Right, good afternoon
It is the lightning talks sessions at DebConf Hamburg 2018
We've got seven speakers, and I guess we'll just get going
Starting with Tobias Platn???, talking about Debian on Power9.
Yesterday I, hm no, on friday, I received my new Power9 machine.
A Talos 9 (II).
And it has an IBM Power9 processor
So, the only distro that I know that will work is Debian.
Then, this is a new PowerPC 64 bits architecture,
that can run in little-endian mode.
I downloaded a Debian installer.
First, I chosed the stable version, but
that crashed during install.
And, then I retried a different version, a daily version.
And this one, which is based on Buster, correctly installed.
I can even have a graphical environment, working out of the box.
And, the installer then complained that there is no boot partition
for older PowerPCs, and this boot partition is not needed, since the TalosII
has a newer systems starting with power7 used petitboot.
So, that needs to be fixed in the Debian installer,
that it doesn't produce the warning on Power machines.
And now I have a working Debian installation,
which I can use.
(thanks) [applause]
Thank you very much, that was very quick.
Next up is Thimothée Jaussoin,
talking about Movim, the XMPP social platform.
Give him a moment to get set up.
I think it's a bit better this way.
Who already heard about the platform Movim?
OK, so we have a couple of people that know about the project here.
Just to present you what I ??? could be a parallel universe
but is actually the current universe we're living with.
Lots of different chat platofrms.
The same thing on social networks.
We keep reinventing the wheel all the time.
We don't have this problem with e-mails
hopefully actually the e-mail standards came way before before all of those
proprietary solutions
So we have ??? and Google and Microsoft are still using SMTP, IMAP, for now.
So everything is compatible, and we have a lot of clients on top of that.
But for chat, and social networks, it's not the case.
So the idea of Movim is to build a social platform.
In there, we can put a little couple of ingredients.
First, it needs to be Open-Source, for the transparency, for the fact that you can
have feedback and improvements, for the security part.
I think that you guys here know about the advantages of Free Software, and
especially on the communication part, on social networks, but it's not enough.
We also need to be in control, actually in this social network.
So it need to be simple and transparent
on the UI but also on the protocol level.
On the really deep below stacks.
So we'll need to have a strong and reliable encryption,
so don't reinvent also an encryption - talking about Telegram, here -
And, yeah, need some trusts in sights here.
I mean a community, and not a company that you will blindly trust
to take care of all of your communications.
But it's not enough.
It needs to be decentralized. Because centralized social networks,
even if it's opensource,
if it's only one instance, you have to still trust the instance. So would like to
deploy your instance, you would like to trust someone else,
you can only, sometimes, trust only yourself in seldom cases
Decentralization also brings robustness
So that's too many times that actually one server is failing, think Signal
had an issue recently, about this kind of thing there.
The issue was with the Amazon servers, the whole thing didn't worked
for a couple of hours.
And then, resist against censorship and control.
Same thing with Telegram, I think in Russia.
I'm talking more about the IM part, but it's also applicable to social networks.
It's exactly the same thing, just that the exchanges of information are a bit different.
So, you need these steps but
all those platforms here
(I just made this conference 3 years ago, just added Mastodon recently)
So i might talk about different sorts of platforms
There is communication between those platforms, kind of standards that are
starting to come in, especially between Diaspora and Mastodon,
but there is still a lot of work to do there.
So, the secret ingredient is about compatibility, about extensibility.
Don't try to reinvent the wheel again,
don't try to create another social network,
or another IM platform that will have all those communication troubles.
So, I mean a long-term vision.
And, actually, the secret ingredient is standardization, in these things.
So, this standard should have a couple of features,
support news feeds, communities, IM, chatroom presences, know who's online, profiles,
video conferencing security, bridges to the Web.
And then it will be real-time.
And, 1 minute?
This protocol actually exists, it's called XMPP.
So the goal of the project is: - take XMPP implemented
- and doing a lot of innovation on top of the project
So, server-side it's a simple XMPP client, webserver, simple to install
(PHP, MySQL PostgreSQL)
And user-side, it's also super simple to use, you need simply a browser,
it's responsive, it's light, it's fast and is built actually for small communities.
There are pods all around the world.
You're really invited to deploy your own pods.
There is already ten thousands accounts on the official pod
30 languages
Debian packages coming soon
Thanks to the help of some people in this room.
And, that's it !
So if you want more information, everything is on the website,
you can join the chat room.
Or, the twitter.
[applause]
Thank you very much.
Next up is Thomas Lange, Mrfai, talking about dracut.
Today, I'm not talking about FAI but about dracut.
dracut is a replacement for initramfs which is used by most other distributions.
If I'm correct, only Ubuntu and Debian and derivatives are using initramfs-tools
All other distributions already moved to dracut.
Today I want to show how you can get an experience with dracut
without deinstalling initramfs-tools.
Ben Hutchings did some patches, I think two years ago, so it's possible.
What you have to do, there's a package called "dracut-core",
which does not conflict with initramfs-tools.
I have a virtual machine.
So, debian/fai…
On this machine, I will now install the dracut-core package
and that's it.
We still have one initrd.
And now I can say…
Oh no, first I have to copy the dracut version and then I can generate
a new initrd with dracut.
dracut uses the usual hooks or module system,
it does not use the hooks from the initramfs things but it already includes
a lot of hooks, so for example if you have a cryptsetup,
you do not need the hooks for initramfs-tools from the cryptsetup package
because dracut already includes this and a lot of other things.
After generating a new initrd, you update your grub and you see
we have now two entries in the grub.
One with the old initrd which was created by…
the default one is the initrd which is created by initramfs-tools
and here you have the boot entry for the new dracut initrd
and it boots up and works.
What we need is that more people are using it and giving it a try.
In your environment, on your hardware, does dracut work?
We had a discussion, like 5 years ago, if Debian…
When will Debian switch from initramfs-tools to dracut?
And still there's no real need because initramfs-tools works for everybody
but I think in the long term, we will switch it,
so please help us, write bug reports
or just give it a try, if it works for you or not.
That's it.
[Applause]