The Embedded Talks

The foss-north conference strives to have an assortment of various talks. The point is that visitors should see something unexpected and that the conference should attract all types of visitors to ensure that we as a community can meet across various industries and problem spaces.

This time I’ve selected three talks about embedded systems from foss-north 2020. The talks touch on building embedded systems around Linux. If your reader does not show you the embedded videos, make sure to follow the actual page or go to our conf.tube channel to see all the contents.

First out was Ron Munitz talk on understanding and building minimal Linux systems. This talk proved to be a real deep dive into the Linux kernel – including setting up a debugger to the kernel itself.

The next embedded speaker on the program was Chris Simmonds. He discussed if going with Yocto or Debian is best for your embedded Linux project. This an interesting topic – how much is customization worth compared to other aspect such as build-time.

The embedded set of talks ended with Drew Fustini talking about running Linux on the RISC-V. This talk dives deep into the hardware part of embedded systems, but also Linux. By being able to run Linux on RISC-V, which is open hardware, we are very close to an completely open eco-system.

The three talks are already available on conf.tube, and the presentation material can be found by following the links to each speaker. For those of you who prefer YouTube, the talks will be made available shortly on the foss-north channel. Subscribe to get notified when they are.

What a License Track!

The foss-north 2020 videos are rolling out. This year we’re doing a small experiment, so everything is available at once over at conf.tube, while we roll the videos out gradually at YouTube in an attempt to feed the algorithm (like and subscribe!).

This year we had a great set of licensing related talks, and I’d like to discuss them all in this post.

Monday morning started with Frank Karlitschek and his talk Why the GPL is great for business. This a great overview of how you can build an free and open source business – pros and cons and pitfalls to avoid.

Next up is Gabriel Ku Wei Bin from FSFE who talked about REUSE. The REUSE project is about helping creators choose and apply free and open source licenses.

This is followed by Pavel Kopylov and his talk Hacking the legal code of an open source license. This talk is about understanding how licenses works and how to use them.

This is followed by Jason Hammond from Whitesource talking about their compliance tooling and why compliance is important.

The final talk in this track is by Adriaan de Groot talking about the KDE Free Qt Foundation. This is an interesting aspect, as it is about protecting the customers by offering a more liberal license at a given point of time.

Historically we’ve always split talks on a specific topic during the conference to ensure that people move about in the hallways and that most visitors get to see something unexpected. Since we record everything, we can now do both – clustering by topic and a linear playlist.

foss-north – or doing many things at once

When placing this year’s foss-north event over a quarter break I knew that I would be busy both at work and at the conference. Little did I know what was beyond the horizon ;-)

As a consequence of the COVID-19 situation, the event has to be converted from a physical meeting to a virtual event. This means many things to an organizer: renegotiating all sponsorship contracts, renegotiating with the physical venue, setting up the infrastructure for a virtual event, rescheduling all speakers, and so on.

We at foss-north are lucky. All sponsors continue to stay with us and the venue was very cooperative when it came to rescheduling the event.

I have started to document our virtual conference setup so that other conferences in the same situation can learn. Pull requests are welcome!

This Sunday we decided to stress test the infrastructure by running the lightning talks. This is a good test case, as it involves a maximum number of speaker transitions, as well as more frequent QA sessions. From an organizer perspective, this is really like running a full day of the conference in 90 minutes.

I’m happy to tell you that the talks went well! You find them below. Following the links you find slides as well as recordings of the sessions.

Develop better software with usability testing by Andreas Nilsson
Running Android on the Raspberry Pi by Chris Simmonds
The Yocto Project 10 minute quick-start guide by Ron Munitz
Getting started with your smart, connected, vehicle project by Dimitris Platis
Seven years in Tibet^W^Wat Home by Kristoffer Grönlund
Linux on RISC-V by Drew Fustini
Singularity container platform by Anders Björklund

We’ve also been able to get most of the conference schedule in place and just have a few rough edges to fix before the big event. I am extremely pleased with how this has turned out. We still have a stellar speaker setup and I hope that you will all join in and watch the streams. The event is free for all and open to all and runs from March 29 – April 1.

foss-north

It is with great regret that I have to announce that foss-north 2020 has been postponed due to the COVID-19 situation.

It will be replaced by a virtual event during the planned dates (March 30-31), and a physical event during the fall.

We regret any inconvenience that this causes our guests and sponsors. At the same time we appreciate the great support of our sponsors who unanimously support us in these difficult times.

Details will be shared at https://foss-north.se/2020/ as we learn more.

This is turning out to be a really shitty week. But we will prevail together.

I’m always positively surprised about the amount of support and love out there in difficult times. It is what makes the world go around.

foss-north 2020 Training Day

Let’s talk about the foss-north 2020 training day! Every year we invite interesting speakers for the conference. Some of them are also teachers, and some of them are willing to hold a heavily discounted open enrollment training the day after the conference.

This year we offer three trainings:

You can get a training as an add-on to your ticket. You can even upgrade your ticket and add a training afterwards. Check it out here: https://foss-north.se/2020/tickets.html.

This gives you four days of contents: Community – 2x Conference – Training. And you get to visit Gothenburg!

foss-north 2020 Community Day

Let me tell you about the foss-north 2020 community day. It has been an idea for many years, but it all started last year. The idea is that we welcome open source projects to a day of hacking, workshoping, teaching and fun the day before the conference.

This year we are visited by Ansible, Debian, FreeBSD, Gnome, KDE and RISC-V. We a functional programming group meeting and a badge hacking workshop.

The community day is free of charge. It works thanks to the volunteers from the projects, and all the companies helping us with venues.

You are of course very welcome to join the conference days too. For them you will need a ticket. You can learn more here: https://foss-north.se/2020.

More foss stuff

It is busy days at the moment – but in a positive way.

First of all – a huge thanks to everyone who submitted to the Call for Papers for foss-north 2020. We have over 70 hours (!!!) of contents to squeeze into two tracks over two days. As always, it will be hard to pick the speakers to create the very best program.

Other foss-north activities includes starting to populate the community day activities, as well as getting a whole bunch on sponsors onboard. An extra big thanks to Luxoft and Red Hat Ansible for helping us by picking up the Gold Sponsorship packages. Ansible are even running their European Contributor Summit as a part of the foss-north Community Day together with events by KDE, Gnome, FreeBSD, Debian, and a hardware hacking workshop. I’m really looking forward to this – if you want to join in with your own project, workshop, hackaton, etc – just ping me!

The other big foss-north change for this year is that we are finally abandoning Eventbrite for a self-hosted system. Big thanks to Magnus Hagander helping us getting the pgeu-system up and running. At the moment, we offer login via Github and Google OAUTH. We’re looking into setting up a self-hosted OAUTH service as well, to let you log in locally, but that will not happen for the 2020 event due to time reasons.

Closer in time is the next local foss-gbg meetup. We are running an event around React together with our good friends at Edument. We already have 50+ registered attendees, so it will be fun!

In other news – I’ve also released Ordmonster – if anyone has kids who wants to get started reading. This is a complement to the Mattemonster app for basic maths launched earlier. Both are made with Godot, a tool that I enjoy more and more.

fosdem, day #0

I arrived in Brussels yesterday, and today feels like the day before the storm. Closing some work from the hotel room, meeting some people before the fosdem chaos, doing some preparatory stuff for foss-north.

Make sure to checkout the foss-north Community Day page. It is mostly scaffolding yet, but it will grow quite quickly. Also, if you bump in to me, grab a foss-north flyer and help spread the word!