FOSDEM 2013

The neat guide to Fedora RPM Packaging - Nikos Roussos:

This talk will present the full workflow and the tools needed for Fedora RPM Packaging. Simple and clean. No more development libraries in your system. No need to have multiple architectures or releases available.

Anyone who is interested in contributing to the Fedora Project doing packaging should find this presentation a really good starting point.

Looking for heroes: Start writing code for Firefox today! - Josh Matthews:

Mozilla is a project driven by people who care. What if one of those people were you? Walking into a project made of millions of lines of code can be daunting - we'll discuss strategies for getting involved, how to learn without getting lost, where to ask for help, and you'll get a high-level overview of the parts that make up Firefox. By the time you leave, you'll know how to obtain the source, read it, learn it, write it, and finally ship it.

An Integrated Localization Environment - Axel Hecht:

Axel is working on a new breed of localization tool, bringing together localization workflows and UX as you can see it in Integrated Development Environments (IDE). In short, an ILE uses UX paradigms like code completion to implement translation suggestions and the like. As Axel can't spell, the pathway to being a lucky localizer is dubbed "aisle", a web based ILE with both server- and client-side tools. He's going to show a demo of how that will look.

Vehicular traffic estimation through bluetooth - Paolo Valleri:

We present a traffic monitoring prototype powered by a raspberry-pi that leverages on techniques such as the detection of signals as Bluetooth. Namely, signals spread by vehicles passing on the roadway are revealed by the battery powered boxes installed on the roadside.

The entire system is proudly powered by only free and open source softwares, at the probe side upon a healthy OS level orchestrated by the Debian OS runs the bluetooth inquiring tool while at the server side the traces are gathered and analyzed by a python back-end developed with the web2py web framework.

Given the growing and serious issue as the traffic jam and the continued reduction of the budget that municipalities have to deal with a sane and open source system for monitoring the traffic trends could be a starting point not only for cutting the expenditure down but also to develop an homogeneous monitoring infrastructure.

The aim of developing our prototype based on signals as bluetooth stems from an interest of proposing an open source solution in the field of monitoring vehicular traffic. Moreover the idea is that the same solution can be applied by different municipalities without any significant effort in customizing and adapting the source code for their particular requirements. Nowadays the bluetooth technology is available on several vehicular fleets, it is a matter of fact, it is widely used as the main in-car short range point-to-point communication standard for info-entertainment and phone headset. Its adoption in new vehicles is growing, as a result we expect that the number of cars monitored will increase in the following years. This positive growth can only strengthen the use of this technology. In particular, based on empirical tests carried out in the city of Bolzano, the number of cars detected are at least the 25% of the total traffic flow, with an average of 30%, and peak of 43%. This figures are proof that it is possible and worthwhile to predict the traffic trends with this approach. In addition, by detecting bluetooth signals the system is not only able to project an estimation of the total number of cars passing through the monitored area but also to compute the travel time that a vehicle took to pass through two different places monitored by the probes. Namely, the former is an estimation chart generated as a function of the percentage of cars equipped with bluetooth while the later can provide input data for the so called in the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) domain origin/destination matrix, which is used by traffic engineers to feed complex traffic simulation models that compute the traffic flows distribution over the entire road-network.

QML Mobile Application Development - Showcase on Jolla Sailfish OS - Marko Mattila:

Qt and QML are open source technologies which enable crossplatform development. This presentation demonstrates how Qt and QML can be used to create modern mobile applications and operating systems using open source technologies and tools such as the Mer project, Nemo Mobile, Qt Mobility, Qt Creator and Sailfish SDK.

As a showcase - the presentator shows how to create a photo gallery application, using Qt Creator, Qt, QML, Qt Mobility and how to add in a custom layer to fit in the Sailfish UX with a few simple steps.

Razor-qt - Jerome Leclanche: The other Qt desktop

Razor-qt is a Qt-based desktop environment that has been in quiet development for the past two years. It has been gaining traction as a lightweight alternative to KDE for users and developers who prefer Qt apps. This talk introduces Razor to those who haven't heard of it, and invites contribution to the project as well as the lacking non-KDE Qt app environment.

Crypto.cat - Daniel Faucon: Secure messaging for everyone

Cryptocat is free software that aims to provide an open, accessible Instant Messaging environment with a transparent layer of encryption that works right in your browser.

Cryptocat is developed by privacy advocates, for privacy advocates. Big Data providers such as Google and Facebook continue to amass gigantic amounts of personal information without providing any guarantee of privacy, while encryption remains largely inaccessible. This means that a lot of what you do online is not within your control, but rather susceptible to governmental or corporate interception.

Cryptocat aims to bridge the gap for those who need encrypted communications that are easily accessible.

Fipes - Romain Gauthier: Beating the sneakernet

Fipes is a damn simple privacy friendly file sharing web application.

Fipes try to solve the 949 problem - aka « why using usb keys is faster than using the network ».

It's a web application which helps people to share files in a synchronous way. We'll see how the project is by design focused on privacy and simplicity.

Debian Med - Andreas Tille: a Debian Pure Blends for medical care and microbiological research

Since 10 years the Debian Med project tries to attract developers and users of Free Software in the field of medical care and microbiological research inside the Debian distribution.

The strict approach package everything for official Debian and relay completely on the Debian infrastructure as so called "Debian Pure Blend" has turned out as very successful and enabled a constant growth regarding the number of packages in this field but also in the number of developers and users.

The talk will stress either the consequences to stick into a distribution (there are similar projects in Fedora and SuSE) or to be an example for other sciences how to reasonable attract scientist into your team.

Static site generation for the masses - Denis Defreyne:

Static website generators are slowly rising in popularity and have been proven to be a worthy alternatives to CMSes in many cases. This talk explains what static site generators are, how they avoid the traditional problems with CMSes, and explains what technical challenges must be overcome when implementing one.

In the beginning of the web, there were only static HTML files. This way of working proved to be hard to maintain, so people connected a database to their web sites, and in this way, CMSes were born. Today's CMSes are much more powerful than their ancestors, but they have brought a slew of drawbacks with them. Deployment has become harder, security is more of a sore point than ever, and speed issues are still hard to solve.

A CMS is overkill for many sites. Many drawbacks of CMSes can be aleviated by using a static site generator. These tools generate static HTML files and other static assets that can be deployed to any web host. They have recently gained a lot in popularity, and have proven to be a worthy alternative to CMSes in many cases. Even FOSDEM has, as of the 2013 edition, replaced Drupal with nanoc, a popular static site generator.

How do static site generators work, precisely? How do they differ from traditional CMSes? What are their advantages and how do they resolve drawbacks that CMSes have? This talk gives answers to these questions, built on real-world experience received by creating several large web sites powered by static site generators.

FreedomBox 1.0 - Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee:

FreedomBox is a personal server running a free software operating system and free applications, designed to create and preserve personal privacy by providing a secure platform upon which federated social networks can be constructed. Software for FreedomBox is being assembled by volunteer programmers around the world who believe in Free Software and Free Society, with Bdale coordinating development of a reference implementation on behalf of the non-profit FreedomBox Foundation.

Eben Moglen articulated the need for FreedomBox in his 2011 FOSDEM opening keynote, then Bdale Garbee provided a progress update in his 2012 FOSDEM closing keynote. This year, Eben and Bdale will jointly present the development status of freedom-respecting hardware and a software stack that together represent the first FreedomBox release for end users.

Vroom! Free Software in your car - Jeremiah C. Foster:

This talk describes how the automotive industry has moved to embedded Linux and Open Source to develop the next generation of In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) and how it has met the challenges along the way.

This talk describes how the automotive industry has moved to embedded Linux and Open Source to develop the next generation of In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI). IVI is increasingly important as everyone wants to be connected all the time and cars are no exception. Cars are a natural fit for modern mobility software and customers expect that nearly anything they purchase nowadays has smart mobility baked in.

How does it happen that an industry known for its mechanical engineering and cautious approach can suddenly become a leader in smart mobility? How can the auto industry jump over a generation of consumer electronics and right into the smart phone era?

One approach is to join together, create a common platform, and innovate on top. This is what the GENIVI alliance has done. That common platform is embedded Linux and it comes with a number of challenges for the automotive industry. License compliance, fast start-up times, mobile connectivity to the internet, interaction with a wide variety of cell phones; all these things are challenges that the GENIVI alliance has tried to tackle head on.

We'll discuss some the technical solutions, the resultant software stack, and the work that still needs to be done to realize modern IVI in every car.

Android freedom and Replicant - Denis Carikli:

This talk will deal with the freedom issues in android, their solutions and the Replicant project that is a 100% Free software distribution of android.