hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1452.txt

Episode: 1452
Title: HPR1452: HPR Coverage at FOSDEM 2014 Part 3
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1452/hpr1452.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 03:19:21

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Okay, this is Ken again. We're down at the K building and here beside the
Mozilla team is the tour project. Yeah, that's time. Hello, I'm Luna from the
Thor project. Okay, so I've just given away your identity. So most of people
listening to Hacker Public Radio will be well aware of what the
Thor project is, but just in case there's somebody out there who don't know,
could you give us a quick rundown on what the Thor project is? So the Thor
project is project dedicated to you and the community online. What we do is
we produce software that enables people to use a tour network, which is a
network of volunteers all around the world, which set up relays, and the Thor
software will bounce a connection through these relays to analyze it. So the
ISP you're using doesn't know which sites you're connecting to and the sites
you're connecting to doesn't know where you are. So your location is
collected by the Thor project. So if I'm going to www.mozilla.org, it will go up
my into the tour, to jump to some other relays, some other relays, some other
relays, and then this time come out in France, the next time come out in the USA
France. Absolutely. Every time you get a different every
circuit, every website you visit gets a new circuit, and you exit through
another nodes from the tonnet walk, and it gives you a different IP address, which
means that from the sites you connect you're coming from a different location
of the internet. A lot of the purchases in my third of the Thor project is that
it's very slow. It's not true. These days we push around 45 gigabits per
second on the world network. I use it every single day, and I mean it's a little
bit less responsive, but I use it to watch YouTube video and it works fine.
Seriously? Yeah. We have on the past three, four years more and more people have
been setting relays in data center, with massive bandwidth capacity in
various countries, and we're getting more and more of them, like sending up
not-for-profit organizations to collect money to be able to get more
interesting contracts. And so the network has gone a lot better in the past three
four years. That's fantastic to hear. But so I've got the
Thor, the Thor installed. My DNS has still gone out through my local ISP
is that correct, or? No. So how you use Thor these days is basically you have
two way we recommend. One is to use a Thor brother bundle, and this is
available on Linux, Windows, and MacOS 10, and the Thor brother bundle contains Thor
and a modified version of Firefox with some privacy improvements, and if you
use the Thor brother bundle, everything in that window of that brother will go
through the Thor network. DNS will not leave. The other way we recommend using Thor
is to use the Tails live operating system, which is a full operating system. You
put on a DVD or USB stick, and you boot your computer on it, and it's based on
GBN, and it contains many best-up, like document producing software, and also
internet-facing software. But it offers you two guarantees. One is that every
outgoing connection is going to go through Thor, and it will not leave traces on
the computer that you have not decided to leave. Links to that, both of those
will be in the show notes for this episode. But I think some people might be,
how do I run a Nord? How do I help the network? So running a Thor relay is
fairly easy. It's mainly about configuring the Thor demon to enable relaying
because we do not do it by default. By default, everybody is a client. It's
allocating resources, basically. You actually decide how much bandwidth you want
the Thor demon to use, and it's going to stick to that. I mean, on many Linux
distributions, for example, it's just a simple like you installed the Thor
package, and it's a configuration file restart, and you're done. Basically, it
requires very valuable maintenance. I've got a very slow, you know, I've got a
one megabit connection, and say I wanted to give 256 megabits. Is there even any
point to do that? So not really. A relay with this little bandwidth will not be
used these days, because the faster relays are really have too much. But what you
can do if you have even that little network is to run a bridge, because one thing
is that the least of Thor relays is publicly known. So sensors can block
Thor relays, which is a problem in some countries. People can't access the
network. A bridge is a Thor relays that is not, it's only an entry node, and it's
not publicly listed. It's only given through the bridge database, or even like
completely private and given hand to hand, and it allows people that are behind
censorship devices to access the Thor network through these unlisted relays.
Okay, so it's a sneaky way to get into the network. Yeah, that's that's called
bridges, and it's also, it's as easy to set up as a relay, and it's useful even
if you don't have that much bandwidth, because what we need there is IP addresses.
Yeah, so the idea of what these say all our listeners, even half of them,
set up these relays, these bridges, they wouldn't be used for most of the time,
but it could be. Yeah, one of the criticism of the Thor network is the fact that
you know, not nice people, you know, kiddie porn, whatever, hate crimes, that sort of thing.
You know, with the good, you only get the bad, and then the contract I have with my
ISP would make me liable for that sort of skunk. So if you run, if you run, just a relay,
and it's not an exit node, nothing is going to happen because you're only
reallowing untripped traffic, and unless your ISP is super done, I mean they don't
have, they're not going to get any abuse. Sure, if you want to run an exit node,
it's better to have maybe a dedicated legal body and also lawyer support, but
for example, in the EU, most lawyers agree that we are protected by the EU
directive from June 13, 2000, Article 12, which defines the notion of what is a
mere country, which is that if you do not start connection, if you do not
modify them in flight, and if you do not select them, then you're just achieved.
You're mere country, and you're not liable for what you're transmitting. Very
interesting, very interesting. So, but the amount of bandwidth that
the Torrex node uses is quite high. You decide, Tor is going to use the
bandwidth you give it. If you say, I'm dedicating five megabit per second,
Ben is going to stick to that. And can I limit it? That's, you know, say I'm only
allowed 40 megabits a month or something, can I limit it? There is something
that is called hibernating, and we have that contingent option, so you can also say
40 gigabit a month or 40 gigabit a week, and it's and it's going to hibernate
when you reach the limit. Okay, fantastic. And the one question, I guess,
that you know, Torrex becomes very popular since the NSA thing, but the roots of
the project itself was from the from an American, was it to see an NSA or
not all research laboratory. So, how do I know that they it's not a how do I know
that the code has been audacious and that there's no secret back door? It is. I mean,
from the so I'm part of Debian also, and I mean, I mean, I've been watching free
software projects for a while. I've never seen as many code reviews as since I've
been working, we've thought we have people looking at every commit and like
getting really angry if someone making a mistake. Fantastic. Exactly what we want
to hear. Yeah, it's happening. I mean, this this thing like having people
reviewing could at least for the tall demon, the corp is actually there are at
least three people doing it in the open that I know regular contributors, but
also probably maybe many more that you know, contact us anonymously,
to report something they found. Okay, that is great news. So, is there any way
other way we don't have that? There's only other way we as the hacker public
radio audience can help unique coders, unique reviewers, what do you need? I mean,
the top project has more than 40 different coding projects at the moment. It's
really, it's really huge actually, because so you have the more like
comment, like, tall itself, the demon, you have the tall brother, and we need
many help with solving web fingerprint issues, for example, every time they
had a new web feature in Firefox, we need people to think, hmm, how is this
going to affect privacy? Because for example, when people that are like
web fonts, who could have guessed like, okay, by enumerating the fonts that you
have installed on computer, I'm going to make, I'm doing a fingerprint that is
pretty like you need, and so we need to stop that. We have a few of these in the
brother, one thing we're trying to do is also automate more of a work, so we
can like automate builds and to make tests, so like people who wants to do
that, that would be very welcome. We have a, we're trying to find an interesting
way to describe the tall traffic into looking into something else that is not
going to be detected by DPI boxes. We started the project to redo our website,
because right now it's not, I mean, five years ago it was, it was a project
mostly interested for hackers. Now we interest the general public and we, the
website needs to be changed, so we can better address these new
audiences. We have, I don't know, we have interesting crypto problems, we have
research problems. People who want to help, they should subscribe to the tall
weekly news, which is a monthly, weekly, sorry, the tall weekly news, weekly news
letter that we send every, everyone that they and contains many culture for
help and like, there's things happening all the time in the community.
Okay, cool, I'll put a link to that into the show notes for this episode.
Anything else I missed? Yeah, one thing you can do to help this
our project is also to donate. I mean, the core team has, like, we, we used to
rely on government funding a lot. Problem is that it looks like some of the
government is not that happy with everything toys doing and we need more
participation of the community into defending of the project on top of
model and tears, but, yeah, small, small money also help on top of everything
we also said. Probably no harm to get the politicians involved so that they
would fund the tour project. I mean, we, we, is the thing, an
unlimited loves company. If we want an unlimited network to be successful, we
need every kind of different users to get involved and that's how you make it
successful. I mean, because if it's only the army and you see a connection to that
network, right, it's obvious that it's the army and an unlimited network. We've
told we have many different people using it and so we need also many
different source of funding. So no one has doubts that, you know, we're going, we're
doing it for the greater good. Gotcha. Okay. Perfect. Thank you very much for
the interview and tune in later on for more exciting interviews from the K
building. I'm coming up to talk to Eric. How are you doing, Eric? I'm doing great.
Thanks. You're here promoting the EPF SUG. What is that? That's a very nice way
of coming around the problem of expressing or saying our acronym in one way
without spitting on anybody. It's like EPF SUG is it's European Parliament
free software user group. Okay, that's a, that's a mouthful. It has to be said.
Yes. So you're basically a log for the European Parliament. What? Then it's
user group for the European Parliament. Yeah, it's a user group and we are, I don't
know the audience really of, but since this is a hacker radio. Basically anybody
English speaking people from around the world, America, all around Europe. We
have people listening in Sweden. Okay. Anyway, maybe I can then expand on, so there's,
we're a couple of people in the European Parliament. We work in the Parliament in
the administration on the technical side and different functions. We are not
politicians. We're not members of the European Parliament, but we are working
for the Parliament in different functions. And... So you're like Siss admins and stuff like that?
No, well, I'm working in the secretary out of the Greens with the Legal Affairs Committee.
There's one member that is working for the translation unit to make sure that
there are multiple, the translation works as well. One is a member, one is an assistant
to an MEP. So we have different functions, but we are not political.
Electric representative. No. And this is where the name comes in, maybe to explain it, we
are as a social movement-based free software user group. So we are focusing on the
reasons for the... If you look at Tebian, they have the social contract. You look at
the GPL license first paragraph. It's about promoting freedom. So in the Parliament, you
can... If you're an MEP, if you're a politician, you can do certain things. You have the right
to do certain things within the premises of the Parliament. You can have a friends of
sport. For example, they get together and be friendly with sport. You can have a philosophical
circle. You can talk about religion or you can invite different social movements, based
the organisations and have activity in the Parliament. So in that legal space or framework,
we thought maybe you can also be a saint in the Church of Emax or do things that is related
to the social change that free software is promoting and is a part of. Without being entangled
in industry law being or other policy developments that are more political. Okay, there was very
long explanation for this. It's deliberately chosen for that purpose, not only to be really
difficult to pronounce, but also to be... Make sure that we are doing what we're doing
is we're in favour of social change based on the values of the free software movement.
So there's five MEPs as patrons and 14 people working in the EP as joint members in
50 supporters. So this is a very Brussels type of user group. Well, yeah, the European Parliament
has its main seat in Brussels and we are working in Brussels. But the members that are... I mean,
the patrons are MEPs from all over the world, all over Europe and all from all political groups.
Just for the people who might not know, the European Parliament is headquartered sometimes
here in Brussels for the most part in Strasbourg. Yes. Do you also have one in Strasbourg,
or is it just location? We are kind of... We could have meetings in Strasbourg
too or even in Luxembourg where there's a third European Parliament. But to keep things
simple, you could say, we are mostly having our activity in Brussels, yes. And how is this
relevant to any of the people who are going to pass what's your goal here today?
The EPISODE was started here. It started with a call in 2011 in one of the sessions here
to ask first participants and the community that comes here for health. Many of the people...
There's a lot of organisations that are here that have been pushing for free software
and open standards in different ways for many, many years. Many have been engaged in different
policy and different legislation processes. And an experience back there... We have had
many attempts to call on the parliament to go for the use of the open standards, but
it has been difficult to make anything happen because you can only go so far with petitions
and you can only come so far with political pressure. So when after the elections 2009,
we were a couple of people in the parliament that are rooted or come from this movement that
got jobs. So we're working in the parliament and then we thought maybe if we have a user
group inside the parliament that could bring all these issues a bit closer to the heart
or where decisions are taken. So are our guys on the inside basically?
That is the plan. Secret self. Yeah, I wouldn't say it's a terrorist organisation,
but the idea is the same. Right, I'm going to have to... No, you will understand what I mean.
It's really to have presence in the parliament to be able to talk with the people that work there
about the things that many people on the outside have been asking for for a long, long time.
Yes, fantastic. So how can we help you? Well, there are many ways you can help.
The simplest way is just to become a supporter of EPSU and you do that by submitting to the publicly
archive mailing list your supporter statement so that you declare in public why you support EPSU
and the reasons you do that. And so we have now the 50 supporters have all each their own
statement on the website. So that's so any EU citizen terrorist could do that?
Anyone in the world can be a supporter because it's unlimited and then you can also subscribe
to the mailing list and just participate in discussions without making this public statement
if you don't want to. So what could that do? I say this is obviously a good idea. So
how is that going to help? What's going to change because I just become a supporter of it?
That will still exist after three years of efforts to have this discussion happening inside
is wouldn't have been possible without outside support and people on the outside helping with
not only like awareness but technically. So EPSU was started on the basis that you can actually
use free software in the parliament and the first software that made that possible was a bridge
to use email over an IMAP or a DAV mail and DAV cut work around so that you could actually use
your free software mail client with your parliamentary address. You could read it right here.
So I've been working on the free software laptop in the parliament for the last three years
thanks to support DAV mail and supporters on the outside of the parliament that has helped me to
maintain that platform. And now we have a fantastic cooperation with a deviant community where
there's been prepared something that is called deviant for poliments and where maybe the European
parliament will have the first dedicated distribution for poliments to be implemented and that's
like and that is not done by people inside it's done by deviant developers and so then that lowers
the barrier for so it becomes if there's a deviant distribution for us then the only thing you need
to do is actually to use it in the parliament and then it comes easy to talk on the inside saying
hey here's my laptop it uses deviant power it's the distribution made for us and you can do email
encryption I can do maybe use pigeon or some other xnpp protocol and I can do stuff and it's
own free software and verifiable and you know all the features that free software has that has
become increasingly important the last year when we now know that infrastructure is more or less
is compromised and produced by you systems obviously well the yeah free software is can can be can
be and much of it is actually and you can see it here at foster here after year you have
well I don't know how many thousand are here this year but it's it's a growing community which
means it's a growing economy it means if I would be a politician I would say growth and jobs
it's it's what this you can get with this
yeah basically if public procurement would use tax money more directly investing in software
that is made by programmers from Europe that anybody in the world could use of course but it's like
why do you take the detour to from the decision to have it that you go over an foreign country
or other economy that takes a cut on tax money when we can do the same thing ourselves
yeah particularly when quite a lot of those companies declare their profits in our land any
yeah it doesn't really make sense also doesn't benefit the American economy so much either so
for our American listeners don't worry we're not trying to take your your money here you don't
have it in the first place because it's coming funnel through the the Dutch Irish sandwich
okay you know more about that than me but it's to me it seems that the developers and users when they
have as little middlemen as possible and and communicate with each other about the software
the use and what they need that why don't we go there exactly exactly you've got a brochure here
and I will do you have a link to this in the show do you do you have a website you do have a website
the website for it's epfsug.eu that is European Parliament free software use group.eu and on that
site right now the pamphlet is not there actually it's in the mail archive so I would have to put
it up on the yeah it's okay it's I can also we have a very cute logo or mascot edge the hedgehog
and it's also it's comes from it's a contribution from the Debian community actually
and it's really nice so if you want to use it for other purposes I guess it's fine
so I've got a few questions here just general questions you've got a need to pad instance how have
been finding eat pad we use this for our new year show and it is quite good actually if the pad was
installed by one of our supporters as why don't we try this to you know just put our ideas
somewhere we can edit stuff together and now to me it's wherever I go in different contexts I
was at the EU hackathon or European Parliament hackathon last weekend here in Brussels and
there is a pad so you know that's where you many people work on ethypads it's kind of standard
how many people have you had on other one time on the pad I don't know the meetings we have had in
the parliament there have been like almost 60-70 people coming 30-10 and then we have meetings on
out yeah so it's it varies a bit on on the who is organized or which MEP is hosting the event
thank you very much for the interview
hi everybody my name is Kent Fallon and we're down here at the KDE standard I'm talking to
Jonathan Riddell how are you Jonathan good afternoon I'm being quite tired for a long day actually
but I'm happy okay what have you been up to today I've been on the KDE store and we're demonstrating
KDE on Windows we're demonstrating KDE Connect which is a program to make your desktop talk to
your Android phone and we're demonstrating KDE Frameworks 5 the next generation of software
from KDE okay so what's your involvement with the KDE project I started off as a developer I did
I did umbrella you and my mother originally and did working on a number of other things KDE
promo as well editor KDE.news for many years and then I had to get a real job and I was
fortunate enough to be able to work on Kubuntu the flavor of Ubuntu distribution that ships
with the KDE software as you've been working as part of the devian project pilot and I know
I never worked on devian directly I just took an interest in Kubuntu because I heard about this
project where an African space man was working on something I would revolutionize the distribution
world and KDE wasn't involved and I saw I blogged about it said KDE guys you need to get involved
with this this is really important and that blog it was the top Google hit when Ubuntu was
first publicly launched and so Mark's employee Jeff War he put me up and said do you want to work on
this because we need somebody from KDE so I did okay cool there's been a bit of controversy I
guess within the Ubuntu team you're no longer funded by canonical or what's the story going on
there right so they made my post redundant and along with a number of other projects that
KDE was supporting like Launchpad and Bizarre they took down their level of support put it into
maintenance mode said we're not going to be able to pay you to work on this directly anymore
so we as a community Kubuntu got a bit downcast and there's some soul search I think
wondered if we really wanted to carry on doing this was our need but it turned out that there was
and there's enough people to support it we wanted to keep a current one who needed it carrying on
we got lots of people saying Jen's I've just installed this in my university and and we need
we need this to carry on otherwise I'm fired or something so where there's support then there's
a way and and we managed to carry on you're working for blue something or other blue systems as a
company which is a nice company that supports KDE in a number of ways and they employ a number of
KDE developers working on KDE frameworks with on Kubuntu and and a few other projects there seem
to be the area 51 of the free software free software movement nobody seems to know where they are
where they're based it's slightly surreal world that I tend to move in so I used to have the
privilege of working for an African spaceman and now I work for a German butcher who unlike the
African spaceman isn't isn't quite so loud and rationed and isn't such a personality but he is
also a nice guy who wants to help out and he's got deep pockets and he uses them to help out KDE
so why KDE why it was the business business interest or business interest that's so
old fashioned is everything about money to you just wants to help out cool cool excellent so how did
you become a developer developer when I started learning programming at university the the lectures
told us this is how you write a program in Java and I would go but that's how you write that
program but how do you how does a full program work and the only way to actually teach yourself
how programming works is is to use open source free software to download actual programs that
solve actual problems in the real world work at how they work of course once you start doing that
you find bugs and then you start fixing the bugs so then you get involved in communities and
adding new features and then I took over whole projects so that's in my opinion the only good
way to teach yourself programming and also it has the interesting side effects of getting involved
in free software what university did you go to that was Sterning University in Scotland I went to
and was free software open source software so prevalent there that you knew you knew instinctively
that that's the way you should go no not at all they didn't use it so they they so how did you
find out it was extremely wary of it they only had windows and their computers they only had Java
as a programming language so I fortunately I had my own computer at home it was pretty slow
and basic but it was enough to install Susa on and Susa came with Katie of course
so how did you how did you find out about Susa in the first place what was your introduction
to free software in the very first place oh I think one of my friends said here's this Susa desk
that that's how you get involved in this stuff and that her Katie on the back then a lot of
distal seemed to have Katie on it now not so much there's plenty of distors to do of course
coupon to I recommend is the best one but for example Fedora over at Red Hat they've they've
also had really bad support for KDE but it turns out that all of their business users who use
desktops use KDE and so they've got a team of about half a dozen people now just working on KDE
at Red Hat which is a lot more than anybody else has and that's just because it makes business
sense their customers use it open Susa went back to they've always been on the fence but we
don't want to support anything by default but they they now take the KDE box by default
and and Ubuntu in general they've moved away from using using gnome for their own
interesting business reasons that they seem a lot less they don't want to use community
mates after in a lot of cases so they make their own desktop now which means that we've had a lot
of people saying yeah I want I want communities that's why I do this that's why I use this stuff
so I want to look around though here's the biggest community within Ubuntu that's not not
organized by canonical is us so we can call it a lot of users that way do you think the lever
come a day when you're going to have to rename the project and call us okay something else
we have looked at that when when we when Chronicle stopped doing commercial support for it
um there was somebody else who saw this as a business opportunity wanted to set up commercial
support um but he got blocked from by canonical from doing that for a number of months because
um when canonical also was true support for mother stuff like bizarre and launch pad they
didn't really have very active communities so they they just quietly sat in a corner by themselves
but Ubuntu maybe canonical was taken by surprise but we have a very active community of very
enthusiastic users who uh who made light noise and said that what the heck is going on this is no
good um so when we tried to get the business support deal they they didn't really have any
processes in place to make that happen uh so we did look at changing the name for that there
and and we did brainstorm that but then Mark Scherler showed it down and said no we kicked you
ahead and we changed the name so we we didn't do that so you're still an integral part you still
contribute upstream to the archive within Ubuntu day yes it's all the same archive
um us as flavors the Ubuntu flavor is no different from the Ubuntu unity flavor that is just
a selection software from the archive um and i'm a release manager for Ubuntu i'm on that team
and i i'm an archive admin as well so if you upload a package then it's me who has to approve it so
there have been plenty of cases where canonical have uploaded a package after some freeze because
they're designers and artists are not always respectful for free this and i've had to reject it
because it it doesn't fit in with this cycle okay yeah so what's the um i think some of the
criticism i've heard of kd in the past also coming from myself will be how how big it's gotten
recently um other people you know calls people to look at larger desktops like razor qt which is now
going to be elix qt um there was talk for a while of doing a larger weight version of kd that
kd was it was possible to run kd in a lightweight mode for older laptops is that something that you
would consider doing like kd life ah interesting um no there've been a number of people have gone
this uses up too many resources um but if you if you remove all the shiny graphic spring from
kd then it ends up just being a less interesting desktop and you'd be better off using xfc or or one
of the other alternatives like that um the current uh focus of development within kd is kd frame
mode 5 which is modularizing kd ellipse to make it so that if you write a an application you don't
need to have to bring in the whole of kd ellipse which is a big dependency um so that's been stood
up into 55 libraries now um there's a tech preview out which uh i've just finished packaging for
so people who develop kd or qt applications can just pick the bits that they want in their
applications without having to bring in the whole load so we're getting a lot of interest from
qt developers now saying actually kd i i really want that library i didn't want it before because
i added several hundred megabytes of uh extra memory use now it just it's an extra megabyte
few extra classes excellent i'll bring in that yeah i think my my use case is uh kt and then
k is on a really slow laptop and suddenly you've got lots and lots of other stuff coming in
could you just explain to me um the underlying things that's behind uh kd that's running
in the background or the benefits of them particularly the indexing and they uh the uh is an
anaconda not the anaconda they so a couple of controversial features would be acanadi for
talk about the controversial features why they're not caching kd pym and neepamug for indexing the
whole the the disk system um acanadi had it's had occasional qa problems because it has to work
with a database and sometimes those databases as as digital packages we're not quite used to
integrating them with it as a running process because that's that's for several people to do
for the most part that's been sold for a number of releases now and that that's running quite
nicely and from as far as i'm aware the neepamug one on the other hand that what's the purpose of
that that's got a silly name and it indexes everything on your on your hard disk um which is
very very useful and um that's possible to do in such a way that it becomes an essential feature
that you just search your your computer uh but it was implemented as a research project funded by
the european union um in a bit of an academic way it it's been implemented using uh sparkle this
wheelqueer language and and uh virtuoso it originally used janeva and now it but it it doesn't
that was drunk but it still uses virtuoso is another obscure non escuel database um so that
that's useful is cool but it does it is very resource hungry and couldn't use it as it's all being
replaced the vicheshanda who's uh i've lost them this weekend he's writing a new library called
blue which uh is much more lightweight indexer and people who have um index their whole source
code tree of kidee they say oh i've got this five gigabyte index file that neepamug has um but with
blue that that's contented by 500 megabytes there's nothing in deck file so it's a significant
reduction and it will be much much faster and what if you will it be possible to do an install where
i don't do that stop search i don't want it i don't have an integrated payment i don't want that
to sort of modularize it um so as part of kidee framework five that that will be easy for
application developers to pick and choose and for users to turn it on and off but then kubuntu we
have kubuntu low-fat settings which is a package that you can install if you if you want that
a slightly different configuration that has these things turned off by default kubuntu low-fat
settings yeah cool so what else what else have you got on here what what are you doing what's
what's the kidee boot looked like uh we are we are selling a bunch of t-shirts we're saying
or giving away a bunch of badges and we have almost exciting products is a new conkey the dragon
knitted doll um which has been knitted by one of our friends from south america and as with all
binary products it it comes with source code because we're open source of course so you get a
list of instructions that have to knit your own as well with it so if you have a suitable
compiler for that that you can you can create new ones fantastic um i see down there that you've
got kidee windows running and kidee connect kidee framework five can you tell us about what those
projects are maybe we should walk down the offer so kidee software is written cute which is a
framework that can be ported to any um to windows and mac and so of course kidee programs can be
ported to windows and mac um why would you do that i know why you'd run a one run a kidee
cute program on white door kidee sweet so you you wouldn't typically you can run plasma on windows
but yeah there's no practical reason why you would do that before the individual applications
so uh here we're demonstrating credo which is a painting application it's a world class painting
application uh it beats the socks off of if gimp which is some that's for photo editing so this
is for painting works of art uh beats the socks off a lot of adobe stuff and is certainly a fraction
of the price it nothing um and and they they have enough load of users on windows because a lot of
artists still like to use windows um and that integrates really nicely with with tablet uh graphics
tablets are drawing tablets um so that's got a lot of users and commercial support as well from kio
who are here for anybody and how does that work technically how
so was does the kira project need to be ported or is it just sufficient to install the kidee
libraries on windows and then just go it has to be recompiled against cute on windows and kidee
libraries on windows um that that is quite a big and company job at the moment so as part of
kidee framework five is to say this modularization um all of those will be ported to windows um that's
a fairly trivial process because cute banks that are trivial process um and as those
are ported to windows then uh creature and everything else can be compiled against them
under what are the advantages then of just uh not writing a native cute application in
in in the cute framework as opposed to using a kidee well part of the kidee frameworks is that
there is no particular difference uh so a lot of what what we've been doing over the last year
is taking code out of kidee lips and just putting it in cute um so if you want your your uh printer
dialogue to be able to search through cups or something that used to be a feature only in kidee
now it's just been put in cute uh fantastic because the cute project that's been opened up
as an open source collaborative project it's a lot easier now just to get patches into cute
so it's your policy to push self upstream now as opposed to fantastic didn't know that um so
obviously then other other cute other cute platforms should be able to benefit from that
like phones and stuff do you have a do you have any goal for doing a mobile device um so cute got
ported to android as part of a kidee project kidee supports any consumer based projects
and one of those was porting cute to android that became so successful that it's now moved to
cute and has been taken on by the cute project proper uh it's now commercially supported by digier
their their commercial sponsors um and is is a really useful development platform for developing
on android and because it's cross platform it's relatively easy to then develop an iPhone which also
has a working progress cute cute port okay what else do i have here kidee framework five when
when we gonna see that come and done the pike uh that's got a tech preview right now i just finished
packaging it from kubuntu so for developers is there and it's ready to develop against uh
that i'll have a one point not released probably about june is the schedule um but we'll start
porting kidee applications to kidee framework five now for the the user there's no big swap
over for there um so unlike the change from kidee three to kidee four it won't be a big user
visible difference and those applications can live side by side running on k-lips four and
kidee framework five but bits will be tidied up and and made a bit shiny and clearer so that will be
a transparent thing your app guess will will just bring that down yes that you'll just get that
but what will be possibly less transparent is in the next kubuntu we hope to change to wayland um
so the the big move away from x is is probably happening this year um
quinn the window manager has been working on wayland for some time now and uh
individual applications are starting to be um removing x dependencies being sure they can be
compiled against wayland um so hopefully in in our next kubuntu release in april that's a long-term
sport no big changes the one after that in april it's quite likely will be will be shipping kidee
frameworks five and wayland so that that'll be a tentacle challenge anyway i better we'll be
uh one thing about that is uh with your background that so many deployments are out in the field
enterprise a lot of enterprises tend to use x forwarding for forwarding applications that are
well behind bastion holes and firewalls and stuff uh what's the wayland's wayland's not going to
work like that anymore so will you still be able to how how are we going to do that how am i going to
forward in the next session you talk to a wayland developer about this um most of them say that
that's something that people talk about but nobody actually does or no we use it like guarantee
okay um you need to talk to wayland developer the initial way to do it will be by vnc
okay that's not okay fair enough right you're not the person to talk to about this
okay um i'm not kidee connect why is it needed actually well kidee connectors are a program that
you run on kidee and another program you run on your android phone to get your android phone to
talk to kidee and integrate in various ways um why would i do that surely a usb connectors enough
if you have a usb connect you need to have a cable here this just talks over wifi so you can walk around
your house um if you get a text message on your phone then that'll appear on your laptop
ah and the other way around you send send a text message from your laptop through your phone
you can also control your music on your phone so i use that if i'm if i'm in my kitchen i play my
music in the office um and if i want a different track i can just change it on my phone as a portable
remote control uh but also if i get a phone call my phone that will stop the music from playing on
my computer so that i can answer the phone call without without interruption can you take a phone
call from can you get will you be able to use a client on your laptop to use a headset to take a
photo regular progress yes welcome progress oh this is cool this is cool listen how can um what's kidee
written in um most of it most of our kidee software is written in t++ and using qt and if you're
not a c++ expert can it is there anything we can do to help uh there's as a coder that we've
got a bunch of stuff coded in python and a bunch of other stuff coded in javascript so that's that's
always there for help and we also have enough a lot of work for non coders in terms of promotion
publicity uh artwork uh documentation and user support okay um i can't let you go without bringing
up uh this topic what support are you going to have for accessibility because i hear the reputation
for kidee and accessibility isn't too good at the minute um kidee accessibility is the kidee
accessibility project has a lot of features that don't exist on any other any other free software
or desktop um qt 5 has gained gained accessibility and talks to the same protocol as as known talks
so it it uses just the same tools as known this so you'll be able to use these speak with us
issue or uh what how are you the best person to talk to about the speech agent and how that works
no the there's a speech recognition engine called Simon which you can use to control your
whole desktop um that's written by a guy called ptr nash who i don't think it's here this weekend but
but his demonstrations are extremely impressive yes and and and and and and as far as getting the
screen to read back to you how how easy is that to configure uh kidee text to speech engine
is has been renamed and is maintained by Joseph somebody else whose name i don't remember that's
why i can't expect you it's been a long day so how many conferences do you go to uh various
a lot we we used to have uds and one of my grumbles was that canonical stop using doing uds
because um that that was a lot big part of what made ubantu a great project to contribute to as
as a as a community um now that's gone we still do uh academy and kidee conference and we've come
to first i'm here but we also had a have our meeting in minif so minif has a big rollout of kuban
two and the company that does that has a big meeting every year where they invite anybody who wants
to come so we have a big kuban two meeting there okay what's your um how is your cooperation with
the known project and by the way your licensed under report what license do you release kidee
under now kidee software is l gpl3 for libraries and and uh a jopeo two plus for libraries and gpl2
plus for most of the software okay so no issue there as far as three is in freedom now okay super
and uh how is your cooperation with the other uh desktop like gnome and uh enlightenment or
whoever free desktop project take their beer with them quite happily yep cool is there anything else
uh that i've missed here in the discussion uh we have a successful room of talks who are talking
about uh as a panel talk just about to start where the the kidee foundation eb and gnome foundation
will be talking about their respective ways of organizing uh uh community and funding it
okay cool and the other way that we can uh we can support kuban two uh by using it and spreading
it and and sharing it well the kuban two light will be uh i'll give that another go i have to say
well john thank you very much for taking the time for the interview and links to the uh sessions
that were here at fostom will be in the show notes for this episode you're very welcome
hi everybody is ken here again as fostom 2014 at fostom 2014 i'm done in the k building and i'm talking to
hi doing good so Paul we knew each other from from way back and when we're working are we working
in the same outfit in all in so uh yeah we know each other but we've gone are both
a separate ways but nice to bump into you're here again so who are you working for what do you do
i'm a support engineer for aquia aquia support we are our main business we support
Drupal and open source web cms and it's been doing good we're growing like hell and expanding
all over the world so i'm uh it's a lot of it's doable for for an audience uh it's three things
it's uh web cms content management system but you can also see it as a framework for building
web applications but the third thing is what i think is most important is a great community
of people who share knowledge and and work together to build this awesome open project open source
project uh what licenses is released under uh it's a gpl gpl2 okay cool and um i think it's a community
it's hard to estimate i think we just passed over our millionth user on drupal.org uh hundreds of
thousands for sure uh i think i'll leave or we have like more than 1800 committers right now in
drupal eight if my stats don't don't fake me so yeah it's a huge community we have a lot of people
contributing to the drupal core project itself but it's also i think 45 000 modules that you can
plug into drupal and it's also open source as well so typically the type of work that you be doing
will be uh doing websites for people i guess. No uh aquia doesn't develop websites we help people
build off some websites so we we don't do development ourselves whether we uh we we have hosting
service yeah we have a consulting service and we provide support so if a development firm you know
need some help uh getting some advice how would you do this hey we have this bug something's wrong
with my website and you know what it is you can call us and uh we'll let you help. Yes
where there's a problem you'll be there right cool one i think one of the criticisms a lot of
people have about triple is how difficult it is to migrate when compared with something like WordPress
depends on where you're migrating from if you're going from WordPress it's fairly easy because
there's uh quite a few uh known projects how you how you can do uh that's transfer uh drupal
itself comes and the new version will have a migrate module a build in which is i contribute
with module right now and it's getting better so yeah uh drupal it has a reputation for being
a bit difficult to learn as well it's it's quite complex uh then again that's also getting a lot
better with the new upcoming version we're building on right now which should be released this year
so do you want to amend drupal code or no no i'm i'm not actually a coder i have a few contract
modules but i'm more a systeming guy and a support guy so i know my drupal but not from a core
perspective or programmer's perspective gotcha gotcha so this is your first fast then yeah
what do you think about it's it's awesome yeah yeah it's good to fill this five of
the lots of energy you know lots of nerds quite a few familiar faces so far ready so that's good
looking forward to and adding some talks tomorrow and then have a chance to do that today
the whole way talk is usually quite interesting as well exactly the the scale of this event really
has blown my mind it's it's it's how many people are here i don't know how is it it's like you
it's like if you want to experience this go to a big university in a capital city and on any day
and that's the number of people that are here yeah yeah like the this whole that we're in now is just
one of the one of the halls and it's as full as i've seen at many conferences so oh yeah yeah
well in the drupal community we have our drupal cones we do them twice a year three times a year
now even because we just included Australia as one of the destinations do you get to go to that
Australia didn't but maybe a little plug the next drupal cone in europe is going to be in Amsterdam
i'm going to be a volunteer for that so that's going to be awesome we're expecting between
three and three thousand people there so and we're growing still so maybe we're a bit you know a bit
cautious on those estimates but we have high hopes that it's going to be a gray conference when is
it's going to be the last week of september right at the exact date split my mind but go to
Amsterdam the drupal cone drupal the dark and then you'll get there cool thank you very much a
link to that will be in the show notes for this episode and tune in for another exciting
segment from fostem 2014 2013 2014
hi everybody my name is ken fallon this is day two of fostem after a very long and strange knife
trying to navigate around the brosel's metro system met it back to the k building and i'm
standing beside the uh far fox mazilis stand and talking to brine king who is european community
builder what do you do for a living brine so basically my job is to support our contributor
communities mainly in europe but also around the world so i do a bunch of things you know i work
with local communities in each country i work with mazilla reps who are organizing the event here
and fostem i oversee mazilians dot org and a few other bits and pieces so you're a full-time
employee of mazilla correct yes so how did you how did you end up at that at that job what was the
where did you start well i've been a mazilian for a long time 13 or 14 years so i don't know if
you remember our old dinosaur logo that's me i'm that dinosaur so i was i was i was a i was a
volunteer for 11 12 years before i came on staff uh started as developer uh friend and knee
show was doing add-ons for fire fox i was working with mazilicode every day um we came more and
more involved in community went to events and so on and that's how i ended up in this position
doing community work okay cool so what have we got here on the stand today uh we're mainly showing
off our fox os so far fox os is this is the mobile phone thing that's correct it's a mobile operating
system um and we released in 2013 we've released in 18 countries uh we're releasing in more
countries around the world this year and um yeah um um um you know fire fox os is a web operating
system uh we believe the web is the platform we believe it's the future and uh that's what mazilla
does you know we want to keep the web open we want to offer developers users and everybody choice
okay um so how's the uptake of the phone bin uh has it been well received has it uh has you've
got quite a few carriers more than say it's right Ubuntu for example Ubuntu phone yeah that's
right we went down the route of um partnering with carriers you know we wanted to get phones
into the into the hands of of consumers you know um we wanted to really make an impact and
to do that in the mobile industry um we partnered with with people who know how to do that and uh
it's been quite successful so far um we've launched in certain countries in Eastern Europe uh in
Latin America and yeah yeah in general um it's been positive you know there have been a few bumps
along the way but um you know we're doing okay well um as look would have a two our episode on
I think Thursday was about uh our last week was two of the guys were discussing the the plans for
this year and one of the biggest disappointments they had afraid to say this is the uh the developer
version he got version 1.1 of the phone and it's proven very very difficult to update to uh
get a new version of it the developer felt as a developer phone he had nothing to be able to
country be back because of the uh you know the development has moved on to 1.3 now is that correct
or yes yes uh even even beyond 1.3 you know we've got different branches so uh yeah developers
are looking even further but but 1.3 is is the most stable branch right now yeah so if if a
developer purchase a phone now what guarantee do they have that they were going to be able to
purchase it deliberately to develop apps but you can't do that because the bugs and version 1.1
and you can't update it because they installed processes it's very hairy yes compile the whole
stack right um well yeah it's unfortunate with the developer vices unfortunately we don't support
them anymore and the manufacturer's geek phones do support them so they're still distributing
bills and as far as I know just recently they did uh release an official 1.3 build so geeks phone
does support bills for that devices was it unfortunately it doesn't because of our focus we really
have to focus on the consumer devices in saying that though coming very soon this year um we will
have reference devices so these will be um devices where mozilla will have control of the builds
we'll be able to get uh you know we'll be streaming them amongst developers again amongst
other audiences and we'll be getting updates out quicker and more reliably hopefully okay so uh
so you want to be a hacker or double them be easier um the hardware will be unlikely to change
in those reference bills is that more how it's going to happen I don't know the hardware
specs of the of the reference devices right now um I could make a while guess and say they might
be slightly better specs but uh you know uh don't bother we can we can exactly yeah what's the
the network device over there that I see in the table that I do not know okay that's the secret
project we're not allowed to talk about no no I think it's just some mini PC uh the roots for
Firefox OS you just hook it up to a monitor and yeah you can also use Firefox OS for just a standard
like raspberry pie-ish device or uh one of those low power devices yeah you know I've seen it on
37 inch televisions you know obviously it's not optimized you know it's not supposed to work on
on the screens that large um but you know we're moving into tablets we'll be releasing a developer
tablet soon so we're scaling up to that uh Panasonic enhanced a couple of weeks ago that
they're looking to put Firefox OS in their smart televisions so um you know
sure you'll you'll be seeing in many screens I'm sure that's good news um
Tony has the NSA scandal and the issues around that I've seen that Firefox and Mozilla in particular
have met some announcements that you're the only browser that can be trusted uh has how how
that strategy worked for you um well you know it comes down to what what our motivations are you know
as a nonprofit you know we've only got to answer to our users so we're not uh we're not pressurized
into you know making any um decisions based on on business or other factors and saying that we
do need to comply with the law uh ignore idea if we've ever got any requests for data um I don't
think so again don't call me on that um we're only now moving more heavily into the services area
so you know we will be dealing a lot more with user data moving forward um so I you know
we're going to do our utmost to ensure that we put the user first regards to privacy and security
you know that's our mission and the cold is there so anybody who's got the technical
know-how can go and yeah and you know um we're urging security researchers to to to you know
make available tools where you can compare builds of Firefox with reference builds and make
sure it's exactly what you're getting for example you know it's just one thing um we're going to
continue to fight on policy we're going to continue to be involved in these discussions and
influence um um yeah and just make sure we're always fighting for the users yeah I think
the Firefox brand itself is the poster child really for what you know the best of what
open source can do or free software can do so um do you find that politically that's that you know
that's been useful to your uh has have you tried to institute political changes in that or is
that outside your mission um yeah there's you know there's always constant debate in the community
about how far we should go you know on that on the political front um um you know are we a
technology company or are we a policy organization um I think we're kind of somewhere in the middle
I think you know we're definitely technology driven our number one focus is the product uh you know
it is open um we try and make it as transparent as possible in that respect um but we really I think
we really need to uh and we have been you know stepping open and making statements uh various
policy statements wouldn't quite say political but uh you know are we feel that's um you know the
user experience on the internet is being threatened you know uh we speak up for sure okay one last
question is probably put in the foot in a little uh the funding mozilla is a nonprofit organization
but quite a lot of your funding comes from companies like google and to the to the search and stuff
how um how if if that's funding suddenly stops in the morning is there a plan B
oh it is always a plan B um
no I wouldn't quite say that um you know before we we had business contracts with with
google we were a thriving organization we we had a solid browser we had um you know we've
got a solid community around the world uh that we can rely on and um it's because I know
that I can't comment on the financial side of things um but we're definitely looking uh looking
at a lot of angles uh for sustainability and uh you know that's that's a big priority for us
yeah so have you been to is this the first time you're a foster or do you go to many events
yeah as part of my job I go to a lot of events uh it's probably my ninth or tenth time at
fuzdem yeah yeah um fuzdem is definitely very special you know it's definitely very grassroots
yeah very geeky um and I think you know great camaraderie um yeah it's just a really special
atmosphere you ever got telling you the talks at all or you're just down here on the beach the
whole time uh to be honest most of the time I'm caught up in something mozilla related uh we have
a dev room every year as well um this here's a little bit different we've only got dev room for one
day so today it's great uh all the mozilians can wander around go to different talks go different
spans and and you know network and mingle more and I think that's important as well you know not to
be not to be isolated and and to you know mix with your peers and other projects and and uh
you know brainstorm things and so on yeah it's also good that the talks are going to be online at
least you go and uh watch them after the event absolutely yeah yeah so anything else uh you
are not coming that we should know about anything uh that our hackers can assist you with that you
need help with yeah absolutely um we always welcome help um in all areas not just engineering but
we've got opportunities and and marketing in the or in in events and so on um um you know um
so so um I would urge everybody to go to mozilla.org slash contribute um that lists um a lot of the
opportunities uh available in the project so right right across the board um we have an initiative
this year one million mozilians so we're looking to expand our our community of contributors um so
we're building out a lot more tools for our community to become involved uh we're figuring new pathways
for contributions and you know we're really excited we um this is the web you know you know
we're just we're just working for the web and we'd love to have everybody to get involved
thank you very much for the time and enjoy the rest of the show you're welcome thank you for
you too
hi everybody this is Ken i've just met my way over from the mozilla booth and i'm at the
norm booth i'm talking to Tobias Tobias Bula yes hello hi she comes yes hello so where are you from
so where are you from i'm from Germany from the lovely north of Germany but i understood that
everybody in germany runs kiddie well actually uh we used to have a strong community in germany
nonetheless but i know it's a client to to be fair but okay tell us uh what do you do for the
norm community to see well i used to do book management things like uh well cleaning up in the
bugzilla and uh well reminding people to you know submit information stuff like that and then i uh
i went on to to uh take over new duties and now i'm in the or on the board of directors of the
gnome foundation uh very good how is the uh uh norm organization structured well it's actually well
from a to to make it very simple there's a uh a foundation a a an us based entity and you can
become a member and the members can then vote on their board of directors which is pretty much
like any other nonprofit organization i presume in in europe and that's that that would be the very
basic structure on the governance level right on the technical level this as it is in software
project there's no real and forced hard structure i mean we have a release team who cares about
like the release and then getting the the sub teams in order to well provide the quality needed
but it's not well and forced really by by any by any rules it's just social pressure say
so what sort of uh stuff have you got here with what's the purpose of being here fast and
right so um we're trying to increase awareness of free software in general right and um
fuzz them might not be the appropriate venue for that as everybody knows about free software ready
but we have many goodies to bring home so we have loads of t-shirts with
loads of stickers and badges and well other other stuff that people might want to take home and show off
i see the two you have two computers running there what's what's the story with them
one is a tablet and one is just a regular device right it's just a regular pc rather tiny one
though so that we can carry it around easily it's so for showing off the latest and greatest
known three point ten release running onto our twenty yeah it's just for people to touch just
right now there's someone touching the touchscreen of the tablet because the people like touchy
things and they they like to interact with the like PC and so what underlying operations systems
running on the tablet oh that's just a stock for dark 20 without no modifications just installed
it like that on the tablet right okay which uh it's an xo pc slate that's uh yeah we got that
from intel a couple of years ago right and um so has it been busy around oh yeah we've been
very busy in fact i it was so busy i couldn't even attend a talk but it's great it's
interacting with people it's awesome do you have a developer track as well going on or such
is that over uh it is over i think the there was a dev room for the for the desktop or process
of dev room and i think it was only on to it at yesterday but in fact it's a different members
of the community take care of the dev room so i mean we are here for the booth and uh different
people are for the for the dev room so what's coming up and uh what's the new cool things that's
happening in the gnome comfort is gnome or genome or gnome so genomes are the things that you
have in your blood and on yourself right the your DNA and all the these make genomes and we are
gnome just like uh uh quite simple so um i've heard that uh current versions of gnome rely on a
particular startup uh system d so correct well yes no first of all i i'm not uh the very correct
person to talk about uh technical things as i as i'm not that much involved on the on the technical
level we are more involved in the in the cover governance level so i'm whatever i say might
actually be utterly wrong so it doesn't matter that's right so um as far as i understood it
oh we got rid of a lot of croft in in the code and instead rely on debuts interfaces which
happen to be provided by system d and there was there's no i don't even claim to understand it but
that then seems to limit the possibilities of running gnome and other operation systems kind of
makes us limit space because that's the only uh that's the only system that provides system d
well this is true unfolds it has been the case for a long time now that all the features were
available unlearns only it's not nothing really has changed if you want to run gnome on a non
non-linear system you're very welcome to do so but you don't get all the features and that has
been the case for a long time now it's just been the case that it was uh if theft altering or
stuff like that so you wouldn't get the features just as you didn't in the past and you don't get
them now right nothing has changed actually just that it's not a public thing because the decision
to choose what startup system is coming up say the answer it's just become more obvious now to
more people because of this uh this discussion right that's going on right correct correct cool well
that's it um is there anything else you'd like to mention before we go no i wouldn't love i
would i would love to thank all the people for being interested you know and free software in general
keeping awesome thank you very much when is the next released you are at march so in a couple of
months two months cool thank you very much okay cool
hi everybody this is Ken again a uh foster m 2014 and i've moseyed over to the central s booth
and they've quickly hidden all the red hats under the table and i'm going to talk to Jim
per and Jim how you doing i'm doing well thank you so you've come all the way from the states have
you or do you live over this part of the world uh no i came over from houston texas
and you're part of what for i'd say the two people on the network who don't know what sent to us
is could you just give us a a run down on what it is uh we try to be a community oriented stable
enterprise operating environment and you steal the code from red hat to do that don't you i wouldn't
use the word steal exactly um we have a rather cozy relationship at present um there was an
announcement in January that might have been making the rounds um that that helps kind of ease that
transition but we we try to be uh very good and very open source friendly and red hats done a
fantastic job with um furthering that along uh both with distributing the code through ftp and
welcoming us into the family so the the way that um correct me if around the red hat is just
computed if you are a subscriber of their network then you're you get access to the source code or
you're allowed legally access to the source code which you take strip out the red hats um trade
marks and that sort of thing and you rebrand that to send to us providing community support for
up to hello exactly with the exception that red hat goes a bit further than that they provide
that source freely to anybody you don't have to be a subscriber it is right now on their uh
ftp website ftp dot senoa ftp dot red hat dot com um the agreement right now is that that will
shift in the future to become get dot seno s dot work so we will be transitioning to make that code
even more available uh through the the seno s framework to put that out there for everybody to use
okay so then can other projects that do similar things like scientific Linux they will also be
able to use that yes we've been uh actually in discussion with the scientific Linux folks about
how best to work with them so that both teams can can use this new uh change to benefit everybody
so why do you why do you think they um red hat picked seno s as opposed to scientific
Linux as opposed to uh unbreakable Linux i think there's an interesting choice with unbreakable
and i will keep my opinions to myself oh we want controversy here let me just uh throw some stuff
out there um well actually about the obviously article is taking the code recompiling it and then
providing support the same services as red hat would be doing but there was at a certain point
to change mid which made it more difficult for uh article to do that and at the time the
seno s project and the scientific Linux project said that that didn't present a massive hurdle can
you just tell us what happened there and why the change was met um around the six time frame when
when that distribution came out the kernel patching structure was changed from an individual patch
to a unified patching framework so everything that red hat had changed within the kernel structure
was distributed then as one unified patch instead of broken out into i think there were somewhere
around seven or eight hundred individual patches in the package for us that didn't present a
problem because we just need to make sure the code compiles we're not going to change all that
much so if it works for us fantastic for other vendors who might have been cherry picking individual
patches to apply that may have presented more of a problem i say a lot of tears were shed
hit over that so what is the new organization will certain uh sent to us team members will now be
working will be paid for uh well their salaries will be paid by red yes one of the lucky ones i am one
of the lucky ones um with that it essentially provides us more time to work on seno s instead of
trying to fit time to do the distribution in between day job family life and everything else going
on now we can actually focus on the distribution full time so it's not necessarily that that red
hat is providing us all of these grand resources or anything like that they're just enabling us to
put more time into the distribution they they have complete trust in in us and the team that was
running the distribution prior and they're allowing us more freedom and more opportunity to work on
it as we see uh uh uh need to do so okay so i'm looking at this whole plan for door i can understand
it's the cutting edge it's the it's the reason you know they're going to do development stuff in
there your red hat enterprise what why would an organization who's selling whose core business
is selling support then come along and these guys are doing it for free let's also pair their
salaries that's surely madness it seems like that at first and it really does but when you look at
a lot of the community development the red hat is trying to foster around uh open stack and open
shift it over and a lot of these other programs they're trying to build that community up they're
trying to build that foundation that has been successful for them in the past um so what our
distribution enables them to have that that longer framework to build on and to develop community
around fedora has primarily been targeted at the the desktop and more rapidly moving development
aspect but for projects like over where they're focused on uh long-term virtualization aimed at
enterprise you need a middle ground between the rapidly moving development structure and
somebody that is paying red hat for a turnkey solution that they want support for so we're
providing that kind of community-based middle ground where if somebody wants to use more recent
code that they're okay with it breaking fantastic come use our stuff come come be a part of the
community come help make it all better so that's that's kind of where it benefits us because we're
able to reach out to more community aspects that we couldn't necessarily before due to time
constraints or family constraints and red hat gets a platform to push more community that
might not fit as well in the fedora structure without impacting other aspects and of course the
day will come when some manager comes down and goes we want to support contract for this what
what OS we're running all sent to us here's the number for red hat thank you very much so there
will be so you will be able will you be able to guess sorry but more is the amount and why not
will you be able to get support or from red hat for sent to us on a on a paid basis if you wish
that is not the plan no right right now that has not been discussed and that has been turned down
i i don't sit on the the business side of red hat i have no idea what their future plans are
they have told me they don't plan to do that for my aspect of it i'm focused on the community side
and the bigger we can make the community the better okay so one of the stuff should i see here
right behind me i see open stack open vertex and the zen project where's red house in this
red hat is directly behind you with the open shift booth the overt booth the foreman group
and probably part of the open set i believe they have some uh radio folks over at open stack
it's red hat we contribute to just about everything
they don't even have a booth here i like this something okay fair enough i don't think
anything else i missed in this whole my journey i don't think so i think you've covered it uh
other than that go get sent us try it out and join the community come be a part of what we're
working on how did you start how did you make your way into the community in the first place
i started off in the community as a user and i kept trying to get uh johnny over here and
karen be saying who's the the project is he the chair yeah he's the board chair right now um i kept
trying to get those two to do some of the work that i needed to have done in the distribution and
instead they talked me and adjoining and doing it myself funny some people do that it's a terrible
terrible thing um right and uh so fostom do you go around to a lot of these events how would you
compare it fostom i was not able to before now that we have a little more uh reserve bounds
actually now that we have a few more resources i'm able to do a few more of these this is my first
time at fostom and it has been fantastic it's it's it's my also my first time so it's actually massive
i was blown away by the size of this uh i've i've done uh linux con linux world things like that
but this is by far right those are you know trade shows this is very definitely not a trade show
everybody that i've spoken with here is a user that understands the deep technical fundamentals and
the conversations have been fantastic i saw i was we came on the charm this morning and it was
full of people with you know in black wearing look sex and i'm sure there was a lady sitting there
she was thinking this is a flash mob and all of a sudden all these people got off the tram she's
just wondering and then she looked over at myself and uh this my my friend before we were both
quite old just go what these guys i can understand but what are these two all fararts do you know
anyway thanks very much for the interview and uh good luck and congratulations with your new job
thank you very much okay guys as ken i've been sent over here by the central s guys and i'm now
talking to a red hat employee uh daniel how you doing daniel i'm doing very well thank you
so you work for red hats do you i don't even see a red hats the word red hat up here in any of
the banners how is that possible uh we're basically very focused on contributing to open source and
it doesn't really uh so red hat basically sells these products uh it sells to support
it sells uh like features requests for new users and here we're basically trying to give back to
the open source community so they can talk to us uh in fact i myself was working on some of these
projects uh when i was working at my previous uh my previous job i made like a lot of contributions
to this to this project and now i got uh hired by by by red hat so it's uh we're very focused on
on open source and not really uh we don't really come here to sell as much as to as we do to get
in touch with the community i think that's that makes perfect sense so there are three different i'm
i must say i've heard about all can stack i've listened to some of the podcasts but it's kind of
gone over my head a little bit so can you bring us through what the hell you're doing here okay so
we brought uh three main projects which are open shift uh four men and overt so open shift
four men and overt now in our land shift means something completely different to what
it probably means here so which one do you want to talk about first uh okay let's go for
four men okay so four men is basically um a way of having like an inventory of your of your
data center or your cluster of servers uh you get to have like groups of hosts that you can
basically say what you want them to do so you you can say i want this group of hosts to be a
had to processor cluster and then it connects to pop it or it connects to chef and these
configuration management systems uh basically provision the notes uh you can also connect it to
a lot of uh virtualization systems so you can connect it to open stack google compute engine
whatever you want and spin up some VMs and have them provision provision them with with any kind of
uh with any kind of uh software that you want so if you it's nice like when you have a data center
and you want to be uh maybe uh having like some commodity hardware and you want to uh maybe
change the things that this community commodity hardware does uh like a lot of times uh you just
move them to a different host group you this are the processors that we have created
like i just said we can just move them to my sequel cluster host group and in a matter of uh
20 30 minutes you have a my sequel cluster working uh if you have set it if you have set it up
correctly okay so just to get it clear in my head for example you're operating a data center
you have so many machines you don't use all the machines for the same thing at all the time
so uh customers doing a campaign for something else so we knew new web servers we need new
so we just throw hardware at that and this facilitates that but how is that different from doing it
with something like cf engine or uh something uh do not buy hand right yeah so we basically build
upon uh configuration management tools we don't specifically use cf engine but we use
puppet and theft which are alternatives to it uh we're planning on supporting other uh
configured configuration management tools uh basically what Foreman does in in a natural is to
tell this configuration management servers uh hey you should provision the systems with this
software they should look like like Foreman says and yeah that's basically what so what does
that look like um um is there a web server front is it a front end okay cool we're walking over
we're walking we're walking oh actually it should be the free software so and here's Foreman
I'm looking at a laptop which is not going to be a whole lot of good non audio podcast but um
so it's a web page presumably this is available on a demo website somewhere uh yeah so uh it's
Rails app this uh which basically connects to all the configuration management systems that
I said before um here you have like a dashboard with an overview of your of your system and
our system everything is okay but you get like ever reports uh hosts that might not be uh when
it says here that they are out of sync that means that they don't look they don't look like Foreman
says that they should look uh and when you go to a particular host like this these are like our
mini data center in this laptop uh when you go to one particular host you can see uh some statistics
about the host like what kind of environment this host is this is this in production is this in
development whatever it is and if you have some physical machines you can you can uh check like the
BMC uh properties of them so you can do like remote power control uh if you have some VMs uh then you
can uh get like some information about them get get a console uh personal yeah and this is actually
very useful for uh maybe if you want to offer a cloud to your to your um to your employees uh you
can just give them access to the Foreman they can go here click a new host and uh you basically
just what kind of machine that you want so here we don't have one kind of machine uh you just
like where do you want to deploy this machine we now on the options bare metal local host or uh
libert and over libert uh it can be open stack we don't have only configured this to here uh
let's say uh libert and you say okay so I want a large instance I want to deploy the libert
I want it to be production I want it to call it um which we are test uh and I want it since I want
to sell uh ntp so you this is basically selecting the kind of this extra software that you want in
that machine uh you can also select which uh and then we're do you want to deploy it on which
operating system everything and the particular parameters of the virtual machine like memory
if you want like extra yeah extra nicks and they're like you have like a multi-site data center you
can also um deploy it and and uh remote data center so it's kind of useful when you want to have
like a central tool for several data centers because you this works by having a proxy at each of
the data centers and this proxy uh can connect to the central Foreman and uh basically let Foreman
know what's this data what the status of the machine of the machine is tonight click and submit oh
it's okay we don't need to go through a full thing okay um just one question then how would you
how do you link this to your pop-up instance in the first place or your chef okay so your
pub and master will have uh a little script that whenever it gets a request from a public client
the public master will uh will contact Foreman and say hey I got this client how does test that
client dot come uh should look like I'm Foreman say hey this should look like an SQL server
then puppet does it uh sends the info sends the provision and information to to the client
and then the client tells Foreman hey I got this this uh information from puppet uh
you take a report and here's what I've done so you can so after after all the configuration has
happened you can go to Foreman and take the the history of of what happened to that particular host
okay so essentially it's taken the pain out of making tea uh I would bring it up all these
hosts yeah so that's Foreman so what about what's what's the other stuff okay the overt because
the overt was an option under here wasn't it correct yeah so it's uh virtualization uh tool
it it can be uh compared to livered uh open stack uh kvm it's just a way of uh creating virtual
machines on on your on your servers um but how is this different why have you then got a kvm
hot provider sticker here okay so here's the thing uh Foreman flock uses on providing on providing
uh provision and instructions yeah yeah it doesn't do the actual the actual virtualization it doesn't
do the actual provision and it doesn't do the actual monitoring it just builds upon those tools
this is one of this virtualization tools and this is what is actually uh going into the server
and creating the actual virtual machine inside it so but this isn't the technology that does the
the virtual machine proper yeah yeah on the on the physical bare metal so yeah physical bare metal
you're looking at kvm it's correct something like um are there other options all doesn't kvm like
Zen uh maybe yep I think we just use kvm yet we're actually managing well sorry you you are
I'm done from without don't fed you uh we're doing data center virtualizations which means uh we are
covering the whole data center life cycle so for starting uh virtual machines we work with
qm on kvm kvm is in the kernel qm is the user space okay and we are basically managing everything
you need in a data center which includes storage we're connecting to the physical storage resources
network uh all the relevant network path that you need we will do everything for you
starting with installing the first host the only thing you need to do is fix it with your server
have a base operating system like center s so for the wow even real we will do everything we
will make hypervisor in from out of your server sorry and then we will start managing it so
every time the user would like to start the vm we will do it for him uh we will schedule a vm
based on the resources we are doing load balancing across the data center we have different policies
for example if you want during the weekend to shut down the host so you switch to power saving
policy and we will start monitoring the traffic and the activity and the CPU usage and once we see
everything is done we'll start migrating live migrating your vm's uh into several few hosts and
everything else will simply shut down so this is kind of like uh the vm where our vmware management
the open source version of this field i'm gonna say it looking at the screen um we'll put a link
do you have a demo site on the web somewhere that people can go to well they can uh download we
have over it live and they can simply put a usb stick with over it live on it and they will have
full demo full running demo so you get to a website yeah and they let me see got a data center
underneath that is a tree view with a tauts which is home storage network templates clusters so
it's like your typical uh management of the m basically the hierarchy is that way you start with
creating your data center yeah so this one has an NFS support but uh we can actually have you
give you various other storage supports like ice guys if i will channel whatever cluster we have
very tight clusters support by the way once you have that you will create a cluster of hosts
which is basically a migration domain this is what ensures that your live migration will succeed
and you will not try to migrate a vm running on a high CPU level to a lower one which may kill
the guest so that's basically a cluster and it has several properties um so one of the interesting
things here is that we have a cluster policy and that's where you actually set whether you want
uh load balancing to work for even distribution all power saving and in our latest versions you
can have and create your own policies something that's going to be my next question yeah so we have it
in the system level this is the system configuration level so you can actually create your
new policies it's based on a concept which are a bit similar to Nova scheduler in OpenStack
so we have filters which filters out host that that does not meet the bare minimum for example if
you have insufficient memory we will filter out that host during the scheduling process yeah so
that's the first thing you would like so i see enabled filters here so you got pinned to host CPU
level memory CPU and now he's just dragging and dropping them over and you can uh you can set up your
like dragging over the network so it's so i guess these are all going to be uh filters that we
wonder this will filter out based on that internal logic the host from the cluster and you will end
up with a limited amount of host which are relevant to the scheduling process the next part is a
weight basically the weight is a kind of optimization it allows us from the valid host to choose the
best one okay so you actually have an explanation when hovering above any one of the models so for
example it's even distribution and a pop-up kit says gives host with lower CPU usage
higher weight meaning that the host with higher CPU usage are more likely to be selected
well that seems obvious enough to me and then the last part you actually choose the load balancing
logic okay so let's take even distribution and let's give that a name demo instead of test
okay now we have a demo and we can go back to the cluster and assign it the new demo policy we just
created fantastic okay so now taking a higher level view how does this relate to format like
okay so format is a great project uh we actually consider them as siblings because we integrate
very well together uh we have a restful API with python bindings and they are actually
integrating with over using our rest API so they can actually provide virtual machines
I'm not sure if they're managing the rest of the resources such as network and storage but they
make sure that at this for the VMs you want with or without high availability for example we'll get
exactly what you need okay yeah okay so we basically take over uh format has this concept of
a compute resource and we can use many of these virtualization to stacks like to create our virtual
machines in format so you can have over you can have open stack you can have delivered a VM where
Google Compute Engine you can have all of them if you want and have your user just go to a
standardized new host interface where they just say I want a machine of this kind I want
I want this machine to be like a medium uh power CPU I want this machine to have that ramp and it
doesn't really care about what the backend is it just creates the machine also it gives uh some
provision to to the to the virtualization tool that is behind when you go to over and you
try to create one machine you don't know what that machine is going to be uh doing you you cannot
uh well provision it like with CF Engine or Pub or any of this tool uh what Forman does is that
it sends information when you create the machine to the server of this configuration management tool
and and when you create the machine it gets provisioned with whatever you want so
correct me if I'm wrong here and I'm probably on overt is more detailed more system administrator how
you how you want to provide your VMs and then Forman would be more higher level I just want to
my SQL database and I want it on this machine correct uh if you terms like small medium and large
yeah maybe if the listeners have um played with open stack Verizon it kind of gives a like a leg up
on that so open stack Verizon is basically a way of creating virtual machines creating volumes
great creating networks apologies on an open stack uh when you have Forman you can use that you can
use whichever virtualization backing you have and on top of that uh you can also uh manage your
set of already existing virtual machines and give them like some of you you can like you group them
in host groups and say these groups this group is going to be uh my SQL server cluster this group
is going to be uh had to process process or a cluster this one is going to be a rail server cluster
so from from your point of view you're in the digital center you're writing a stack and you know
providing the virtual machines to you to you it wouldn't really matter whether it's a my SQL server
or a web server without being correct that would be more a Forman task to provision that to your
pup or something in over you have the option of creating a machine with a free provision volume
so when you create the machine it can have uh already like an image that we have templates in over
yes very much like this field so in that way once you create a template let's say that you
a university and you have students and every one of them should get his own Linux VM and his own
Microsoft Windows VM okay so we create one template and we create all of the VMs out of that template
looking for the line guys where is the line between your two so the um let's say that over is
mentioned the back-end of actual creating the machine uh and Forman is doing all the life cycle of
the is worrying about the whole life cycle of the machine okay and it's possible then I guess
underneath it's possible for all this migration and power saving to be done without bothering
the Forman yeah Forman is handling the configuration parts and the provisioning
all of it is basically data center virtualization which means everything we said VM
life cycle including high availability and live validation you know everybody listen to this
as long can get it already come on move on uh so what's the other project here the open stack then
open stack is an open search solution that was born uh out of the need of having some alternative
to AWS I guess uh which basically oh Amazon Web Services uh so it has like a few
Lego building blocks like you can see here on on the poster I don't we've got uh
where do I start at the bottom or work my way up uh it doesn't really matter I mean it's
while we got open stack computers which provisions large and manages large
networks of virtual machines it's not truly what this is great yeah okay cool underneath that
boss they are doing it in a different way uh open stack is more about public cloud yeah just as
you we just mentioned AWS and over it is more a private cloud like data center virtualization
so over it can actually integrate with open stack and we can consume some of those services
but it's like a different type of solution if you have if you're a bank so you'd probably go for
a private cloud um but if you would like to provide uh public services and you need to scale up
for a big amount of consumers and virtual machines so that would be open stack they actually
don't really care about uh things that over it provides like high availability and load balancing
if your VM crashes tough just start it actually in the open stack concept the application should be
highly available and not the virtual machine so underneath that we have open stack storage
object and block storage for use with servers and applications right you can basically tie that
to your uh virtual machines or you can just have them stand alone and connect them at some point
later on uh it can be like all of these building blocks have more or less like an equivalent in
in AWS so if people are more used to s3 let's say that it's the alternative to s3 and in fact all
the open stack cloud has like um similar or nearly identical API to AWS so that it can integrate
well with already existing um AWS plugins and AWS um and the last one there is the open stack
network plugable scalable API driven IP management this I actually this understand I would see
this has been slightly different to what g2 does yeah you're very very compatible projects from one
correct I would see and this is more for you just want to build your own you want to compete with
Amazon this yeah I can give you an like a deployment there was management there was mandium with some
other people in in CERN in Geneva and they're a large part of the project they have an open stack
deployment at their data center what what they basically do is they want to offer a public cloud
for old physics research researchers and in the world out of the resources in the in the CERN
data center and what they basically do is they they have like a very very similar to
uh easy to to the easy to interface for for open stack which is offered by OpenStack it's called
OpenStack Horizon and physicists can go there and say okay I want my machine to have these
parameters let's create one on top of that since that's not enough because you're leaving
the burden of of configuring the machine to the physicist we put four months so that physicist
can say hey I want this machine to have this parameter and I want this machine to do this thing
and I want this cluster of machines to do that with OpenStack you can just build the machine
yeah and that's yeah just two different philosophies both a lot of work we're talking more
banking type stuff more yeah enterprise level and this is more like pocket against the wall
and let's do this thing that's excellent thank you very much guys for taking the time
what do you think of foster it's going very well actually it's the first my first time here and
I'm pretty surprised uh it's like all the talks that have been it's that have attended to
uh mostly in my sequel track there they've been very very good and it's great like it makes
Marshall uh really kind of like tech center for a few days uh like the whole city kind of feels
like very very uh techy so I really like first it's my second time in post them and it's
brilliant it's getting better every year it's like good wine have you seen the beer fridge up there
it's like a beer beer collectors dream there isn't a kind of honey can to be seen so I was
sitting twitter actually yesterday someone said that first them is a denial of service attack on
Brussels it's very good yeah but I love first time it's brilliant thank you guys thank you very
much and if ever you want to do your own show on Hacker Public Radio the contact details are there
and you can upload any topic that's of interest hackers all right we'll do thank you very much
hey have a good one we're here at the Fedora project and I'm talking to you okay hi guys I'm
you know such as you can I'm Fedora program manager and I'm Micheli Aishman and I'm the chair of Fedora
ambassador staying committee and I work for ad head as a community manager okay so what is Fedora
Fedora is first Fedora is a general purpose Linux distribution and Fedora project is
an open source project that is backed by ad head and the goal is to make the Fedora that's the
Linux distribution so Fedora development stuff is developed and Fedora and then passed on to
the other Red Hat project so that'd be fair to say sorry so things are developed in Fedora and then
they go into Red Hat Enterprise and into Central S so it comes into Fedora first yeah yeah Fedora
Fedora very excess you know upstream upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux but we are still
community Red Hat helps us community helps Red Hat so it's like some some biosis between these
two projects this company and community and it's really great and then you know send us this
you know rebuild of rel but Enterprise Linux so it's like a whole ecosystem of you know distributions
and it's pretty cool you know to work with Red Hat and making Red Hat and there are many Red Haters
who work in Fedora not because they are you know Red Haters but they like the project and they
like to share and I passionate about Fedora so it's hard to say like who's Red Hater and who's
working for Red Hat because they have to and in the end you and you know working on Fedora not
that eight hours you are paid for but then you spend 14 hours and you are leaving office at 3am
and you have to release the Fedora because not you have to because Red Hat said but you want
to release it so you're getting paid for your hobby basically you're getting paid to do what you
like when we got hired by Red Hat it was quite the much that our hobby became our work or
job you see mom I am somebody is going to pay me to do what you told me I would never be able to
get money to do but about the Fedora project one thing that's always been a bit of puzzle to me is
if Fedora or if Fedora is the you know the direction that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is going to be
and it's a community project that means that who knows what's going to be in Red Hat Enterprise
Linux surely there must be a wish from the marketing department or the roadmap department that
we want to put widget X into the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux so therefore you must
put widget project widgets into Fedora. Well it's kind of too but I think it's like it's a good
symbiosis and the goals of the community the wishes of the community and what Red Hat wants
pretty much comes together after all and Fedora pretty much at the beginning like at the beginning
it's just a platform and then you can build different we would call it now products
so far it has been called spins and there is there is a room for pretty much for everyone to build
what he wants so even for Red Hat even for the community so if Red Hat really wants something
then he pretty much pays people to do it in Fedora but it doesn't mean that nothing else
cannot be done within within the distribution. So for example if if I was Microsoft and I wanted
something into Red Hat Enterprise Linux I could pay you guys to develop that or have my own
developers work on that product and get it into Microsoft is probably a bad name but if you
if you get something to Fedora that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to end up in RL it's always
RL, RL, RL, it's always just a subset of Fedora. Fedora contains much much more software than
I could head into the price Linux itself but it could be if it's already in Fedora it could be
picked by Red Hat for the next generation of Fedor Linux. Okay I've been as I said earlier I've
been running Fedora for three years on the bet actually from one of the guys here I used to run
Debian quite a lot and my earlier experiences with Red Hat space just shows has been you know
RPM hell where you take a random RPM and there's none of that anymore since then so the only
controversial feature that I would have noticed has been the recent introduction of the partitioning
manager. How did that come about and why have you why have you decided to radically change how
partitioning managers work? You mean I mean and Akonda and Installer. The new one where you have
up here and you need to click here and other things are going on and a lot of the feedback from
people on Hacker Public Radio has been it's not been 100% clear. Okay it's a major product but
it seemed to me that it was just had to go into Fedora it was pushed out the door. Well one thing is
we had to change the installer because the old one wasn't crappy but you know the cold base
was old and it was hard to maintain it and took a lot of resources to work on it. Installer also
the UI at that time wasn't that very friendly. If you remember that three years ago four years ago
who hit back Installer usually crashed so that was pretty pretty not good experience at that time.
So and really have to say I like that idea a bit hop like for example if you live in the U.S.
so we are not going to change the keyboard you probably your timezone is picked up automatically
you just click two times to select your disk hard drive and you continue install it. So it's
pretty pretty neat idea I like it. Partitioning because you know it comes from designers
and I think the idea behind is not bad we still have some you know space that implementation how
to make it better and for example last year actually this time in double for conference we had to
like the usability session with users so we asked a few users to put guys come here we will you
know record you we will take a look what you are doing and we got a lot of you know very nice
feedback so for example one thing was okay with the new installer partition magic and somehow you
have to you know put your disk together how you want but people were clicking and then realized okay
so I would like to run the installation but I don't know what's going to happen there so from the
time there's a nice overview of you know all actions that has to happen and you know okay so this
is happened to my disk this partition is removed this is added this is formatted so we are still
working on you know making that experience better and you know with real users so we have some
kind of feedback and you know the federal 18 was delayed pretty much because of new installer and
it wasn't that ready at time but all that you know free releases guys are awesome not
on the install and we are trying to make the experience better and this time for around 18 was
nightmare for me as you know risk manager federal 19 was perfect we release almost on time so a lot
of bugs were sorted out throughout 20 we had a few issues with the new features but it's getting
overall better I'm not saying it's we are that you know plays we like to see but we are getting
better and I think people are getting familiar with it new partitioning it's always a new change
something from scratch people are screaming okay you change something and especially partitioning
where all the photos of my kids around the life you don't want to be massive but I think if I
can add something I think the designers and developers of Anaconda that the federal installer
fighting a pretty difficult task because the partitioning in Anaconda has to support like a lot
a lot of features other distributions just don't support like the enterprise features in partitioning
LVM and so on and I think at the beginning the designers came with pretty neat design but you know
with adding new features and supporting more and more use cases it kind of became a bit bloated
and a bit confusing but that's that's something we have to deal with that's because federal is
like abstain for resident paradise Linux the installers just has to support most of these features
the enterprise features so but again people should go back and revisit this a lot of
improvements have been done and probably going on a lot of improvements will come so yeah always
trying to improve one thing I do like about Fedora is is that you get the option to encrypt your
hardest kind of the box which is something that I think other districts could very well do well
with putting in now in revelations of what's been happening recently so that that's a big plus
for me as far as actually one of the one of the features I've been a very quiet features for
enterprise that other other what not only not only for enterprise but it's for for enterprise
it's pretty much hard requirement that's why it's it's there and it's that's actually one of the
benefits of this approach that we support also features for anybody who runs a laptop should
by there's no there's no question you should encrypt your hardest industry so uh I've been
reaching that for a while now one thing that I also like recently has been the Fedop 2 which is
a very bad name for an upgrade to a lot more sake try and Fedop Fedora on Google will give you
some very interesting hits so how has that been improving how have you how have you tackled out
that that probably was a criticism a lot of people are used in the devium world of
up guess up up get upgraded up get just up to it has it been the challenge well in the beginning
Fedop was challenged this is one reason why we delayed it at 18 yeah right because it wasn't
ready and also there was a lot of work ongoing during that free releases so the first time we were
not completely happy about an experience or user but now I tried it several times and we have
no pretty good feedback from people that it's breaks now so it's cool actually you have that
option to upgrade from command line without you know needing to reboot using a Fedop but it's not
supported actually you can you can do it but we don't support it because we can't support any
single combination that can happen so your recommendation still is to do a new fresh thing
Fedop is actually officially tested the tested way to upgrade to the new release but as I said
at the beginning there is no one way in Fedora so if one guy didn't like Fedop so he just created
Fedora upgrade which is pretty much live upgrade during when the system is fully running
which Fedop fed up balancing like a minimal environment when like
as least things as possible can go wrong some people like you know to have the
fully running system usually the ones that know what to do when something goes wrong
and they've got the option in Fedora okay I've been I have had quite good experience with Fedop
I've been updating my work computer since Fedora 14 and I've been pretty lucky with that I haven't had a
problem touching wood right here I wanted to do something else so how has your been oh yeah
about Fedora but I know that's on your website you're the the three friends I was a friend's
for features it would have been bad if you hear on the Fedora booth and didn't know those three
guys so you're in a lot of people say that Fedora are at least in the podcasting world when
the reviewing distributions they criticism mostly for Fedora is that you pretend to be
operating system for everybody yet you're obviously somebody for that you need to be highly
technical in order to run it is that correct or not well we are aiming to be for everyone but yeah
like honestly say well it's difficult to be extremely user-friendly if you have to follow all the
all the laws and so on like that's the that's the main problem for Fedora that we cannot include
pretend it's of where and there is there is no way around it it's not a technical problem it's not
a philosophical problem it's it's dollar here it's a legal problem so we are trying to be
as user-friendly as possible within the limits we know it's not it could be it's not as good as it could be
and then we go to the next question people I guess automatically install something like
rpm fusion how does the rpm fusion team fit in with Fedora is is there any level of support there
is there are do you know who these guys are are they just random people on the internet these guys are
you know it depends there are some Fedora guys who like to see some of them but legal
problems or stuff like legal problems so wait just do it in rpm fusion because it's the easiest way
usually usually the communities of these two repositories like the main Fedora one and the
rpm fusion plan are somehow overlapping and most people are breaking on bow when you know
need something to do that you can't do in Fedora there was recently there was some discussion
about you know allowing those rpm fusion and other stuff like not allowing it in Fedora repositories
make for users easier to reach software in these repositories there was some agreement so
FESCO now supports you know third-party repositories with free and open source software
unfortunately rpm fusion is not one of you know the praised one and because the rule is
that you know third-party open source the repository should not contain diverse kind of software
it's reason because we can't audit everything was in rpm fusion and again again that could be
the legal problems but you know if users wants to use it we are not saying you can't do that you can
do that so also some disputes about you know allowing third-party proprietories software happened
two weeks ago it was very heated discussion about that it was raised to board so as I'm a member
of board so we had you know pretty much no heated discussion about that and actually we were trying
to think about if it still you know fits our values you know to promote free software if you if you
allow you know searching for Chrome or Adobe reader in the gnome insulator software insulator I don't
know the name is a name I'm like no user so that's hard question and we are now trying to solve it
it's one part of Fedora.nxt initiative so I don't know you heard about it but tell us about it
okay so Fedora we already you know there for 10 years but you know always you have to always
not look to the future account you know stay in past so we are trying to overmay like make a
new way how to produce Fedora it's so called now the free products initiative but we are going
to have workstation product like the standalone product cloud product and server product
there's also discussion how to promote other you know sub projects into the real product
and the idea is you know let these you know products work on their products like an
individually way like to set up their own goals so for example for workstation guys
we are creating now the PRDs the product requirements document and if you take a look there they are
trying to make you know this user experience as easy as possible so yeah there are problems with
that value sometimes it's you know on the very edge you know what we can allow but the idea is
you know to let these working groups to define the product to go you know with their goals higher
than you know the overall project before was so there was a talk about the Fedora.nxt by Steve
Delegger yesterday and they are exactly time we are trying to define if what we need to do
or Fedora.nxt and Fedora 21 is going to be probably a very new distribution better when you
I hope better than we had before because of these because of these products for example before
Fedora was everything for everyone now it's not easy you know to do you know software at works for
guys in cloud environments they need something minimal and something that could be used in cloud
environments server guys we probably on server you don't want to update every every single year
so so server needs a different thing workstation needs again different things they have to be you know
as easy as consumable for users it's possible and there are some you know like disputes between
you know these groups so for example the idea is in the future I'm not saying it's going to
happen this year or next year there is a possibility you know for example server product would have
a different release cycle different you know cadence releases different life support and so
for example cloud would be you know the rapidly developing one that you know every three months
there would be new cloud product workstation would be somewhere in between so that would be more
governments of these working groups to do what they want for Fedora 21 it's not going to happen
right now it was really cyclist because fesco said we don't have manpower we don't have
doing to allow it but one day we would like to see you know more you know products that are aiming
their users base not just you know pushing something that's completely general for everyone I say
okay you have to be happy with that because we release that so okay I suppose the analogy would be
a Debian minimal city on a server and then you build from that you're that's going to be a lot
of dividing your community project is that's going to require different people to take ownership
of a lot more you're going to need a lot more help to do that yeah you're ever going to be able to
get sleep or now you're going to be releasing three different products instead of the one Fedora
project or I mean this is something here that's that's fun thing I'm looking forward and trying to
sorry doubt are you mad and the wall community is trying to do that but one way how to make it
possible is to work on you know tooling and automation yeah for example for until now the Fedora
QA was mostly manual you know testing so we are now moving to automation they're
release engineering tools were run by one guy he would have probably got crazy he would have to
release free products in different time it would be release every single week and it would be
crazy but he's working again on better tooling you know to allow you know fast spinning of
composes and so I think the main goal is you know to work now on the tooling and if you have tools
but you know it allows us to be more flexible and more agile when we could you know move to the
next step of Fedora dot next you know to have different products with different goals different
these cycles what if you end up getting into a you download server and you need something from
a workstation and something else and cloud you still be able to do it you know it would be still
possible it's going to be fairer base which is a very fairer base working group essentially a
supported spin I guess no it's in some ways you can say products are spins but with much more
rights and much more power to do what they want but of course there would be always that you know
Fedora repository that would contain everything and you could install it on Fedora server from I
don't know desktop from workstation but you would not get that experience workstation product would
like to see you when you install it like the recommended way how to install it but it would be
definitely possible and we are trying to make sure it's going to be possible will that then roll
down into main supported red hat products or can could I then buy you support for these products
just a technical guy talks to the market department okay thank you very much
is there anything else that I think we've talked about what's coming up in Fedora is there anything
else that I've missed that I don't that you need to talk about how people how can people contribute
how can how can we help well you've got all sorts of roles it could be not only the technical
ones like typical technical role in a distribution is packaging you can you can package software
and we can maintain it you can you can work on Fedora infrastructure because all all those
contributors need some infrastructure some tooling to do the job if it's either a build system
or different tags gates and so on the tooling you need for development and maintenance
mini designers you know and I'll be the new installer and it's all that I was trying to get to
is that actually if someone wants to contribute to Linux distribution is usually a technical person
so I would say Fedora and it's not only Fedora it's more a lack of non-technical persons for
non-technical positions such as it could be this design it could be a marketing it could be even
finite finances and budgeting because it's also it's also very important Fedora is a large project
with hundreds of contributors and we've got some finances someone needs to take the expenses
to do the budget to do the financial planning and so on and usually if someone
really wants to contribute to Fedora it's it's mostly technical guys going for development
growing for packaging and stuff like that so it's not it's not really only about this we
are looking for people hopefully there's some account adult here listening to this but yes
finally I can contribute to the so guys right um how is your fast ambient
well that's what Fedora track is today are yeah that was but I have to admit I haven't attended a
single talk since I've been I've been around the table for the whole time and well I actually
enjoyed because we meet a lot of Fedora users and even contributors and it's always nice to talk
to people and it's it's awesome you know because a few years ago when we asked what distribution do
you use it was like Ubuntu or other distributions and this time everyone comes oh I'm using Fedora
it's cool thank you for that work so it's really like I have my energy was boosted again and
oh after hearing all the people who are using Fedora and said wow it's cool we have very nice
database especially from people who are here at FOSDAM and you know these are people with
cool people and it's great to have them on board and I hope they will contribute one day
and if you two guys are paid by Red Hat or you and you work on Fedora project
I'm paid by the Red Hat just you know Fedora program manager
I'm well my my job doesn't really involve any Fedora activities may it's a bit related
but not really so what I'm doing for Fedora is pretty much my hobby activity but
Red Hat as an employer and my my manager are very tolerant today so I can pretty much
me I can work on federal activities during for example my work hours if it's necessary
so they wouldn't be probably possibly if I worked for someone else and where you guys come from
where are you based oh we are based in Bruno check the public
it's where Red Hat has the largest engineering office in the world currently almost
7 hundred engineers so it's the ideal large large office so you're familiar with good
quality beer than still yeah okay have I missed anything else guys or have we covered everything
thank you thank you for doing it every repress not a problem I'll talk to anyone okay talk to you later
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