FUDCon Berlin Provides Venue for Security, Wireless Collaboration

At the recent Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon) in Berlin, held alongside the LinuxTag 2009 event, over 150 attendees gathered to teach, learn, and collaborate on subjects ranging from systems management best practices to user interface design. Attendees included developers, translators, security professionals, designers, and system administrators from around the globe and the Fedora community. The three-day event included two days of development featuring group-driven brainstorming, code sprints, and lecture sessions; and a dedicated day of over thirty technical and educational talks, in which the schedule and proceedings were organized directly on site by the participants themselves.

One group attending the FUDCon event was the Red Hat Security Response Team, which is made up of employees from eight different countries. During the event they collaborated on procedural revisions and were able to discuss current security issues of interest. FUDCon also hosted a Linux wireless mini-summit, attended by over a dozen upstream Linux developers representing various kernel wireless LAN driver and infrastructure component communities, related user applications, hardware vendors, and Fedora and other Linux distribution communities. The face-to-face involvement of hardware vendors helped expose the need for specific testing mode extensions. The group also explored the impact of current standards activities on Linux thanks to the attendance of a voting member of the IEEE 802.11 standards body. Finally, during the technical sessions, the group presented tutorial material that would allow contributors to participate in developing and improving open source wireless drivers.

You can’t put it better than Linux kernel wireless LAN maintainer and Red Hat engineer John Linville, who said, after the event: “Keeping these people working well together is key to further improvements and successful maintenance in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and the rest of the Linux community.”

Among the many speakers at FUDCon:

• Byte-Code solution architect Francesco Crippa and Red Hat’s 2008 RHCE of the Year award winner Jeroen van Meeuwen delivered a mini-track of topics on systems management using Cobbler, Koan, Puppet, Func, and Symbolic.
• Chitlesh Goorah conducted several sessions on the Fedora Electronics Lab and the future of low-cost, high-TCO open source tools in technical verticals.
• Fedora Engineering Manager Tom Callaway spoke on a variety of open source licensing and other legal issues.

To learn more about the proceedings in Berlin, FUDCon, and the Fedora Project, visit the Fedora Project wiki page for FUDCon Berlin 2009, at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Berlin_2009.