TL;DR: What a great DebConf! I managed to recharge my Debian batteries, and my talks / BoF sessions all went fine. Already looking forward to DebConf in Japan next year!

The evening before DebCamp started, we had a nice bbq (we taught some locals to call it a “braai” at an organiser’s house and went for a walk around the river as the sun set. It was a very peaceful lead-in to DebCamp.

• I set up and sent out the call for Forky desktop artwork:
  • https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/910906f3-7ce4-4884-a49f-4b4a5975471b@debian.org
• Had many nice discussions about various Debian topics with all the Debian people around. It’s really fun being around people who are natural problem solvers who care deeply about both technical and social issues. At one point Jonas told me “Holy shit, these people are motivated!” and I appreciate that so much too!

Debian LTS wine

• Most of my DebCamp was dedicated to preparing for my demo and main talk that followed at DebConf.
• Sadly, we had no loopy this year, I just didn’t have the time, and the people who stepped up to help last year were either overwhelmed with other issues or couldn’t make it. I’ll try to make it happen again for next year by kicking it off long before DC27.

View of Santa Fe city from hotel

In this talk I do a very quick comparison of system installers based on my experience with them. It’s hard to directly compare all of them, since there are so many, and each have their own niche that they attempt to satisfy.

I also introduce Yasi – my attempt to answer the question of whether we could build a universal installer, which can also better cover advanced installations, automated installations and niche setups.

It’s very early days for the project, and I didn’t quite feel ready to share the code with the world, but it was nice that I did a quick demo where I could install a Debian system… and the resulting system actually booted up. *phew*.

This is also going to be my main focus for the mid-term future. I aim to have all the basic partitioning options working by the time Debian 14 (Forky) is released, and by the time Debian 15 is released, I have a long list of features that I aim to have working. So, my timeline for having something that’s generally useful is around a year from now, and in around 3 years it should be a fully fledged installer that should cover a very large amount of Debian use cases and architectures.

For the day trip, we did a tour across Santa Fe, visited Constitución de la Nación Argentina, had lunch where we tried various dishes based on local fish from the river, and then went on a boat ride on the river.

Funding in Free Software Projects: I initially registered this BoF because I’m increasingly concerned about how upstreams are asking for donations in their software. I increased the scope to talk about funding in free software in general. It followed Marga’s talk about funding, which focussed more about how developers are funded in general. We didn’t dive very deep into this, but we certainly need some further discussion (and action) on this within Debian.

Debian Social Team: My most important issue for this team is a carry-over from last year, I want to set up barman (packaged in Debian) for live postgres syncing for our larger databases. For the smaller DBs, doing a daily dump is quite cheap. But for Matrix, it’s very expensive in terms if i/o and CPU, so it would be ideal to do less regular complete dumps and use live replication for the first line of redundancy instead.

Images Team: I wasn’t initially planning to say much during this session, I have some ideas to reduce both size and count of images, without losing any benefits, but I don’t have any work to show for that yet. I ended up talking a lot more than I anticipated, the topics covered were quite good and representative of the current state of Debian images built. I don’t have time to create a full summary, so I suggest checking the etherpad / video recording if you’re interested.

Some more wine variety during the conference dinner

Debianites in the main hacklab

I’m spending two days in Rosario before I head home. Exploring a bit, catching up with sleep, finishing this blog post, signing keys and exploring some ideas I made note of during DebConf.

It was a little surreal not being part of any DebConf team for the first time ever, I’ve just been too focussed on getting Yasi ready for my talk (no regrets!). I hope to be more involved again next year, in the meantime, I’m very grateful to everyone who has made this happen, you did a stellar job! I hope to see many of you again next year in Japan!

Thank you to all the people who made DebConf26 possible! The DebConf organisation team, the Debian Video Team, our speakers, volunteers, and attendees, and of course our sponsors. Would you like to join for organising the next DebConf? If so visit https://wiki.debian.org/DebConf/27 and contact the DebConf team. #debian #debconf26 #debconf #santafe #debianargentina

Great new feature in the latest Signal app. If you enable disappearing messages the meta data of calls and missed calls gets deleted as well.

I know this was a long standing goal for them, but the engineering behind it took time.
#Privacy @signalapp

FUN FACT: I offer send-in service for coreboot installation, and I have done for many years: https://minifree.org/product/installation-service.html

It is ostensibly a Libreboot installation service, but I provide service for all other coreboot distros as well - for example, I can provide MrChromebox installation on Chromebooks.

I want to expand my send-in service, so I've re-written the page to more clearly explain what it offers. I do lots of custom jobs for customers all the time, via this service.

If you have a coreboot-compatible device, I can service it. Where feasible, I also have it added to Libreboot for future send-ins, otherwise I install whichever coreboot firmware the customer prefers, e.g. Heads, MrChromebox, Dasharo.

I normally just sell computers with Libreboot pre-installed. Libreboot provides better security and flexibility compared to proprietary BIOS/UEFI firmware; it's the same argument as using Linux instead of Windows.

I wish to expand the use of send-ins, so I hope the new page is clear.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@gamingonlinux/116958382115564493

So @mozilla shut down their own Mastodon instance, don't post on their mastodon.social account anymore either, have no official Firefox presence on the Fediverse anymore (besides developer-focused accounts @firefoxwebdevs and @firefoxnightly, which do a great job but serve a different audience), and then pull shit like this. What an utter disappointment indeed.

#Firefox #Mozilla #MozillaFirefox

RT: https://mastodon.social/users/gamingonlinux/statuses/116958382115564493

🌐 Websites vanish. 📰 News archives go offline. 📚 Textbooks are withdrawn. 🏛️ Government reports are deleted.

What happens when the historical record starts disappearing?

The Internet Archive and the Our Future Memory movement explore why "vanishing culture" is becoming a political crisis in THE POLITICAL THREATS OF VANISHING CULTURE AND THE NEED TO PROTECT OUR FUTURE MEMORY.

📖 Read or download the paper here ⬇️
https://journals.library.wustl.edu/pollib/article/id/9287/

#VanishingCulture #memoryhole

openSUSE Seeking Additional Corporate Sponsors

While openSUSE is closely aligned with SUSE as a company, they aren't the exclusive sponsor of this free and open-source Linux distribution with its rolling-release Tumbleweed and Leap stable releases. AMD has been a longtime major supporter of openSUSE and the Fastly content delivery company has been another platinum sponsor too besides SUSE. There are also various other lower-tier sponsors while today the openSUSE Projec…
https://www.phoronix.com/news/openSUSE-Needs-More-Sponsors

Biblically accurate VLC player

"spherical bastard"

🔧 Mainline Linux is getting NPU support for the Rockchip RK3576, thanks to serious reverse-engineering work by Ga Hing Woo (the chip's TRM doesn't even document the compute registers involved)!

-> Byte-exact int8 convolution achieved
-> Chained-layer stalls documented as an honest negative result, not hidden
-> Tested on Radxa ROCK 4D: Llama-3.2-1B ~13 tok/s, MobileNet ~169 fps

👇 (1/2)