GNOMErs, the Desktop Summit in Berlin, Germany is approaching quickly!

Submit your BoF for the Desktop Summit BoF days NOW! Deadline is July 3rd, this sunday!

Sign up as a volunteer for the Desktop Summit NOW! Deadline is July 18th!

It has been a while since I blogged photos of my various travels, although I have visited quite a number of countries in the past 12 months, and travelled overland in a number of them. Here are a few selected shots from three: India (November/December), Thailand (January), Japan (June).

These pictures are from Kyoto, Nara and Takayama in Honshu, Japan.

All this is Bangkok, Thailand. Particular interest deserve the gold-based patterns used widely to adorn Thai architecture:

And finally India (one picture NSFW!):

This is Mumbai, Ellora, Ajanta, Aurangabad (in Maharashtra); Mandu, Sanchi, Gwalior, Khajuraho (Madhya Pradesh); Orchha, Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh); Bangalore, Mysore (Karnataka).

The Desktop Summit 2011 in Berlin, Germany Needs Your Help!

Are you attending the Desktop Summit? Are you interested in helping the GNOME and KDE communities organize this year's Summit? Do you want to work with other Free Software enthusiasts to make the Desktop Summit rock? Would you like to own one of the exclusive Desktop Summit Team T-Shirts?

If so, please sign up as a volunteer for the Desktop Summit!

Read the full Call For Volunteers!

Read Patricia's original announcement.

Or go directly and sign up as a volunteer.

The Desktop Summit schedule for the talks and presentations has been published a couple of weeks ago. Now it is time to open the 2nd Call for Participation, this time for Workshops and BoFs.

If you'd like to run a workshop, BoF, hack session or training/teaching session, then please submit it here. If you do it will appear in the printed schedule and get a prominent time slot assigned. BoFs, workshops, hack sessions and training/teaching sessions can also be added after the deadline of July 3rd, and even be registered ad-hoc at the conference, but if you register your slot in advance we can make sure people will find it in the printed schedule, will know about it, can plan to attend it and we can do everything to make sure a lot of people show up.

Note that BoF/workshop proposals are unrestricted, i.e. there is no program committee that will accept or reject submissions: we have a lot of room and we'll accept liberally what is submitted.

For GNOMErs: this part of the conference is supposed to be much like the Boston GNOME summit, but with a printed schedule. So please be welcome to submit your sessions like you'd want to have them take place at the GNOME summit as well.

Also see Jonnor's original announcement.

So, hurry, file your session request right-away and before July 3rd!

If you are into computers and live in Germany I am sure you know the c't computer magazine. The current edition 13/2011 (p. 172) contains two articles contributed by Thorsten Leemhuis, Kay Sievers and yours truly on the topic of systemd. Awesome read. Now, run to your local kiosk and grab a c't and study the two articles. Go now, quick!

Golem.de has an interview with yours truly. When I watched I learned so much! If you understand the German language then you might too! (and only then because it is in Goethe's tongue).

Fedora 15 is out. Get it while it is hot! It is probably the biggest distribution release of a all time with being first in shipping both GNOME 3 and systemd.

Since this is the first distribution release based on systemd, it might be interesting to read up on what it is all about. Here's a little compilation of the available documentation for systemd.

The Manual Pages

• systemd(1), covering general concepts of systemd.
• systemctl(1), covering the client control utility of systemd.
• systemd-cgls(1), on a tool to show the systemd cgroup tree.
• systemd.unit(5), systemd.exec(5), systemd.service(5), systemd.socket(5), systemd.target(5), systemd.timer(5), systemd.swap(5), systemd.snapshot(5), systemd.path(5), systemd.mount(5), systemd.device(5), systemd.automount(5), for writing systemd unit files.
• systemd-nspawn(1), on a tool for running simple containers.
• systemd-notify(1), on a tool for sending notifications to systemd.
• systemd.special(5), with a list of systemd's special units.
• daemon(7), on writing daemons.
• pam_systemd(8), on configuring user session settings.
• sd-daemon(7), sd_listen_fds(3), sd_notify(3), sd_is_fifo(3), sd_booted(3), sd-readahead(7), sd_readahead(3), covering the systemd API.
• systemd-ask-password(1), describing a tool for querying system passwords.
• systemd-tmpfiles(8), describing a tool for creating, deleting and cleaning up volatile and temporary files and directories.
• systemd.conf(5), describing the systemd main configuration file.
• binfmt.d(5), hostname(5), locale.conf(5), machine-id(5), machine-info(5), modules-load.d(5), os-release(5), sysctl.d, tmpfiles.d(5), vconsole.conf(5), for the configuration files systemd standardizes.
• halt(8), runlevel(8), shutdown(8), telinit(8), covering the SysV compatibility tools.

Here's the full list of all man pages.

The Blog Stories

• The original announcement blog story, lining out the ideas of systemd in much detail.
• The two status updates since then.
• systemd for Administrators #1: Verifying Bootup
• systemd for Administrators #2: Which Service Owns Which Processes?
• systemd for Administrators #3: How Do I Convert A SysV Init Script Into A systemd Service File?
• systemd for Administrators #4: Killing Services
• systemd for Administrators #5: The Three Levels of "Off"
• systemd for Administrators #6: Changing Roots
• systemd for Administrators #7: The Blame Game
• systemd for Administrators #8: The New Configuration Files
• Why systemd?, exploring why distributions should choose (and are choosing) systemd.
• systemd for Developers #1: Socket Activation

Some of the systemd for Administrators blog posts are available in Russian language, too.

Other Documentation

• Tips & Tricks
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Interface Stability Promise, covering what you need to know when developing against systemd interfaces.
• Writing Password Agents, in case you want to add a systemd compatible password agent to the desktop of your preference.
• On hostnamed, in case you want to add hostname changing UIs to your favourite desktop environment.

Fedora Documentation

• General Overview
• SysVInit to systemd Cheatsheet
• How to Debug systemd Problems
• systemd Packaging Guidelines

In The Press

• The original LWN article
• Bê-á-bá do systemd
• Press articles after the original announcement

Other Distributions' Documentation

• OpenSUSE
• Debian
• Ubuntu
• Gentoo
• Arch

And, if you still have questions after all of this, please join our mailing list, or our IRC channel #systemd on irc.freenode.org. Alternatively, if you are looking for paid consulting services for systemd contact our friends at ProFUSION.

The Paper Committee of the Desktop Summit 2011, in Berlin, Germany is happy to announce that the conference programme is now published.

Go directly to the schedule.

Read the full announcement.

And yes, it is an absolutely rocking programme.

See you in Berlin!

The Linux Plumbers Conference 2011 in Santa Rosa, CA, USA is coming nearer (Sep. 7-9). Together with Kay Sievers I am running the Boot&Init track, and together with Mark Brown the Audio track.

For both tracks we still need proposals. So if you haven't submitted anything yet, please consider doing so. And that quickly. i.e. if you can arrange for it, last sunday would be best, since that was actually the final deadline. However, the submission form is still open, so if you submit something really, really quickly we'll ignore the absence of time travel and the calendar for a bit. So, go, submit something. Now.

What are we looking for? Well, here's what I just posted on the audio related mailing lists:

So, please consider submitting something if you haven't done so yet. We
are looking for all kinds of technical talks covering everything audio
plumbing related: audio drivers, audio APIs, sound servers, pro audio,
consumer audio. If you can propose something audio related -- like talks
on media controller routing, on audio for ASOC/Embedded, submit
something! If you care for low-latency audio, submit something. If you
care about the Linux audio stack in general, submit something.

LPC is probably the most relevant technical conference on the general
Linux platform, so be sure that if you want your project, your work,
your ideas to be heard then this is the right forum for everything
related to the Linux stack. And the Audio track covers everything in our
Audio Stack, regardless whether it is pro or consumer audio.

And here's what I posted to the init related lists:

So, please consider submitting something if you haven't done so yet. We
are looking for all kinds of technical talks covering everything from
the BIOS (i.e. CoreBoot and friends), over boot loaders (i.e. GRUB and
friends), to initramfs (i.e. Dracut and friends) and init systems
(i.e. systemd and friends). If you have something smart to say about any
of these areas or maybe about related tools (i.e. you wrote a fancy new
tool to measure boot performance) or fancy boot schemes in your
favourite Linux based OS (i.e. the new Meego zero second boot ;-)) then
don't hesitate to submit something on the LPC web site, in the Boot&Init
track!

And now, quickly, go to the LPC website and post your session proposal in the Audio resp. Boot&Init; track! Thank you!

As some of you might know Fedora 15 went Gold a couple of days ago. The first big distribution based on systemd will be released 2011-05-24. Mark the date!

In little over a year systemd went from nowhere to became a core piece of Fedora. This wasn't possible without the numerous folks who worked with us on getting systemd right, supplied patches, chased bugs, tested releases and posted comments and generally made sure everything was in shape for the big release.

At this point we'd like to thank everybody who contributed and a few folks in particular:

A. Costa Adrian Spinu Alexey Shabalin Andreas Jaeger Andrew Edmunds Andrey Borzenkov Bill Nottingham Brandon Philips Brendan Jones Brett Witherspoon Chris E Ferron Christian Ruppert Conrad Meyer Daniel J Walsh Dave Reisner Eric Paris Fabian Henze Fabiano Fidêncio Florian Kriener Franz Dietrich Greg Kroah-Hartman Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri Harald Hoyer James Laska Jan Engelhardt Jeff Mahoney Jesse Zhang Jóhann B. Guðmundsson Karel Zak Koen Kooi Lucas De Marchi Ludwig Nussel Luis Felipe Strano Moraes Maarten Lankhorst Malcolm Studd Marc-Antoine Perennou Martin Mikkelsen Matthew Miller Matthias Clasen Matthias Schiffer Michael Biebl Michael Olbrich Michael Tremer Michał Piotrowski Michal Schmidt Mike Kazantsev Mike Kelly Miklos Vajna Milan Broz Ozan Çağlayan Paul Menzel Pavol Rusnak Rahul Sundaram Rainer Gerhards Ran Benita Ray Strode Robert Gerus Sedat Dilek Tero Roponen Thierry Reding Tollef Fog Heen Tomasz Torcz Tom Callaway Tom Gundersen Toshio Kuratomi William Jon McCann Wulf C. Krueger Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek

And everybody else who I (or git shortlog) forgot.

Thank you!

Lennart and Kay

BTW, the interface stability promise is valid now.