I am pleased to say it is the one of the largest Debconf group photos yet with 263 people and 86 Mpix resolution. It took 10 separate images to stitch it together (from 44 images taken) and 15 fixes of stitching bugs deemed RC, 4 bugs were noted post-release, deemed minor. Most noticeable is on very skinny leg in the front row .

Short links: http://is.gd/dc11group http://is.gd/dc11names

Let me explain the technicalities.

In all modern laptops (such as the new and sexy Dell XPS 15z and many, many others) NVidia Optimus is implemented as follows – there is an NVidia card and an Intel card, all display outputs are connected to the Intel card, when the user wants more 3D power, the NVidia card is powered on and it renders an image into a framebuffer in the video memory of the Intel card which is the responsible for actually outputing that framebuffer to a display.

Currently in Linux if you are using NVidia drivers the Intel card is left uninitialised, your session starts up fine on the NVidia card, it outputs the resulting picture onto the video memory of the Intel card, but … the Intel card is not configured in any way and so it does not do anything further with this picture and the display stays black.

The alternative is to use Intel video card driver and then the NVidia card stays there in your laptop as dead weight. It does not even power down (out of the box) so you have all the power consumption and none of the functionality. There is some support from NVidia to using that card for CUDA computing purposes in such situation, but nothing else.

After years of neglect and statements from NVidia that Optimus support in Linux is impossible and thus not even planned, one individual stepped up and made it work. Yes, the solution is hacky, yes it is a hassle to set up and make it work, but this is the first glimmer of hope for actually working Optimus on Linux. Over the last couple years the share of laptops with Optimus has greatly increased – almost all laptops that have NVidia video cards have Optimus now. This Bumblebee project is currently our only real hope on making Linux work on these laptops.

This project needs our support in a multitude of ways:
1) help test the actual project on different hardware;
2) look at the code and help improve on it, both the core code and system integration, simplify it so that everyone can install and use this;
3) figure out how we can integrate that support into distributions, so that it becomes possible to have working Linux out-of-the-box on Optimus hardware;
4) pressure NVidia more to provide official Optimus support on Linux (at least in always-on-NVidia mode, without breaking Bumblebee along the way).

Martin has already showed the superiority of open source by implementing something that NVidia considered to be too hard to do, let’s show the power of our community to push such solutions to production quality.

In light of all this, I really dug deep into all possible options and found an option that is far more fun and relaxing for me and almost the same price. So I will be travelling to Paris on the morning of July 16th, then staying overnight there (never been in Paris before!), then take a late morning flight to Zagreb where I’ll be around noon (plenty of time to get to Banja Luka) and then on the final day of the conference I can got to Zagreb at any time, stay there overnight (never been to Zagreb too!) and around noon next day fly back home via Budapest (just a 2 hour break there). This way I will get to see two more cities, save me a lot of stress and also not bother the organizers too much.

P.S. I must say thank you Accenture for paying for my plane tickets.

We can draw two conclusions from this:

1. Debian Planet is far more popular than Debconf info or Debian-related hashtags on Twitter/Identi.ca. It could be estimated that the Debian Planet is 50-100 times more popular.
2. Readers of Debian Planet read the posted articles with a delay. It looks like most will have read an article after 6-7 days, but there might also be a tail, I will kee an eye on that over the next weeks

I thought it might be interesting to people

Note: Only 14 blank spots left in the group photo faces page! Let’s get the hunt on and finish it!

Please add your name and names of people you recognise here. Update: 14 people left!

The rest of my DebConf10 photos are in my DebConf10 Flickr set. There will still be a few photos from today uploaded to that set tomorrow morning, but it is almost complete. Hint: it also contains a video of DPL pitch and video of MakerBot working.

Update: All photos are up and labelled now. Enjoy!

But about the first half of the Debcamp week there are things that are as usual and there are things that are not.

Let’s start with the usual bits: more people arriving every day, evening parties are getting more and more fun and wild (or so people say) and the Internet and power at the hacklabs magically becomes more and more reliable day by day, the cabling mess grows organically trying to spread out evenly and not overload any individual socket, extension cords with non-local plugs appear and spread the load some more, people stress out, volunteer, crash out and repeat. All in all nothing can stop the freight train of few hundred Debian developers determined to have fun. With out own DFSG-free definition of fun. (But this year we appear to be running very close to the edge on volunteers – if we run out of those, there will be a train-wreck, so please volunteer!)

Now off to the unusual stuff.

The City is … well … it is cool and very, very impressive. It is not terribly different to me at least – I am used to such structure of the city: grid based layout of the downtown city (with some parks) and then branching out to separate, but different across-the-river districts and then sprawling out to slightly chaotic suburbs. Riga is very much like New York in the design. The difference is that New York is 10-20 times larger: the areas are 10 times larger, the buildings are 3-4 times higher on average, the streets are 2-3 times wider and yet have more traffic and there are far, far more shops, shows and restaurants. Also there is the subway. It is a great thing in that it hides the size of the city – take a bus downtown once, to find out what I mean – it takes ages to drive the distance that takes 20 minutes on the subway. I like this city, I am getting a feeling, that I could live here without much problem for me. So far I’ve only had this feeling in Riga and Berlin.

On the other hand this is USA. I’ve so far only encountered one bad thing about it, but it is a pretty big one – food. Basically all food that I’ve tried so far in the USA has been crap. It was tasty – salt, sugars and fat took care on my brain thinking it’s food, but underneath that it was pretty crap: there was no texture, no content, no soul. The John Jay cafeteria where we are eating lunch and dinner is better than the most other options, because it is an all-you-can-eat buffet where you can choose your poison and it was also the place where I had the best piece of food in USA so far – a slice of pepperoni pizza, that had a bit of taste behind the fat. Also, surprisingly, the fast food options (McDonalds, Burger King, …) are better than the equivalents in Europe, far better. In fact the fast food is cheap and in some cases tastes better than ‘regular’ food, so there is no wonder why people might prefer it in some situations. So it is easy to see how people just accept shoving bland fast food or bland all-you-can-eat food into their mouths and not think much about it and thus become fat and put undue stress on their health. I expect the average weight of Debian developers to increase by 5 kg by the end of the conference. If you want to prove me wrong, running with bubulle would help you a lot with that.

Events downtown. New York is a huge city with a lot of events going on every day, so everyone should be able to find something of interest for them. For me it was the free tickets for tapeings of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I got into both of those and for me The Colbert Report was by far the better experience. For one you can not get into Daily Show without a ticket (some tickets show up on the web site on the morning of the shoot around 11am), while 18 people from the stand-by list at Colbert Report got in. At The Daily Show you stand in a live line with ticket holders in one line and stand-by line separate. If you have tickets and arrive around 3pm you should be fine – any later than that and you risk to be standing outside even with a ticket. You find that out around 4.30pm when they hand out physical tickets – you have one, you get in. If not you might rush over to Colbert Report where a more humane system is used – a staffer takes down your name and email on a numbered list and then you can walk around until 5.30pm then they let the ticket holders in and after that call the names of stand-by people that get in. The Colbert Report studio is brighter, more colourful and closer to the action, also it is very rare that cameras block the view from the audience (which is common on The Daily Show). It might have also been my luck when I got on the most boring The Daily Show episode I can remember, ever. The best joke was a woman asking John is she could get a ticket for her friend in August. The warm-up act and crowd control at The Colbert Report was also way better: Colbert staff was hyper, security was ever-present, warm-up was funnier and very engaging (he grilled me for several minutes and I replied making the audience laugh very hard explaining that Latvia was like India of Eastern Europe in regards to IT exports) and Colbert himself was very gracious talking to us out-of-character before the show for a good 10 minutes.

Location, location, location. The talk rooms and event rooms and hacklabs are spread out across multiple buildings and there is a lot of other activities going on in those buildings besides Debconf, so moving between place might be confusing for the first day or two. Also the rooms are quite dark – that might cause a noise problem for me and the video team as we’ll have to up the sensitivity settings on our gear. The video team is working on fixing that by throwing a bit more light on to the speakers. Elevators are wicked fast, but can also be confusing, because the ground floor is on a different number for different buildings – it can be G, 1 or even 4. Usually on campus there is a star next to the level with the exit.

The dorms. I am in the Carman building and it looks like its interior has not been updated since it was built – large ceramic bricks with very visible gaps (for the interior walls), raise-to-open windows, huge aircon fans that take up the whole bottom of the window, plumbing from the 60ies (at least). The security is weird – on one hand you have to give your room card to the guard when entering the building, but on the other hand the room cleaning crew can simply forget to close your door after they are done. Like this Thursday I returned to the dorm just before lunch only to find the door of my room open. No one was around and nothing was missing, but it’s still worrying.

In any case I am steadily uploading photos from Debconf 10 to my Flickr page and new stuff should show up every day.

First of all I got my company (Accenture) pay for the whole thing, so I did not have to worry about sponsorship queue (but instead I must gather and deliver them back some knowledge gained from the conference – should be easy). I also managed to get a direct flight – there is a weekly flight Tashkent-Riga-New York on Sundays and I got a ticket for that both ways. This took many hours off the travel time and reduced the stress a ton. Then I also did all the prudent travelling things: mostly reading the New York page on Wikitravel. This told me (among other things) what metro line to take to get the best view of the city. And for luggage I took a backpack (for the laptop and walking around) and a roller (for the clothes). I learned a lot from the “Up in the air” movie, it really teaches one how to take stress out of travel.

This went very well in the beginning – I took a bus to the airport early, checked in, breezed trough security and then waited and waited. The boarding only started half an hour after we were scheduled to depart. But I can not complain, because the flight attendant called my name (among a few others) just before boarding and changed my ticket – I was bumped up to business class . It has been many years since I’ve flown a regular (non-budget) airline and now first time ever in the business class! We got regular class meals, but at least we got to sit in the big chairs with lots of leg room. It was great! I bought a paper book (from Charles Stross) to read during the flight, because that is the only thing you can do during take-off and landing and I had some stuff to listen to in my iPhone. I tried sleeping and I think I managed to kill a couple hours that way too. It sure helped combat jet lag later on.

When I arrived, I had my immigration and customs forms filled out. Latvia is on the USA Visa Waiver program, so I just had to fill out a form online prior to the trip to get a permission to enter USA. I only had one printout of the Waiver confirmation page and my airline took that before giving me a boarding pass, so I had no paper copy to give to the guy at the USA border, but he did not even ask for it – he only took the two forms I filled out, scanned my passport, took my fingerprints (all fingers) and a photo. Then he gave me back the customs for (stamped) and I could go get my luggage. After that it was just a matter of walking trough customs and giving the customs official the pre-filled and stamped customs form. I was not stopped further.

The AirTrain was a bit confusing – you just get on the AirTrain and go where you need to go, you actually pay at the place where AirTrain connects to metro, so when you are coming from the airport you are actually paying ($5) when you are exiting the AirTrain system. There are plenty of AirTrain people that will give you an AirTrain ticked for $5 cash right there or you can use a machine to get it (where you can also pay with a card). The machines also take AmEx, but you must know the PIN code, if your don’t know the PIN of you AmEx card (like I don’t know the PIN of my corporate AmEx) you can only buy MetroCards at news stands, but there you will not find the unlimited ride tickets – only 5 or 10 ride tickets are available.

Next I screwed up a bit and thus got a bit lost in the New York metro system. The Wikitravel recommends to take the AirTrain to Jamaica station and from there take J or Z line into the city for the best views. I went to Jamaica and got into the first metro train that came on to the platform. Unfortunately, that was the E line train and it does not cross with J or Z lines after that, so I was stuck. To complicate the situation E line is under repair, so after a few stops the trains diverted to the F line and I had to scramble to figure out where to get out to get to the 1 line where Columbia University is. I ended up spending more than an hour in the metro, but I got there in the end.

So I emerge from the 116th street metro station directly in front of the campus entrance gate and … it starts raining. A thunderstorm swept across New York as soon as I stepped outside the metro station, so I took shelter a the side of the building. It kept raining. After a few minutes decided that I don’t want to wait any more, so I put all my electronics into my backpack and went towards the dorm where my room was. The rain was warm, people around me were playing and running around in the wet grass, it was fun.

The guard showed me where to go to check in. It was really simple – sign here, here is you magnetic stripe key, have fun. And the room was just as spartan – bed, desk, chair, closet, bathroom and a large fan under the window. The first night I did not know that I could actually turn that fan down, so I slept to the sound of full fan blasting, much like on the airplane. The dorm looks ancient – it looks like it was build in the 60s and never changed since then. I mean, I’ve lived in worse places, but people would at least change wall sockets or faucets or ceiling paint every other decade or so. The newest things here were the magnetic locks on the doors and a TV and a mini fridge in the hallway.

After dropping my things I went off to the Mudd building across the campus to check in with people in the hacklab. It was just starting to take shape, but many great and familiar people were already there. It was like walking into a family home – same warm welcome smiles and that great feel of belonging to the group.

After I quick chat I went off downtown. The plan was that I left my old Canon 400D camera back at home and that I would buy a new Canon 550D here in New York on arrival. Unfortunately I underestimated the travel time on subway and by the time I got back downtown most shops where already closed. I got to checking out a Best Buy and was told there that they don’t have 550D in stock. Next morning I went for a full scale search – B&H Photo Video store, J&R Express, another BestBuy – none of them had the Canon 550D (aka T2i) in stock in a body-only configuration. BestBuy had a few sets with the kit lens, but I did not want paying 100$ extra for something I already have. The last option was Adorama and I got lucky – I nabbed the last 550D they had and it was body-only.

Now I was back, with a camera in my hands and the Debconf10 could really begin!

As I work for Accenture now, I got them to pay for the plane tickets and also spring for the ‘Professional’ registration, so more people can attend. I am very happy, and very grateful to the company and to the managers here in Riga office for being so very supportive. It is refreshing to see that even a large corporation can be quite nimble.

I hope I can get on a direct Riga – New York flight (there actually is one, once a week, by Uzbekistan Airways) which would be a wicked cool way to save travel time and worries. This might even be faster end-to-end than last year going to Spain (via Frankfurt). Now I only need to replace my passport with the new biometric one, to qualify for USA Visa Waiver and I’ll be good to go

27. martā LU Linux centrā notiks divi pasākumi vienā – Ubuntu Global Bug Jam Latvijas daļa un installfests. Global Bug Jam ir pasākums, kurā piedalīties ir aicināti interesenti, speciālisti, studenti, lai meklētu kļūdas Ubuntu Lucid Lynx testēšanas versijā. Cilvēki, kas grib uzzināt par Ubuntu Linux, vai kuri grib atrisināt kādu konkrētu problēmu ar Ubuntu Linux tiek aicināti nākt uz šī pasākuma otro daļu no pulksten 14:00 līdz 16:00. Pasākuma būs kafija un bulciņas ar Accenture atbalstu.

Ubuntu Global Bug Jam ir globāls pasākums, kura mērķis ir iepazīstināt programmētājus un tulkotājus ar rīkiem, kas tiek lietoti, lai labotu problēmas Ubuntu operētājsistēmā un arī izlabot pēc iespējas lielāku skaitu problēmu īsā laikā. Izstrādātāji, kas grib labot Ubuntu problēmas vai iemācīties kā labot Ubuntu problēmas, tiek aicināti ierasties 12:00 un palikt līdz 16:00.

Installfest pasākuma sadaļā tiek aicināti visi esošie Ubuntu lietotaji, kuriem ir kādas konkrētas problēmas un arī cilvēki, kas tikai vēl interesējas par Ubuntu Linux. Ja jums ir konkrēta problēma ar Ubuntu Linux ir ieteicams atnest uz pasākumu savu datoru, kurā šo problēmu var atkārtot, lai pasākumā esošie programmētāji varētu noteikt šīs problēmas iemeslu un palīdzētu no novērst. Installfests sāksies 14:00 un turpināsies līdz 16:00.

Ubuntu ir bezmaksas, uz Linux balstīta pilna apjoma operētājsistēma jebkuram personālajam datoram, serverim un portatīvajai iekārtai. Tās standarta komplektā iekļautas visas nepieciešamās programmas, lai strādātu ar tekstiem, attēliem, elektronisko pastu un Internetu, kā arī jūs varat instalēt papildus programmatūru dažādiem nolūkiem. Pasaulē to šobrīd jau lieto vairāk kā 8 miljoni cilvēku, un to legāli bez maksas var lietot gan mājās, gan komerciālās un nekomerciālās organizācijās.

LU Linux Centrs ir izveidots Latvijas Universitātes Datorikas fakultātē. Linux Centra darbības mērķi ir: popularizēt atvērtā pirmkoda (Open Source) programmatūras, tai skaitā, Linux operētājsistēmas un citu atvērto tehnoloģiju iespējas un priekšrocības; piedalīties LU studiju procesā un īstenot lietišķo IKT pētījumu projektus, tajos izmantojot un attīstot atvērtās tehnoloģijas; sekmēt APP pieejamību Latvijā un pasaulē.