Lightning Talks

Lightning talks of the Minidebconf Hamburg 2018

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]

Next up is TecKids talking about
their organization.

Ok, those of you who attended the
Skolelinux talk already heard about TecKids.

I want to give a few details about what
else we do.

TecKids is a non-profit organization based
in Germany, but

we're working internationally and

we are completely centered around free
software and we do basically everything

concerning free software in education in
the context of children and adolescents,

young people.

More than 50% of our active members
are minors.

There's an "s" missing, sorry.

They are of course not minor but they are
minors.

Sorry, kids, if you are watching this.

They're minors and we are a fully
democratic organization

like in the FOSS spirit

and the most important thing is that we
get children involved with all the parts

of the organization, both operational and
tutoring and workshops

and working with free software projects,
giving presentations.

Normally some children would be here but
as this conference was right in the middle of

schooltime, this was not so easy.

So what do we do.

First of all, we want to get children
interested in programming, in coding,

in technical stuff and also in free software.

This we do by running youth programs
at free software conferences

like the FrOSCon where normally around
100 to 120 children attend and

use Debian and all that cool stuff and
learn what they can do with it.

We do peer learning, so those children
who already know many things and

are very interested, they start tutoring
other children.

Of course we have non-tech fun together,
we are outside,

there is a social program with staying
over night, having a barbecue and

all that stuff that helps building
a community.

Those who are even more interested can get
actively involved in preparing workshops,

organizing events, preparing talks, looking
at open source projects,

helping others get a free messenger
instead of WhatsApp,

working on HowTo, how to spread the word
among youths and all of that.

And then