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FutureboySolaar | Application for Logitech Unifying Receivers and Devices on openSUSE
How to survive a health crisis during a FOSS conference
The title describes everything. This is not only for FOSS conferences but events in general. Attending a conference means to meeting friends (usually you meet once a year) and have fun in general.
The organizers are responsible for everything that happens during the conference hours. We are grown people, so we have to be responsible for the rest of the day. Sometimes bad things might happen (bad: the critical meaning is health issues). Although the organizers aren't responsible for that, they are the key people, who know the system in their country and it's a good and human thing to help the person with the problem. Everyone wants to have fun and be happy at the end of the conference.
Being an organizer and volunteer, I felt the frustration of having everything covered. I lived a couple of times the health crisis during the conference.
Here are some points to cover before and during the conference. Please leave a comment if you want to share your experience.
Before the conference:
0. If the conference takes place within European Union, you can ask the European citizens to get the European Insurance Card. It doesn't cover everything, but at least you'll avoid some stupid bureaucracy. If they're not EU citizens or they don't have insurance, ask them to buy one for their trip. Usually, when you buy a plane ticket, they suggest buying medical insurance. Do it, because it will save you from a lot of trouble.
1. During the online registration, ask for emergency contact (ask for a name and phone number). It will help you and doctors just in case they need the medical history of the person, allergies, etc.
2. If they're not feeling comfortable providing their name and number, ask them to enable a feature of emergency call on their phone or even better to install a program with the emergency call and some medical history and their medication. Personally, I have the Medical ID (Free) installed (you can choose other). It will help the doctors because it has a field to add your medical history so they can treat you correctly.
3. This might be very personal, but ask them to enter where they will stay. You might need to go to their hotel and bring a special medication they "forgot" to bring with them. And that leads to another issue. Ask them to bring the medication to the conference with them.
4. During registration, it's good to have a field for write down a disease that the attendee feels comfortable sharing. There is a code of conduct committee that can guarantee this information. For example, if the attendee has epilepsy, it's good for the organizers to know and be prepared. Usually, people with epilepsy tell that information to their friends, so they won't be surprised just in case of a seizure.
5. During registration, ask for special types of food. It's not the only religion that prohibits some kinds of food but there are some other categories such as vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, etc. Some of them are just a way of life but others are health-related.
6. Gather information and write on the website everything health-related that the attendees must know because usually there are some illnesses that come up after the attendees return back home. A special quote is if there are special vaccines that the attendees have to be vaccinated. It's better for the locals to write down
7. Gather information and write on the website what everyone has to be careful about. Examples are, don't drink tap water, buy water from kiosks and that costs ..., don't walk alone after midnight at that place because you might get robbed, smoking pot is illegal, traffic police violations. Find out what the attendees need to know so they won't end up either at the hospital or police station.
8. Every country has a different health system. Make sure that you find out the hospitals that accept emergencies and also the pharmacies that are open during the night. Make a list with details (address, phone number, specialties, etc) for the days of the conference. It's better not to use it rather not have it at all.
9. Gather all addresses and phone numbers of embassies and consulates of the attendees. It's the place they have to call if they have a problem and there are people who speak the same language that can help them.
10. On the name tags, write down the emergency phone numbers (like 112). In my country it's different for the police, fire department, ambulance. Also, buy a disposable cell phone number and put the number on the name tags, so attendees can call a local that knows the system and can help.
11. Contact Red Cross volunteers. I guess there are different organizations for every country. You can search for their information. They might be present during the conference for free. They are people with jobs and they are volunteers, so if they cannot join you, ask them to train someone for some basics.
12. Write a document "Protocol if we have to call the authorities". That includes everything from fire to ambulance and from the police to traffic police. Of course, you cannot include everything (because you never know) but at least you can act for some basic situations.
During the conference:
1. Keep a central booth for Red Cross volunteers. They usually carry a bag with heavy equipment. Ask them how they want to have communication for emergencies. Usually, many venues have defibrillators (I think it's called like that). So help them to find one. Ask the volunteers what else they need to operate. Don't forget they are volunteers, so please make sure they have free food and water, and maybe you can give them a T-shirt of your project for free.
2. Make sure you have a private room that the Red Cross volunteers can examine someone. That can be an office. Nothing fancy. Usually, people don't like to be examined in public. Also, the Red Cross Volunteers are more concentrated when the place is quiet.
3. If you don't have a Red Cross volunteer, try to train someone or find a key person (name and phone number) who knows CPR, how to use a defibrillator, etc. He might save a life before the ambulance arrives.
4. Have an Emergency mobile number that an attendee can call you when he faces a problem. Have in mind that everything will happen during the night (because people tend to do stupid things during the night). So be prepared to go to the police (got robbed or had a fight with a local etc), go to a hospital (got hit by a local or got a bicycle and fell, etc). As I wrote, the organizers aren't responsible for what happens after the conference hours. But leaving someone who doesn't know how the foreign system works, will be bad for you and the organization in general. So make shifts for locals on-call :-)
5. Try to pass everything as quietly as you can. It's not good to make a fuss out of the incident. The person with the problem doesn't like everyone to see and ask if he's OK or feel pity for him. That's why the private room helps.
If you have an idea that I forgot, please leave a comment. Please share it with people that organize conferences because it might give them some tips.
Some of the above ideas are overdone. It's better to be prepared rather than be stressed.
I hope following all or some of the above will lead you to a successful conference.
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openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2020/02
Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
Week 2 this year brings you what many have been asking for: Kernel 5.4! YES, After the holiday season came to an end and the right people were back in business, we could address the issue around the invalid certificate chain and correct the issue. In total, Week 2 brought you five snapshots: 0103, 0105, 0106, 0107 and 0108, with all these nice changes:
- Linux kernel 5.4.7 (Snapshot 0108, fresh off the press)
- NetworkManager 1.22.2
- Flatpak 1.6.0
- Mesa 19.3.1
- Rust 1.40
Also, the staging projects are making progress and some of the long-standing areas are likely to be checked in rather soon. The major things coming your way in the near (or maybe distant) future are:
- RPM 4.15.1: tests have all passed, you can expect this to come your way next week
- systemd 244: one package’s test suite keeps on failing without anybody understanding what’s going on. Since this is a legacy package, it was decided to disable the test suite. So systemd 244 should now also be ready and be checked in soon
- Qt 5.14: we are awaiting some legal reviews. Tests by openQA have all passed
- Kubernetes 5.17: the last tests were still failing, but just today we received a submission that is supposedly fixing it
- Python 3.8: not going to happen very soon – but it’s being worked on
- Removal of python 2: python 2 is now officially no longer maintained by upstream. Work is undertaken to lower the usage footprint of python2, to the point where it can be removed from the distro
- SQlite 3.30: python-Django is still failing
- More kernels from the Linux 5.4 branch. You can expect them to come more frequent again
- Mozilla Firefox 72
- KDE Applications 19.12.1
- KDE Plasma 5.17.5
As you can see, the holiday is over – and things are being thrown at me at a high pace, in the hope to get it all integrated into Tumbleweed quickly. I’ll do what I can – but OBS and openQA resources tend to be limited 
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Tumbleweed Provides Some Stability to 2020
The year of 2020, at least in the openSUSE world, is starting out to be pretty stable. In little more than a week into the new year, there have been five openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots released.
The releases, with the exception of one, are either posting a stable rating or are trending at a stable rating, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.
With the release of snapshot 20200107, more OpenGL and Vulkan driver features and improvements came in the update of the Mesa 19.3.1 package. The newer version update also provides better AMD Radeon Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) performance.
The bluez-tools package that is a set of tools to manage Bluetooth devices for Linux had a minor update from the previous three-year-old package included in Tumbleweed. GNOME’s web browser package epiphany provided some security AdBlocker preferences in the 3.34.3.1 version. Message transfer agent exim reduced the start up process initialization with version 4.93.0.4 and fixed more than a half dozen bugs. KDE’s kdevelop5 5.4.6 version fixed some wrong text in the license. Network detector, packet sniffer, and intrusion detection system package for wireless network kismet updated to its December release in the snapshot. One package update that stands out in the snapshot is the release of the finger reader package for Linux devices libfprint 1.0; this first major release provides better documentation and bug fixes related to restarting a failed verification immediately.The osc 0.167.2 package fixed regression in osc chroot. Other packages updated in the snapshot were rubygem-parser 2.7.0.1 and tigervnc 1.10.0 among others.
Snapshot 20200106 snapshot provided an update of ImageMagick 7.0.9.13 that fixed the a bug for custom profile (CMYK or RGB) conversions and the -layers optimize option now requires a fully transparent previous image. Argyll Color Management System package argyllcms had a new major version update; the 2.1.1 version update removes bundled zlib source, that could trigger a fatal rpm check failure on Leap 15.x. The library for handling OpenGL function pointer management libepoxy 1.5.4 requires only the python3-base package for building instead of full python3 package. GNOME’s photo manager shotwell 0.30.8 updated translations and fixed Tumblr publishing.
Several updated YaST packages came in the 20200105 snapshot. Improved sorting by device name and size in tables were made with the yast2-storage-ng 4.2.67 update and an improved warning when all repositories are disabled were made with the yast2-packager 4.2.42 update. The same version number for yast2-network added support for reading / writing Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU). The libstorage-ng 4.2.44 package improved the sort-key for block devices and libyui 3.9.1 added sort key to the table cell. Python-passlib 1.7.2 added some new features like supports Argon2 and utility program to control and monitor computer storage systems smartmontools 7.1 added enhancements for AT Attachment (ATA) ACS-4 and ACS-5. The snapshot also provided an update to the 2.6.0 version of usb_modeswitch, which added several devices and changed the Makefile to prevent parallel build issues.
ImageMagick also had an update in the 20200103 snapshot. NetworkManager 1.22.2 fixed multiple issues in the internal DHCP client and drop support for BlueZ 4 for BlueZ 5, which has been around since 2012. The Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) 1.2.1.2 package brought about 30 upstream patches. File searching tool catfish 1.4.12 adds support for running on Wayland and provided dialog improvements, which were introducted in the 1.4.10 version. Flatpak 1.6.0 made a change in the support for OCI and only support the use of labels, not annotations, as labels work with more registries. Pre-existing OCI flatpak registries (like Fedora) may need some changes, according to the changelog. The new major 7.0 glusterfs, which is an open source platform for scale-out public and private cloud storage, provided improved read workload latency in a cluster, especially in a cloud setup along with load balancing with the outstanding pending requests. The library for reading raw files from digital cameras, libraw 0.19.5, fixed a possible buffer underrun in the modern Samsung loader. Improved responsiveness during large file transfers were made with the sshfs 3.7.0 and vim text editor 8.2.0063 fixed several problems. This snapshot is trending at a rating of 83, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer, but most of the issues recorded with the rating were related to the NetworkManager.
Tumbleweed had a New Year’s snapshot this year. Snapshot 20200101 had 13 packages updated. Of those, key ones to point out were the update of diffstat 1.63, which improved parsing for git diffs, and Fast Light Toolkit, which is a cross-platform widget library for graphical user interfaces, had some security fixes with the fltk 1.3.5.
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