Hi everyone, as I mentioned in one of the previous blog posts, there was a competition for the best talks of Developer Conference 2012. And here are the winners! The absolute rock star is Bryn Reeves, both of his talks scored very high.

#1
Bryn Reeves - How To Lose Data and Implicate People
#2
Karel Piwko - Arquillian Drone Helping Ike Get Rid of the Bugs
#3
Geoffrey De Smet - What Are Drools, Guvnor and Planner?
#4
Lukas Czerner - Btrfs: Design, Implementation and the Current
#5
Bryn Reeves - Supporting the Open Source Enterprise
Miloslav Trmac - Concise Overview of Security

Thanks guys for putting a lot of effort in your talks, I hope to see you all next year!

I've just updated the conference page at www.devconf.cz with slides. Check it out if you've missed some talk. I've started processing the videos last week but it's damn slow. Hopefully I'll have first few done within couple days.

Talks, labs, events .. well, but one things was still missing for the Developer Conference 2012 - the list of all pubs near the conference place. Big thanks to Juraj Huska! Enjoy the event and the after-parties!

The second day of the Developer Conference will be as packed as the first one. Hopefully the party on Friday night won’t make any harm on the attendance of first sessions. The opening session in track#1 are managed by our tools guys - Marek Poláček, Jan Kratochvíl and Jakub Jelínek will in two slots guide you thru prelink, elf, news in gdb and gcc. Next two session in track#1 start the desktop track. Matthias Clasen and Jonathan Blandford are both developers directly involved in Gnome development. Matthias will start with GTK+ 3 and it’s future, Jonathan will continue with planned features for next Gnome 3.x release and integration of Spice within the desktop.

The track#2 will be open by Jared Smith, Fedora Project Leader. His talk will stress the importance of upstream development and how Fedora has a key role in this ecosystem. Talk is focused on all Fedora maintainers and developers. The rest of the day in track#2 belongs to kernel developers. First on the stage is Lukas Czerner, talking about btrfs. Lukas promised to give a little background on why do we need yet another filesystem. Lukas works mostly on ext4 and will compare btrfs not only with ext4/lvm but also other filesystems. Next on the stage is Jaroslav “perex” Kysela. Some time ago (IIRC it was in 1998) Jaroslav started the ALSA project. His talk will be about HDA - High Definitiona Audio and progress on the kernel driver. Next talk is still open, we have confirmation from the oVirt folks that they will show up and give a talk their virtualization management app, but details are still missing.

Afternoon in track#1 continues with desktop sessions. Hand De Geode is Spice developer, his recent project integrates usb redirection support into Spice. If you haven’t seen Spice in action yet, Hans will hopefully give some nice demos. Tomeu Vizoso is one more GTK developer talking at the conference. His talk will be about application development with Python and GObject Introspection. On the other hand, Shaun McCane, works in the documentation team keeping the GNOME docs updated and live. He will talk about GNOME Help System. The day will continue with Jaroslav Reznik and little bit from others desktops as well, in this case from KDE. Jaroslav works in KDE upstream, is active Fedora Board member and maintains KDE in Fedora. He will introduce Qt5 project and what are the new and planned enhancements in this toolkit. After this talk Jared Smith continues with his second talk, this time about docbook and publican and how to generate documentation into various formats starting from web pages to manual pages. Last talk in track#1 is open for speakers from university. Fedora and Red Hat has couple projects running together with folks at university and some of this projects will be described during the last session of the day.

Track #2 continues with the kernel session. Bryn Reeves will start with his second talk, again inspired by his supporting job. This time about LVM, raid and how to backup, snapshot and restore the data. We will continue with LVM talk from Tom Coughlan. Tom runs the Storage group at Red Hat and will uncover the enterprise strategy for storage. His colleagues Milan Broz, Joe and Zdeněk will continue with two talks, one about thin provisioning and snapshoting with device mapper and the other one about disk encryption, why and how to use it. Another talk about filesystems will be done by Edward who worked already on several filesystems and will give a brief comparission of what we have in Linux and what we should have. Jirka Pirko will end the kernel track with a talk about project libteam, about networking devices in general and bonding.

In track #3 the morning starts with several Cloud related talks. Michal and Francesco are both deltacloud developers who deal with different Cloud provider’s APIs. Their talk will show on practical examples who different cloud providers offer and how deltacloud covers them all. Mladen Turk is apache developer who will introduce apache news for cloud providers and users. Niels De Vos will continue with introduction of GlusterFS from the developer point of view. For those who haven’t heard about Gluster yet, this talk is a must.

The party continues even after last talk. The Free movies session will show couple movies rendered purely with open source tools. During both days there will not only be talks but also lab sessions and a free room which everyone can book for a team meeting, small hacking session or a just grouping interested people for additional chat about projects.

As I promissed in my previous blog post, let’s look more closer at the Developer Conference 2012 schedule. I won’t tell you much about the JBoss presentations as I am don’t know much about their talks but I’ll try to point you to some additional source to find out more information about these. Looking at the day one, Friday, it will be hard to decid from the very beginning which track to pick. The track#1 starts with series of talks about identity management, policies and auditing. Jakub Hrozek and Jan Zeleny opens up with current development in the FreeIPA project - an integrated security information management solution. Their focus will be on the command-line administration tools and the backend bones like SSSD and kerberos. Their colleagues, Alexander Bokovoy and Andreas Schneider will continue with development plans for FreeIPA 3.0 and uncover some of the feature that are under heavy development right now, including cross-realm trusts, centralized management of keys or SELinux policies etc. Eduard Beneš and Miroslav Grepl will continue diving into SELinux world. Their talk focuses on new SELinux features introduced in Fedora 16, like faster boot, file name transition and more strict SELinux policies. Dmitri Pal will close the first half of the day in the track#1 with future plans of the FreeIPA project including the related projects like directory server and kerberos.

In the second track, František Řezníček opens the day with a talk about unified messaging. He will focus on technologies used in the Red Hat MRG Messaging product like AMQP and its open source implementation Qpid. He will dive into details about its implementation of clients and brokers, the transaction management, queuing, distribution, security and management. He will be followed by Kamil Dudka and Ondřej Vašík who are deeply involved in projects around static code analysis. Their talk will on examples show the most common C/C++ mistakes and describe how static analysis helps the code quality. Adam Tkáč, bind maintainer and developer, works on enabling DNSSEC features in Fedora. His talk will inform you how important DNSSEC is and how key distribution will get easier with dnssec-conf. On examples you will learn how to setup dnssec validation on your Fedora. The last talk before quick lunch will be done by Marcela Maslanova and Jindrich Novy. You might have read GDK’s blog about ISV problems. Dynamic Software Collections is a project that might solve this issue. The projects shows a way how ISVs can redistribute packages needed for their projects in stacks easily with software collections.

Day will continue with several security related talks in the track#1. Peter Vrabec runs the security R&D team in Brno and will show you the project OpenSCAP and scap-workbench. Using this tool you can ensure that your systems meet security requirements and even create your own policy for your servers and production systems. Mirek Trmac will continue with a more general talk about best security coding practices, how to design programs and protocols with security in mind and on examples will show common programming bugs that lead to security flaws and potential risk on the systems. Security sessions will continue and slowly introduce the next topic of the day, secure logging. Steve Grubb will talk about Security Logging Initiative and auditing tools. Why is security a big concern here and why auditing is required by various certification and large companies. Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers promised a talk about systemd and “Do's and Don'ts when writing system services”. Their talk will uncover some common problems done by programmers when writing daemons and why and how these problems should be avoided. Next guest is Rainer Gerhards, the autoher of rsyslog will talk about rsyslog future and what rsyslog currently implements and you might not know about it. Harald Hoyer showed me his Fedora filesystem on Linuxcon last year. What was so special about it? It will be shown in his talk about streamlined and fully compatible Linux Filesystem Hierarchy. This talk will close the track#1.

In the track#2, Bryn Reeves from Support Engineering Group Europe will describe and day in his life, how Supporting the Open Source enterprise works. Bryn works on complex customer issues from various areas, including kernel, filesystems and others. In his spare time he contributes to a number of projects, including the kernel, device-mapper and LVM2. Jan Hutař coming up next picked an interesting topic - software robot competitions around the world. He will describe what robot competitions are about, what open source competitions are available worldwide and his own robot competition in which anyone can participate. Stanislav Kozina is another Support Engineer on the stage, works on kernel and networking stack and has experience with other OSes including OpenSolaris and HelenOS. Some of his observations and comparissions will be shown in his talk. Phil Knirsch continues with future of yum and rpm - the core of Red Hat based distributions. RPM is heading towards couple changes like plugable depsolvers and yum will come after. With the approaching evening, Thomas Graf will talk about libnl, network config tools for RHEL and kernel QoS and Jaroslav Škarvada will introduce Power management SIG and the results of recent power management work in Fedora.

The Developer Conference 2012 schedule was just published this week and in next few blog posts I’d like to introduce talks I find interesting and if you haven’t decided to come yet, it might change your opinion and plans. It’s been already third year we’re organizing this conference, maybe even longer if you count in the old FUDCon Brno and I’m happy to see that there’s a huge interest from various people not only from Europe to come to the conference and give a talk. We always wanted to have this conference as a developers for developers event, all talks are done by people directly involved in upstream development or work in fields like Quality Assurance or Support Engineers and Consultants - all experts in their areas.

One of the complains that we’ve heard last year was that the talks were not grouped by their functional areas and some talks that were related were split apart in two days. We’ve tried to avoid it this year and created seven main areas of interest - Kernel, CoreOS, Security, JBoss, Cloud, Desktop and Others - eg. everything that doesn’t fit any category. More clearly you can see it on a colorful version of the conference schedule.

So what I plan to do is to introduce some talks and give you some insight on what they will cover. Let me know if you are interested in any certain talk, I can always nag those people and get you details. Stay tuned for next post.

Do you those days as well? You wake up in the morning, start your laptop and try to find the presentation you've started yesterday. Surprisingly OO doesn't show it in recent documents and it's not in your docs folder .. and you can't even think of a name of that slideshow (yeah, believe me, happens). Here's a simple trick that saved me ..

$ find ~/ -name "*.odp" -type f -mtime -1


Since my F16 upgrade the backlight auto adjust stopped working. Not only that, but I couldn't use Fn+PgUp/PgDwn on my Lenovo laptop to change that manually and also `xbacklight --set 100` doesn't work. Got a hint from my friend that actually solved that partially

First search for your acpi driver

$ ls /sys/class/backlight/*/brightness
/sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness


Figure our your max value

$ cat /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/max_brightness
7


and as a root pass it on

$ echo 7 > /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness


Now I could see enough to file a bug against xorg server :-)

Desktop Art - don't know if you heard about it already, it's very simple - it gives you info about current track including the cover art on the desktop. Simple, minimalistic but actually really nice.



Installation on Fedora 15 and CentOS 6 is as easy as ..


mkdir -p $HOME/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins/
cd $HOME/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins/
git clone git://github.com/wippler/desktop-art.git


After that make sure you've enabled the plugin in rhythmbox and also set proper position of the plugin. Quick tip, make sure you have gnome-python2-rsvg installed on your system.