If you contribute to an open-source community, there will be an "opportunity" that you will represent the community at a conference. You're expected to staff the booth and talk to people about the software.

For some people, it looks like you are traveling and having fun. I have news for you. It's not like that.
We are going to see some tips on how to survive booth duty.

1. Contact the booth manager

If you're not the booth manager (usually you're not), then you need to contact him/her before you travel. This person is in charge of shipping all the swag to the exhibition-conference hall at the right time, getting everything put together, and taking things down afterward. Usually, this person organizes the shifts at the booth. So you have to check when you can have your break, ask if there is a special "strategy" to promote, etc.

2. Clothes

Make sure with the booth manager if there is a dress code (so you need to carry a suit). If not, then make sure about the same T-shirt. Wear a comfortable top (T-shirt or hoodie) with the project's logo. It's good for the project that when you'll have a break or when you go for a walk to check other booths, you "advertise" the project. There might be people to see the logo and ask you, so you can point them to your booth.
Carry with you another T-shirt just in case of an emergency, so you can change (also carry a deodorant).
Regarding pants, wear also something comfortable. Jeans are fine but if it's summer, then a short is OK.

3. Shoes

Wear comfy shoes. This is the most important tip. You are going to spend a lot of time standing up. Most of the conferences are 2 days long, so you're going to be getting very sore feet. A pair of shoes with cushioned soles are the perfect choice for the situation. If there is a dress code, then be sure to wear high heels during your central presentation and then have a second pair of shoes for your booth duty.

4. Help with setup/breakdown

If you're not an employee of the open-source project company, then usually the company behind the project (or the companies that sponsor your open source project), paid part of your expenses. They expect you to stuff the booth but also to help them set up everything before and break down everything after the conference. Having good "relation" with the booth manager means also helps with these activities. Ask questions like: "Where would you like this?" or "May I carry anything?". Be different from the people who turned up two minutes before the show was due to start and made ill-advised remarks about the sign not being entirely straight on the front desk.

5. Don't over-police the swag

Swag means "give-aways". Usually, swag is a discussion opener. If the visitor is aware of your project, then he/she wants to get stickers for the laptop. Let them get more than one, because they usually get some for people back home, for people who cannot attend the conference, or for LUG members. Experienced marketers realize they'll just need to box everything up at the end and ship it back, so they might as well give as much of it away as possible.

6. Save some swag for the second day

Most conferences have the majority of visitors during the first day. Usually, they get most (sometimes all) of the swag. The project run out of some swag the second day. That's good because, during the breakdown, there are fewer items to ship back to the company's office. But it's bad because the visitors on the second day, won't be able to get some swag. So save some for the second day (Pareto principle: let's say 80% the first day and 20% the second day). If you have some swag left before the breakdown, take a selection of your best swag around to other booths on the floor and see what you can swap. Your project's swag may seem utterly useless to you, but there's a good chance (particularly if your marketing people know their thing) that other people might want it and will be willing to give you some of their swag in return.

7. You need a big suitcase

In other words, you need an empty big suitcase. Why? Because you'll get swag from other projects or even from your project to use back home, to share with other open-source friends-communities who couldn't attend where you've been.

Regarding how to behave at the booth, you can check the video from an openSUSE conference:


And another from my friend Jos:

The information below might fall into the "unsung heroes of openSUSE" category - we think it is clearly worth to be mentioned and getting some applause (not saying that every user should owe the author a beer at the next conference ;-).

• You are searching for a nice font for the next document?
• You want to install such a font directly via 1-click-install once you had a closer look?
• You want to know more about rendering or language information or the character set for a font you want to install?

Just have a look at https://fontinfo.opensuse.org/, which provides all these information for you + some more. Special thanks to Petr Gajdos, who maintains the page and the package with the same name since years.

So, today I got finally so tired of navigating (or explicitly stepping over) all the internal functions in gdb (you know, all the inline functions from STL containers, from Boost, from this pointer wrapper class, that string class) that I finally googled 'gdb skip system functions'. And guess what, it's been there since gdb 7.12, from 3 years ago, and it's almost trivial, just adding something like this to ~/.gdbinit:

skip -gfi /usr/include/*
skip -gfi /usr/include/*/*
skip -gfi /usr/include/*/*/*
skip -gfi /usr/include/*/*/*/*

 I feel so stu^H^H^Hproud for catching up only 3 years late.

These days, I came across spontaneous kiwi image build failures in a private OBS instance.
The images were SLES15-SP1, they had not been touched for quite some time, rebuilds were only triggered due to new packages in the update channel.
The error was grub2-install failing with the error message "not a directory".
Looking at the recent changes in the update repo showed no obvious reason (some python packages that had nothing to do with grub2-install), so I started to investigate...

... 3 days later, after following some detours, I finally found the issue.

grub2-install scans the installation device for filesystems, and probes all known (to grub2) fs types. The probe of "minix_be" fails fatally. Sometimes.

After building my own grub2 package with lots of debug-printf's, I finally found out, that the minix fs detection of grub2 is a little "fragile". It does the following (pseudo code):

• grub_mount_minix(device) || return "not minix fs"
• grub_minix_find_file("/") || fatal_error()

struct grub_minix_sblock         |struct grub_ext2_sblock
{                                |{
  grub_uint16_t inode_cnt;       |  grub_uint32_t total_inodes;
  grub_uint16_t zone_cnt;        |
  grub_uint16_t inode_bmap_size; |  grub_uint32_t total_blocks;
  grub_uint16_t zone_bmap_size;  |
  grub_uint16_t first_data_zone; |  grub_uint32_t reserved_blocks;
  grub_uint16_t log2_zone_size;  |
  grub_uint32_t max_file_size;   |  grub_uint32_t free_blocks;
  grub_uint16_t magic;           |  grub_uint32_t free_inodes;
};

As much as I like playing in the terminal, the jury is still out as to how much I like working with Cisco. To be as objective as possible, I need to tell myself that: 1, I am not familiar with the command set or how they like to do things so I must be open … Continue reading Configuring a Cisco switch from a Linux Terminal with Minicom →

This morning, while browsing the web, I wanted to listen to a Podcast from my laptop, and thought “Hey, can I stream this to our stereo?”. As it turns out, that’s rather easy to achieve, so I thought I’d share it here.
The media devices in our home are connected using Chromecasts, which are small dongles that allow playing media on them, meaning you can play for example a video from your phone on the projector in the living room: very convenient.

I didn’t know if that was easily achievable with audio from my Plasma/Linux laptop and a quick search turned up “pulseaudio-dlna” which adds Chromecast devices on the local networks as output devices.

On my KDE Neon laptop, it’s as easy as installing pulseaudio-dlna from the standard repositories and then starting “pulseaudio-dlna” from the commandline. Then, I can pick an output device from the panel popup and the audio stream changed to my stereo.

$ sudo apt install pulseaudio-dlna
[...]
$ sudo pulseaudio-dlna
[...]
Added the device "Stereo (Chromecast)".
[...]

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This has been a busy week when looking at the snapshots. Tumbleweed has received 6 fully tested snapshots that were published (0110, 0111, 0112, 0113, 0114 and 0115).

The most noteworthy updates there were:

• RPM 4.15.1
• Mozilla Firefox 72.0.1
• Mozilla Thunderbird 68.4.1
• KDE Applications 19.12.1
• KDE Plasma 5.17.5
• KDE Frameworks 5.66.0
• Linux kernel 5.4.10
• Kubernetes 1.17.0

That was quite a bunch of what was on the todo list of last week, but definitively not all of it and a few new things are already incoming again. Things currently being worked on or being shipped in the near future

• systemd 244 (Snapshot 0116+)
• Mesa 19..3.2 (also snapshot 0116+)
• Qt 5.14: we are awaiting some legal reviews. Tests by openQA have all passed
• Python 3.8: Salt seems to be the main blocker here, as it still relies on Tornado 4.x
• Removal of python 2

At the behest of people like Bryan Lunduke and DTLive on YouTube, I have started using LBRY more and last night I even uploaded a few test videos of my own. I would eventually like to put up some of my own tutorial videos.

With that said, LBRY has some serious issues. So, let’s be frank. LBRY has no rules against hardcore porn or if they do, they are not enforced. That’s fine, and I don’t care. It’s not hard to find porn on YouTube also. However if a porn channel doesn’t flag their own content as mature, then it will be in your search results and there’s no way right now to flag it yourself. The suggestions that I got in the help forum (aka the discord server) was to report it to the #report-spam room which I did. Will that result in these channels being told to reflag their content? Who knows. It seems a little iffy.

I realize that this is a startup and there is only so much time and energy to put into such things for a small team. I am rooting for them to make LBRY a great alternative to YouTube.

With all the talk of VPN (Virtual Private Network) services to keep you safe and my general lack of interest in the subject, I was talking to Eric Adams, my co-host on the DLN Xtend podcast about the subject. He was telling me that he was hesitant to recommend any service so he gave me … Continue reading Windscribe VPN on openSUSE →

When you host your own website on a Virtual Private Server or on a DigitalOcean droplet, you want to know if your website is down (and receive a warning when that happens). Plus it’s fun to see the uptime graphs and the performance metrics. Did you know these services are available for free?

I will compare 3 SaaS vendors who offer uptime performance monitoring tools. Of course, you don’t get the full functionality for free. There are always limitations as these vendors like you to upgrade to a premium (paid) account. But for an enthousiast website, having access to these free basic options is already a big win!

I also need to address the elephant in the room: Pingdom. This is the golden standard of uptime performance monitoring tools. However, you will pay at least €440 per year for the privilege. That is a viable option for a small business. Not for an enthousiast like myself.

The chosen free alternatives are StatusCake, Freshping and UptimeRobot. There are many other options, but these ones are mentioned in multiple lists of ‘the best monitoring tools’. They also have user friendly dashboards. So let’s run with it.

StatusCake

The first option that I have tried is StatusCake. This tool not only offers the uptime monitoring, but also offers a free SpeedTest. Of course you can use the free speedtests of Google and Pingdom. But this won’t allow you to see the day-to-day differences.

The images below show the default dashboard for uptime monitoring, the detailed uptime graph for one URL and the webform for creating a new uptime test.

The next images show the default dashboard for speed tests, the detailed speed graph results and the webform for creating a new speed test.

The basic plan is free and this gets you 10 uptime tests and 1 page speed test. A paid superior plan will set you back €200 per year, which is way to much for an enthousiast like myself.

Freshping

Freshping is the second alternative that I tried. This is a Freshworks tool, so that means that it works together with other Freshworks tools such as Freshdesk, Freshsales, Freshmarketeer, Freshchat and Freshstatus. And all of these tools have a free tier. Wow, that is a lot of value for a start-up business. Of course they will like you to upgrade later on and stay with their company.

However, we are now focussing on Freshping. The below images show the default dashboard, the detailed uptime graph for one URL and the webform for creating a new uptime test.

It looks nice, but it gives you much less information than StatusCake. However they do provide value. The sprout plan is free and this gets you 50 uptime tests. A paid blossom account will set you back €119 per year. That looks cheap, but it won’t get you SSL monitoring (which is included in the paid StatusCake plan). So you will need to pay €389 per year to get this functionality. And that is too close to Pingdom, if you are only interested in uptime performance monitoring.

UptimeRobot

The last alternative that I tried is UptimeRobot. The big advantage of this tool is that the paid plan is very cheap. So let’s get to that first. The basic plan is free and this gets you 50 uptime tests. So it does offer value. A paid pro plan costs €49 per year, which is a surmountable ammount for an enthousiast like myself. This will include SSL monitoring.

So what do you get? The images below show the default dashboard for uptime monitoring, the detailed uptime graph for one URL and the webform for creating a new uptime test.

The user interface of UptimeRobot is fairly minimalistic. And you need to like the gray/green color combination (I am looking at you openSUSE and Linux Mint users). But the interface is easy enough to use. I find the graphs lacking in detail.

Conclusion

When comparing the free plans of StatusCake, Freshping and UptimeRobot the winner is StatusCake by a sizable margin. It not only offers uptime monitoring, but also 1 speed test. It provides detailed information on the graphs and you also see the information in tables that can be easily sorted.

When comparing the paid plans from the viewpoint of an enthousiast website owner, the winner is UptimeRobot. They offer both uptime testing and SSL monitoring for €49 per year. Which is a surmountable price.

Looking at these altenatives from the perspective of a startup business, Freshping starts to look more interesting. But a startup business would be better off by using the other Freshworks products and either pay less for UptimeRobot or pay a little bit more for a Pingdom standard plan.

Published on: 17 January 2020