As has been traditions for some time, this year too saw another wonderful MiniDebConf in Hamburg where some of our members attended. The week-long event consisted of plenty of hacking, discussions, workshop and presentations.
But let’s start from the beginning.
As there is only ever one (big) DebConf per year and (local) Debian people still have the desire to meet and hack, they self-organize smaller events for a couple of days or - in this case - a full week to exchange ideas, fix bugs, give presentations or just generally work on Debian.
The event took place at the cooperative fux eG, located in a historic military baracks building.
More precisely most of it took place in the seminar rooms from dock europe (one of about 250 parties of the cooperative).
And if you registered early enough you could even have a room on site, including breakfast at somewhat hackerfriendly serving times from 08:30-10:00 ;)
During the week three seminar rooms were available to us which were split into a small silent and a big noisy hacklab.
This year, one of the two available 4 person rooms was fully occupied by Phosh.mobi e.V. members. In total 5 of our members participated. And there was much rejoicing.
So it begins
All of us arrived on Monday for the full week. If my headcount isn’t off, we were already around 25 to 30 people at the end of the day!
The first daily stand up meeting took place and led to some interesting discussions around using openQA for testing Phosh/BengalOS images.
The (final) idea would be to automatically test the freshly baked immutable BengalOS images in openQA with a clear focus on the first boot experience.
In the evening, some of us went to play ping pong in the evening @ hafenklang.com as was strongly recommended by h01ger \o/ And again, there was much rejoicing.
So it continues
Continuing on discussions from the previous day, on tuesday fil managed to automatically select Phosh as the graphical desktop environment in the debian installer (netinst) to test the login flow in and starting of the tour on first login openQA.
Mobian pages: User friendliness
On Wednesday David and others brainstormed on the topic of user friendliness of Mobian’s landing page and later in the week proposed an update in the process.
But it did not stop there! The Mobian wiki also got edited to be made more friendly to navigate.
You may know about Phosh running on all sorts of devices, but did you know Phosh can also be installed in a bar?
In the evening, we had the great pleasure to throw a party for Debianites at the local bar/club in the basement of the fine establishment.
Slot was very kind to let us use their premises and operate music and bar by ourselves like the responsible adults that we are \o/
During the peak, around 40% of the conference were present and everything got properly cleaned and closed up waaay into the night.
How much cheese is too much cheese?
On Thursday there was the traditional Cheese & Wine Party which took place in the evening at the cantina from Fux und Ganz. Thanks once more for letting us enjoy our food and drinks at their place! Thanks is also due to the cheese gremlins which prepared everything for a lovely evening!
Day Trip: Harbor anniversary edition
In the afternoon we had the mobile installfest. The idea is: You bring a phone that’s capable of running Mobian or postmarketOS and we flash it together and help ironing out the kinks.
During the installfest we left two fully satisfied customers, who installed Mobian on their Librem 5 and their Fairphone 5.
Sadly, we did not manage to successfully boot a OnePlus 6 with LUKS encryption, as the disk unlocking mechanism seems to be somewhat broken (which we should investigate).
We also updated kernels on a different OnePlus 6 which started a picture taking frenzy.
Of course, the scientific method requires some rigour and so we decided on the new photometric reference picture which was taken in a fully reproducible environment.
In the evening the day trip took place. The first part of the day trip consisted of a boat trip around the harbour.
There was quite some commotion as the weekend celebrated the 837th anniversary of Hamburgs harbour.
Afterwards we went to the Miniaturwunderland, which was also pretty nice.
The first day of talks
Saturday saw the first round of presentations, featuring a diverse range of topics, from Go packaging, onboarding, reproducible builds to LSP-like features for packaging and protecting websites using Anubis.
Surely there’s something for everyone!
A couple of us had a walk around town, performing our civic duty at a protest.
The second day of talks
On Sunday the final round of presentations was scheduled and as you can see in the following images, we managed to hijack the stage with some subliminal messages!
Manuel presented an introduction to immutable OS images at 14:00 and a little later at 16:00 Evangelos gave a short talk on Phosh: “Dispelling illusions” edition; or how I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Debian on my mobile device{,s}
Time to say goodbye (korean style)
On the last day, we said our goodbyes and enjoyed a very nice korean BBQ.
Everyone of us made it safely back home and now we’re already looking forward to coming back to Hamburg for more in the next two years and beyond!
Summary
It was a very eventful, varied week! From lots of Debian infused conversations, through install fests, presentations given and all the work accomplished to the really amazing food @ cantina! We’re happy having been granted the opportunity to meet both familiar and new faces.
Finally, we want to thank everyone who made this yet another memorable MiniDebConf Hamburg. To the organizers, the video team and all the other volunteers: you rock!