Fedora Project at FOSDEM 2023

Author: Filippo Giunchedi, published by: Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Fedora Project will be present at FOSDEM 2023. This article describes this gathering and a few of the events on the agenda. I assume if you are reading the Fedora Magazine, you already know what FOSDEM is, but I’ll start with a small intro anyway.

Define FOSDEM

FOSDEM is the biggest event in the known universe for free/libre and open-source developers and enthusiasts.

Many good people from around the world meet and discuss common topics and define the future of F/LOSS. The event is held in Brussels at the beginning of February. Some of us, who are coming from a bit warmer countries, are calling it FrOSDEM, because it’s usually freezing 🙂

Why attend?

If you are a contributor already or you want to start doing good with your skills for the F/LOSS universe, this event is a must. 

I know everyone has their reason for visiting, but I’ll share the most common ones:

  • You meet the people creating and supporting the products that power the Internet that you already use.
  • If you are a contributor already, you have a chance to meet with your team and people using your product.
  • You learn so much new stuff quickly.
  • You enlarge your horizons by looking at something outside your bubble. If you are a fan of Fedora, go and learn more about Security or Javascript.
  • You have a chance to talk to others with the same passion as yours and even become friends for life. A good friend is always a commodity!
  • You achieve your daily steps goal because the ULB campus is enormous, and you will have to move a lot to get to the room you would like to visit.
  • You have a chance to volunteer and help the community if this is what drives you.
  • You attend an event with a great Code of Conduct.

Fedora at FOSDEM 2023

It’s a tradition for the Fedora Project team to be there to present some of our work from the last year and to allow you to share your feedback on what we do well and how we can improve.

Meet, greet, and see our community in action

One of the most extraordinary things at FOSDEM, which I deliberately didn’t mention in the previous section, is the project booths. In almost every building, you will see people behind a branded table, ready to talk to you about their project, its values, and its mission.

People at the Fedora booth looking at something.
Image by Francesco Crippa under Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

 I have to mention the goodies here, as well. You will return home with many items from your favorite projects. Be sure to continue supporting them further.  

We at Fedora will be happy to welcome you to our booth as well. You can talk to the community members, give us constructive feedback, and see some of the things we prepared.

Our booth location is in building H, alongside the rest of the Linux Distros.

Map of the ULB campus with a mark of the building H, where the Fedora Project booth will be
Building H, ULB Campus.

Stop by and say hi in your language! We are looking forward to talking to you!

We want to share what makes our work exceptional

At each FOSDEM we have a good number of talks related to what we do at Fedora. I am listing only some of them to make it enjoyable for you to browse the agenda and discover the rest yourself.


1: Fedora CoreOS – Your Next Multiplayer Homelab Distro

Using Fedora CoreOS in a Selfhosted Homelab to setup a Multiplayer Server

Speakers

Akashdeep Dhar
 Objective Lead for Fedora Websites & Apps, Fedora Council
 Software Engineer, Red Hat Community Platform Engineering

Sumantro Mukherjee
 Elected Representative, Fedora Council
 Software Quality Engineer, Red Hat

Intro

Fedora CoreOS is an essential, monolithic, automatically updating operating system optimized for running containers. It focuses on offering the best container host for executing containerized workloads securely and at scale. We will show a case study of setting up Fedora CoreOS as a self-hosted Homelab distribution for globally accessible (using secure network tunneling) multiplayer servers for video games (namely Minecraft, Valheim, etc.).

When and Where

Saturday, Feb-4 at the Containers devroom from 11:30 to 12:00


2: Fedora Asahi

Fedora for Apple SIlicon

Speakers

Eric Curtin
 Software Engineer, Red Hat

Intro

This talk will introduce one of the latest Fedora Remixes, the Asahi Fedora Remix! Asahi Fedora Remix exists to assist the Asahi community with Apple Silicon upstreaming and to provide a nifty ARM-based Fedora Workstation for those that own Apple Silicon hardware. We will discuss packages we have forked: kernel, kernel-edge, mesa. Some of the new characteristics of this distro include, 16k page size, a kernel built with rust drivers and hence a kernel built with clang/LLVM. We will show some performance results against some other x86 and aarch64 machines.

On the community side, we will discuss some core values we try our best to abide by, such as our “upstream everything” attitude.

When and Where

Saturday, Feb-4 at the Main Track, K Building from 12:00 to 12:50.


3: DNF5: the new era in RPM software management

How we rewrote the codebase and started loving the community

Speakers

Nicola Sella
 Software Engineer, Red Hat

Jan Kolárik
 Software Engineer, Red Hat

Aleš Matěj
 Software Engineer, Red Hat

Intro

Package managers are essential tools in any Linux system, designed to install, upgrade, remove, and manage software. For several years, Fedora had YUM, which became DNF eleven years ago. Now, DNF5 will replace DNF and be the new Fedora standard. In this talk, we will give an introduction to DNF5. We aim to address our new design principles and how our choices fix some of DNF’s design flaws. We will present a live demo of the new product to showcase some features of DNF5 and make comparisons with DNF. Lastly, we will cover our plan to improve communication, inclusion, and openness with the open-source community.

When and Where

Saturday, Feb-4 at the Main Track, K Building from 13:00 to 13:50.


4: Creative Freedom Summit Retrospective

Speakers

Emma Kidney

Part of Red Hat’s Community Platform Engineering team since 2021. 
Designer at Red Hat’s Community Design Team. 

Jess Chitas 

Part of Red Hat’s Community Platform Engineering team.
Creator of Fedora’s mascot – ColĂşr, and Fedora Brand Guidelines Booklet.

Intro

The Creative Freedom Summit is a virtual event focused on promoting Open Source tools, spreading knowledge of how to use them, and connecting creatives across the FOSS ecosystem. The summit’s accomplishments and shortcomings will be examined in light of the event’s first year and potential changes for the following years.

When and Where

Sunday, Feb-5 at the Open Source Design Dev Room from 14:30 to 14:55


Where to find more related talks?

Our wiki page is a good start, but FOSDEM’s schedule catalog is even better. One life hack: select a good 30 min slot, go through all the rooms which might get your attention, and create a personal schedule in your favorite calendar app. Make sure you have a backup plan because some rooms might be fully occupied, and you cannot enter.

I want to interest you in a challenge

If you know more than I do about FOSDEM 2023 and have already prepared your schedule, share a single paragraph comment about your FOSDEM plan and list a few of your favorite talks. You will help the community understand the greatness of the event and find more reasons to make the trip to frosty Brussels.

See you there!

Events Fedora Project community

8 Comments

  1. Austin DeLauney

    Will there be a recording of the first session (CoreOS & homelab server)?

    • SamVH

      Most talks are recorded and a lot were streamed in previous years. It can take a while however, before the recordings are all online.
      Unfortunately i can’t attend this year, but i’ll be watching some live streams as time permits and definitely be catching up later when the recordings go online.

    • John

      I am also interested in this ^^

  2. Looking forward to being there! I’ll be dividing my time between the Fedora stand and the Distributions devroom.

  3. Luna bittin Jernberg

    Cya all there in a week will help out in the Fedora stand this year 🙂

  4. I’ll be there! Looking forward to seeing everyone after so long!

  5. John

    I am so happy to be there again after the covid. My favorite room is usually Mozilla, but as the author suggested I might visit some more.

  6. Nicolas

    I will be there as well.
    I’ll attend talks about Rust, Containers and Mozilla.
    And of course visit the Fedora booth!

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