and then we have a desktop apps for synchronizing the files and Android and iOS apps as well. So you can run on a Raspberry Python since? Yeah, people do that as well. I've also been doing that at home for example like very low power running your own data from your own home where you know is that not a big slow and funky. There is optimization so you can do for it and there's lots of blog posts around describing how to run on Cloud directly on a Raspberry Pi so it's definitely doable. So you could for example, hypothetically have the VPN into your own box then connect your own Raspberry Pi, sync your own contacts, something like that. I assume that's possible yeah. We recommend like over the Raspberry Pi there's another thing called the banana Pi that is a bit more powerful so maybe that's more fit to that but basically Raspberry Pi as possible. So what does when I hear about PHP and Alamstack especially for home users who are running this sort of stuff are we not running into dangers of security flaws and that your own information will be leaked onto the internet. That's essentially what you're doing you're putting all my personal contact information available on the internet. Well if you hosted on your own cloud I mean it's on your server right and the software is used by many people and like the security of it is evaluated and stuff so we don't do hosting so we don't have your data you have your own data so yeah it's inherently more secure than giving it to a US company where the NSA can spy on you and that's exactly the point right you're on your own turf and yeah you're not you're not at a company you don't put your stuff anywhere else but so the the issue I have with running my own my own version of own cloud is as soon as I shut the door to go on vacation the network goes down and then I'm completely screwed. How do I get around that? Am I able to replicate to different instances? You'll have to do that manually at the moment like it's not built into the into the project but yeah I mean I for example I personally run a server or I run it on a server and so be also because like lots of people actually at the booth I have been saying that their connection their home Wi-Fi connection is too slow to upload it so that's another reason why it might be better for some people to run it on server and anything is possible there right you can run it on your own server or or at home so yeah there's very different ways of running it so the the NSA thing must have been the biggest advertising boom for you guys yeah that's true I mean after that we've seen a lot of new people and being interested in it and and I mean a lot of new open source projects themselves have been cropping up since then and yeah that's that's a really cool thing because we've been saying that before even like I mean because we kind of knew that companies could look at the data of course I mean we didn't know the extent of it and the NSA extent but yeah that's what we've been doing before I mean we've been around we've just recently had our fifth anniversary actually so I'm glad it's been around for five years and yeah now more and more every year people noticed that it's that it's actually a good thing to us data on your own so how difficult is it to install what what distribution does it matter Fedora Redhash Tebian it doesn't really matter I mean it's if you ever installed WordPress or anything similar it's it's even simpler I would say simpler than installing WordPress yeah I didn't spike words there so I mean I'm the designer I paid special attention to make the installation very very easy and I would say yeah it's it might be easier than WordPress yeah all right so we have I have the email address will be in the show notes for this episode so if anyone wants to any issues also ever you know who to contact are you given any talks at all or are you going to be focused here on the boot yeah so there's a lightning talk tomorrow by our founder at like I think 1240 in the lightning talks track and tomorrow I'll actually do a like an open source design dev room and there we'll talk about other also other design focused projects like I'm not going to do like an own thought focused talk but yeah connect with other designers of open source projects okay and I'll do my best to put links to that into the show notes but if I don't manage to do that there will be on the first time site thank you very much for the interview and thank you very much for doing this it's something that we definitely do need I'm talking to Jason Robinson and this is called a diaspora diaspora that's right of course it is and diaspora is like a Facebook cloud it's a it's actually a software and a network so it's a it's like you can you can run your own server or you can join an existing server and together all the servers create a network so basically it's a bit like a Facebook and Twitter and all the other only for the readers yes federated so basically we come compare it to email in the federation so if you want to share with someone you have the diaspora handle and you use that to search and then you find that person's details and then you can exchange private information and public posts you can just write them up and they go to other servers as need be so what sort of a server do I need in order to run my own instance if you want to run your own we recommend well basically you will need a virtual I mean VPS so pop shared hosting is not enough because it's a rule beyond rails and there's background processing jobs basically one gigabyte ram is is enough for a few users but if you want to run or more an open server which anyone can join and then you need maybe to scale it up as you can go along for example I run my own server I have four gigabytes assigned to the to the instance so that's database and and the rule beyond rails and I have 30 users using it comfortably so and what sort of database is running underneath my sql or post core sql so you can and you have the choice of other yes and then I was talking to one of the guys last night and they mentioned that there is a initiative now for diaspora and Pompeo and status stuff now to share underlying protocols are you aware of that yeah actually there's there's actually two things happening so there's diaspora and some other sort of social media software friendika and redmatrix are the two others and they actually share with diaspora in the same language so if you use a friendika redmatrix or diaspora all the users can connect to each other and depending on the features of the post they can send photos and so on and they will arrive at the at the other end but there's also another initiative led by w3c they're creating a social apa and set of protocols to allow any any net site or application to talk in the same language and hopefully in the future we can we can change the diaspora network protocol to support that and that would allow for that would allow for different sites to federate with a project like diaspora or other projects so how long have you been involved with the project i've been involved since 2012 diaspora was originally set up by four US students in new york and they they gave the project to the community in 2012 and since then i've been one of the people in their like the core community driving driving the diaspora development there's there's we have quite a global contributor and network mostly in europe and us of course but a lot of europe based contributors at the moment okay and many people are on the entire network with you guess it's it's in the end it's difficult shape because it's yes and anyone can create a we call them pods and anyone can create a pod but we do have opt-in statistics from the registered users it's 86,000 was the last in the last six months active years okay that's pretty good but we have the the old hurdle like my grandmother isn't going to be on is on facebook but not on diaspora so when is it going to be like the facebook plug-in that we can connect to facebook um probably in the course of to whenever because simply there's the issue that facebook would probably not even want to want that to happen but you can you can post from diaspora to facebook so there's an outgoing APA using the normal facebook app authorization things but i think diaspora is not good for the use case if you want to talk to your grandmother because she's most likely on facebook and that's good for that kind of stuff facebook works well for family relationships but diaspora is good for following interesting people following subject you can search for example hashtag Linux and you will see lots of posts about Linux from people you don't know and then you can get to know them and follow follow them and talk with them and so if i brought up a node a pod pod yes okay if i brought up a pod then will i be able to search on other pods how would that be automatically how does that work um yes and no it happens over time so basically when you when you create a pod it doesn't know about anyone so it's it's like you create an email address and nothing it's it's empty you don't get an email but when you start following people on other pods information starts to reach your pod so it's on a the federation happens on a level of personal relations so for example if if if you register on a German pod for example or let's say a pod that has lots of German users then it's more likely you will have access to public posts in German language because that pod will will suck them in from the rest of the network so it's it's yeah yes and no nice i'm interested to put up on and if you're ever interested in doing a show on how to easily install it you can do upload that to hbr so are you going to be given any talks here or no we we actually just registered the table as like last last last minute these are the people who got the hbr table we we just because the many people think that the project like died a few years ago when when the original people who set up the hospital project stopped working on it but there's a really active community working on it so we wanted to be forced them to to like be visible to people so it's kind of busy here so i will continue on and let you get back to your route thank you very much for the interview and a good look for the rest of the show you've been listening to hecka public radio at hecka public radio dot org we are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday today's show like all our shows was contributed by an hbr listener like yourself if you ever thought of recording a podcast and click on our contributing to find out how easy it really is hecka public radio was found by the digital dog pound and the infonomicon computer club and it's part of the binary revolution at binwreff.com if you have comments on today's show please email the host directly leave a comment on the website or record a follow up episode yourself unless otherwise stated today's show is released on the creative comments attribution share a light 3.0 license