Fedora 21 Release Party Chongqing was successfully held in Go On Cafe on Jan 24, 2015. This was the first time for Fedora Release Party to be in Chongqing to my knowledge. It was organized as a joint event with Chongqing LUG’s monthly meetup. There were about 15 attendees. Most of them were from Chongqing, while I was from Beijing, and another guy was from Chengdu. This was also my first time to visit Chongqing.
The event started around 14:00 and was hosted by Linjie Lyu from Chongqing University. She asked everyone to have a self-introduction first. It turned out we had more or less equal number of company employees and university students. Among them, we had hillwood, an openSUSE contributor, who live broadcast the whole event on weibo.
The first talk was given by Lingyu Zhu. He introduced QEMU and KVM virtualization, and talked about memory balloon and virtual machine migration in details. He demonstrated the common usage of QEMU command line interface a lot during his talk. At last, he revealed the hacks to boot up an ancient system, Red Hat Linux 6.2, with a modern Linux kernel (v3.16) in QEMU.
Then, I talked about "What’s New in Fedora?". I didn’t find current Fedora users in the audience, but some of them had past experience of using Fedora. I introduced the main characteristics of Fedora, the Fedora.next proposal, Fedora 21 features, and Fedora Chinese User Group. In the Q&A session, we discussed about stability of desktop distribution, the role of Fedora Server, and so on.
Next, hillwood gave a lightning talk on his view of "open source". He argued that "open source" is not just "making the source code public". It also means the way of development. In particularly, It means the awareness of making the software compatible among multiple Linux distributions.
At the event we had free coffee. I also distributed the Fedora DVDs and stickers. After the event, we had a group dinner, and enjoyed ourselves while discussing various topics.
Before ending the report, I would like to share some of my observations about open source in Chongqing. Compared with Beijing, the community size is smaller in Chongqing. Part of the reason is that there are fewer IT companies with open source business. At the same time, the current companies find it difficult to find suitable employees and they often need to train new employees themselves first. Besides, there are also a similar phenomenon with Beijing: the business and/or university districts lie in distant locations. The community needs to shift between different venues to reach out to newcomers, and people need to travel some time to get together. However, there are also good news. Chongqing LUG has regular meetups, and there are active members organizing events and promoting free and open source. We think it is beneficial to involve more interested students and more outside speakers in the future.
Click here for the Chinese report by Chongqing LUG and more photos!
GAL (grep art life) 