So my blog has been dormant for some time, and in that time I’ve had a variety of hardware failures etc. As such my previous nanoc based site was lost. Thankfully all the content was stored in git so was easy to recover. I thought if I’m going to restart blogging I might as well look at a different platform, and it looks like all the cool kids are using Hugo so here we are.
I was at the wonderful FOSDEM this weekend just gone and met up with many fine folk (as always) unfortunately there were also many people I didn’t manage to catch up with. On the Sunday I attended a talk on The Tumbleweed Factory given by openSUSE’s very own Release Manager, Coolo. I made a statement about this talk, and have been challenged on that statement - I’m glad that I was challenged by one of our community members, because they were quite right to do so.
I must admit, I’m actually really happy with the Moto360. After reading a load of reviews and speaking to people that already had the device, I was fully prepared for a subpar experience. Maybe that’s the beauty of not being a bleeding edge early adopter :-) The woes that were extolled were many, and the only good thing people had to say were about the stunning good looks; battery life was woeful, not even lasting a day; performance was hit and miss; connectivity to phone was spotty; the list goes on, one almost wonders why on earth I would still want one.
So that was the week that was. As with almost all good things, openSUSE Conference (oSC) 2014 has ended :‘-( A huge thanks to Svebor Prstačić and his fine crew from both Zagreb and Dubrovnik Universities. They did a wonderful job, and if there were any pain points they made sure that only they felt them. The venue was great with plenty of space, the two main auditoriums were almost too big ;-) Huge thankes to Jürgen Weigert and Christopher Hofmann for organising, directing, streaming, editing and uploading the videos of most of the talks.
This is more for my own self reference as I go through fits and starts of having to touch the kernel and end up forgetting WTF I need to do, but it may come in handy for others; especially if people want to enable new hardware etc. As we all know openSUSE follows the mainline kernel source pretty closely. We have as few patches as possible, but sometimes those patches build up as time goes on (think backporting etc.
I’m somewhat late in an openSUSE Board related task, sorry for that :-(. I would like to say a HUGE THANK YOU to all in the openSUSE community for voting in the Board elections, and to those who voted for me! Thank you for having the confidence trust and hope that I can represent your and the wider openSUSE community’s interests. I am deeply honoured to be able to serve a second term as your representative on the Board.
Aloha fellow Geekos! I was fortunate enough to have been elected to the Board two years ago, and as always when you have fun time flies. As such my current tenure on the Board is due to end this year. As the openSUSE project is something that I value, believe in and enjoy I would like to stand for re-election. I will not present my campaign yet but will do so as of the 18 Nov, but what I will say is this:
The final day of EuroBSDCon kicked off (summary of Day 1, 2 & 3) and I gave my talk on “Introducing the 64-bit ARMv8 Architecture” in the morning, actually the morning in Track 3 was overtaken by ARM related talks :-). My talk went down well (no rotten fruit/veg was thrown! \o/), and it was nearly a full room people from various flavours of BSD which was encouraging. There were some good questions and some suggestions for things that could make things easier for the developers to support ARM moving forward which is always useful to hear.
OK so I lied, the EuroBSDCon actually has 3 days of FreeBSD DevSummit. The third day built upon some of the things covered in Day 2. The first part of the morning was taken over by the FreeBSD working groups, these working groups are the ones that do the work and integrate things that make up the full FreeBSD Operating system. There were presentations by groups like Toolchain, Security, Packaging, Desktop, etc.
Day 2 of EuroBSDCon (overview of Day 1) kicked off for me with the morning being dedicated to virtualization. In Linux we’re all used to the usual suspects - KVM/Xen/LXC/VMWare, so I was interested to hear what’s available on FreeBSD especially bhyve which is probably as close to KVM as one will get. Xen support is available in FreeBSD, but only as DomU (guest VM). Dom0 (host server) support is actively being worked on though to rectify this shortfall (this does not apply to NetBSD).