March has been a whirlwind, and in the last two weeks, our event teams visited two sides of the world! In March, we saw both Pasadena, California, and Rust, Germany! Let’s talk about what we loved about each event.
SCaLE 21x
The 21st iteration of the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) kicked off on March 14th, and we were fortunate enough to have a booth staffed by a member of the AlmaLinux OS Foundation. We got to see a ton of our community, and were especially excited to connect with a number of folks who wanted to contribute to AlmaLinux.
This continues to be one of our most beloved shows. It’s so nice to see it growing and returning to its pre-pandemic size. We are so grateful for the continued outpouring of support from our Linux community there.
CloudFest Hackathon
As SCaLE was hitting its stride, 5300 miles away in Rust, Germany, our other event team was arriving and getting ready to start hacking at the CloudFest Hackathon. As one of the Hackathon projects, a group of people joined us to help improve the security of infrastructure globally by easing OS upgrades. We were delighted with what we accomplished there, and we were awarded 3rd place in both the “Future of the Web” and “Web Impact” categories.
We chose three primary goals for the Hackathon. Below I’ve included a bit more about our goals and the results of the work we did!
What ideas did we have, and what were the results?
- Deep Dive into User Space: Analyze commonly used software and CMSs to pinpoint potential upgrade obstacles, ensuring smoother transitions
- We tested 3 different real-world scenarios and reported bugs against each scenario.
- Focus on Industry Drivers: Identify key elements crucial to data consistency and other industry needs to facilitate necessary upgrades.
- We identified and submitted patches for a number of drivers that could be easily and safely re-added to the kernel, allowing users a chance to continue using unsupported hardware (keep an eye out for the AlmaLinux 8 and 9 betas next month!)
- Expand ELevate Support: Extend the capabilities for in-place upgrades across enterprise Linux distributions, including critical updates from CentOS 6 to 7.
- We completed enough research to determine that it’s possible and look forward to trying to implement the research over the coming months.
Here are the slides from our project reporting in PDF format, in case folks would like to look at the details related to our work.
AlmaLinux Day: Germany
On Monday, March 18th, nearly 300 people joined us at Hotel Colleseo at Europa Park or AlmaLinux Day: Germany! This event was the second such event, following AlmaLinux Day: Tokyo last December. I was so excited to highlight some really cool projects and companies using AlmaLinux, shine a light on the ways that we are serving our community and answer our number one question: How do you build AlmaLinux? Some members of the board even had a bit of a Q&A, answering some great questions from an extremely welcoming audience.
You can find the keynote slides available for download here!
We also recorded these sessions and will be able to share the videos as soon as they’re processed.
Keep your eyes open for the next AlmaLinux Day later this year!
CloudFest
With the momentum of the hackathon and ALDG carrying us forward, we closed out the busy week at the world’s largest cloud industry event, CloudFest! We met with a number of companies, learned what they were doing and how they and their customers were using AlmaLinux every day, and handed out buckets of stickers to our sponsors and other companies that were supporting AlmaLinux.
Even More Events
The rest of the year is packed with all kinds of ways to connect with other AlmaLinux Community members. Will you be at one of these events? If so, make sure to say hi and grab some swag.
- April 8 - 10 - FOSSAsia | Hanoi, Vietnam
- April 12-13 - TexasLinux Fest | Austin, TX, USA
- April 15 - 19 - HEPiX | Paris, France
- April 26 - 28 - PenguiCon | Ann Arbor, Mi, USA
- April 26 - 28 - Linuxfest NW | Bellingham, WA, USA
- July 28 - August 1st - SIGGRAPH | Denver, CO, USA
- August 7th - 10th - Flock to Fedora | Rochester, NY, USA
- Early September - Ohio Linux Fest (OLF) | Columbus, OH, USA
- October 27-29 - All things open | Raleigh, NC, USA
- November 17–22 - SC (formerly Supercompute) | Atlanta, GA, USA
If you can dedicate at least 1/2 of the event to staffing a booth at any of the events below, fill out this Google form! We’ll cover your travel and hotel, and you’ll get a per-diem to help offset your food and assorted travel-related costs.
Keep in Touch!
If you want to stay up-to-date, stay tuned on our forum, Reddit, X, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube. We also launched a newsletter this year, which you can subscribe to on LinkedIn or via email on our mailing list.