FrOSCon took place this year from 20 to 21 August 2022, a two-day event about Free Software and Open Source in Sankt-Augustin, Germany. FrOSCon has something very unique as a conference: it’s almost a large family. One reason is that for many attendees it has become a tradition to go there, building friendships, over 10 years or more. On top of that, it was the first FrOSCon after two years of the event being cancelled or remote-only.
Talking open-source in such an environment was a great opportunity for some developers of the Flatcar team to finally meet in real life and to talk about Flatcar at an in-person conference. In all, the team gave three talks:
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Zero-Touch Kubernetes: Vollautomatisierte Infrastruktur mit Flatcar Container Linux by Thilo Fromm (English: Fully automated infrastructure with Flatcar Container Linux)
This talk was a Flatcar overview (in German) to introduce main concepts of the Flatcar OS like A/B partitioning, immutability, etc.
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Deploy software with systemd-sysext by Kai Lüke
In this presentation, Kai demonstrated how useful systemd-systext can be to deploy software on any machine running systemd.
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An overview of Ignition - a one-time provisioning software by Mathieu Tortuyaux
An overview followed by a deep-dive of provisioning instances with Ignition from the initramfs, illustrated with Flatcar examples.
We also got the opportunity to attend great talks, like the one from Guido Günther : “Is there hope for Linux on smartphones?”. The achievements to have working smartphones with an almost-mainline kernel and a GNOME-based stack are very promising. However, major hurdles are lack of hardware support in mainline Linux due to patched vendor kernels being used normally. Other problems span things like camera support and VoLTE, but even with all this there is a gap to the current ecosystem of proprietary apps for Android which don’t work well on Linux phones as they have to be run via Waydroid. Another talk we attended was about LibreOffice and WASM or how LibreOffice has been compiled to WASM to run into a regular web browser. This overview shows the challenges and the solutions over two years of work. The whole experience was very impressive and inspiring, especially when you see the result: LibreOffice Writer and LibreOffice Calc running from a web browser.
More than the talks, it was a great moment of exchanges with the open-source community during the off-time, like the social event or the lunches.
A special kudos to the volunteers and organizers of this event; everything was really well oiled. The Flatcar team really enjoyed this moment from both perspectives: as speaker and as attendee.
Recordings:
Big-up to the Computer Chaos Club for uploading in less than one day all the recordings ( Relive! – FrOSCon 2022 Streaming (ccc.de) ):
