El pasado sábado 22 de abril se realizo el FLISoL en la Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá. Con un total de 150 asistentes durante todo el evento, entre estudiantes y profesionales de varias provincias del país: Panamá Oeste, Colón y Panamá. Muchas gracias a los conferencistas por brindar su experiencia en las exposiciones y talleres. Agradecemos tambienSigue leyendo "FLISoL 2017 | Panamá"

 

Flisol is a big event on latam, many communities join and celebrate and exchange free software and knowledge with each others and general public. Normal event will include free software installations, talks and workshops.

This year Flisol Panama was organized by Jose Reyes who took care of all organization, so many thanks for the job done,

Flisol  David on April 9 of this year hosted by  Universidad del Itsmo thanks for hosting the event on David, Kiara Navarro and me visit hosted the event, we present talks and share with the local community, which bring some new members to Floss-pa our Panamanian free software group and some of them showed interest on becoming Fedora contributors.


Blender talk by JulianVega


On Flisol official Date April 23 we celebrated it at the Universidad Interamericana de Panama  thanks for hosting it. While we did not have the normal attendance for this event  we have really interested crowd. Must interesting part of the crowd was to have 2 people interested on becoming Fedora packagers, both of them starting working to archive that task. Another interesting development was to meet a group of students who want to contribute with some software development and design for our local group Floss-pa, plus others who  wanted to contribute on organization and learn more about free software.


Special thanks to Gonzalo Nina who soon will become a packager and full Fedora Panama contributor.

So it was a good event with many things to learn and do.

Thanks to the people who work to make it possible and we hope to have new contributors doing some task on Fedora.

 

Wanted to try Wayland, since the beginning and been testing it from time to time, first when Fedora 23 was released, then some of my normal applications will crash at launch so it was no Wayland.

After reading there was no go for Wayland for the coming Fedora 24 decided to try it again, to my surprise this time all my apps run and response was good, so try it for a week to see if I can live with it for that time.

Found some issues, while not sure why, the copy and paste between some programs it is not quite working, most important to me was the gnome-terminal keyboard shorcuts for copy and paste did not work have to use mouse to do copy and paste while it is annoying, I could live with that, so keep playing with it for my daily task basically all other stuff normal.

But notice two big issues, on my normal day, my notebook has an external monitor so I'm on dual headed, first day started to work with Wayland did not notice it because started the notebook with the secundary monitor connected and everything works fine.

Then another day started my notebook outside of my desk and when arrive to my desk connected the secondary display it show as normal except that the applications on the secundary display have some issues with the mouse, once I click on the nothing happen then notice that all clicks was done on the application on my main display even do the mouse pointer was on the secondary display. So humm, solved by going into the control panel and switch primary display, that solve the issue.

What did not work for me and the more annoying bug was that some times I have to grab my notebook and move some place else to work, so disconnect secondary display and go to other room with all my gnome session and applications open so I can continue working, but not in Wayland, as son as disconnect the display gnome session shut down and all applications close, so found my no go Wayland while that can be manage by turning of the seconday display on control panel.

So, while appreciated the effort done on Wayland, it was the right call to delay it for Fedora 25. Wayland is not there for normal users yeat. But it is working better that before. Will run another try when Fedora 24 is release and later on.

 

Have been trying to remember the year and month of when started using Fedora as my main desktop, do remember was tired of fighting with Windows XP and its eating memory while trying to code on my work back them, my guess is it was around 2005 or 2006, before that  used Linux on servers and a dual boot but must of my time was on Windows.

What I'm sure when desided to do it was for good and it was so more fun that become a Fedora contributor, getting use to use only Fedora on my machine was interesting, basically all things that I needed work right with no issue with only exception of the meeting tool we use at work did not support Linux, with luck my co workers then decide to use another tool so it was not an issue any more.

With time have learn more and have installed or upgraded Fedora on every new release, no missing Windows at all. It has been also nice how Fedora has also change with time and how have to learn and get use to things like Gnome3 which was kind of challanging at the begining.

It is nice to see how Fedora is getting better, my wife use it now, with her issues as she is a mom user and my son who had trouble as he did not get a Windows machine for some of his courses, but we manage to get by on a school that promote and teach only MS software, not much I could do there.

Home tech support pass from once a week checking for antivirus updates and some other stuff to once every six month update to the next Fedora version. There is no need for a Windows box on my house and really enjoy Fedora. So to all of you working on getting Fedora better thanks.

 

Happy New Year, this is how it should be more post to start this year.

 

First of all, sorry my last post was about Flisol 2015 in Panamá, while many things had happen since then, many words and thoughts  never become a post. Therefore here we go.

Flisol was nice event, thanks to Universidad del Itsmo to host the event, but was the first one I missed on the last five years, was travelling,  visit Ecuador on Family matters, while there manage to talk with some Fedora people there, it was not face to face as  wanted but at lease can confirm we have some users and community members. In a way they do not participate to much out side Ecuador and while we try to change that it seems it will not happen. Some how we need to work on a way to reach them and start working with them to grow the community there.

With that in mind there are other countries in Latam which has some community members but nothing is done in them out side a talk Flisol and not sure if they talk about Fedora. Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica and Guatemala for instance are countries where Fedora latam has Ambassadors but cero activity other than Flisol. Which remain me there is a lot of work to do on our region but resources are basically used to support local activity on countries that have activity. Since cross border travel is expensive that is a limitation for us to visit and start developing a community there.

Latam community has grow in general with more Ambassadors and with a bit more enrolment in other parts of the project, how ever there is to much to do, to find more people that will enjoy been part of Fedora on others areas than Ambassadors.

Let go back to Panama, our group has grow in members some of them still in our training face and hope will join other groups within Fedora soon, we have five local students learning Python and other skills to join infrastructure and other groups it is a slow process but Potty is the may lead on this project.

But that was not all, we had been working with people from San Miguelito Town Hall,  small district embed in Panama City, they wanted to implement free software on this poor town, which then had less that 20 pc to manage all their task. So we help their IT department by training them on Linux as workstation and servers, plus  Libre Office training which was done by Monica Mora from Floss-pa. While it was on really complicated conditions it paid of San Miguelito runs over 100 pc with Fedora and free software. The real hero there is the IT team, that sacrifice after ours to be train by me on Linux while they were trained on Fedora and Linux Mint as they were not make their mind about what distro to use, at the end they choose Fedora. So make me happy.

San Miguelto, IT team deserve my congratulations as that was not easy task to do, teach people how to use a Linux (some workers there never used a pc before others only new Windows) , they have face many challenges on this implementation but they had manage it with really little  trouble. While there are many things to do there there time and mine is been complicated to help them more, but if they keep that way they will do great work.

San Miguelito require more free software as some government software only runs on Windows, but they manage to have the minimal amount possible of Windows PC, saving money from licenses. While this is the first case of massive use of free software in Panama, it is in the right direction.

Floss-pa with Kiara Navarro, team up with Panama City Hall to train kits on Robotics they did 3 courses of 4 Saturdays each on municipal libraries to 8 to 14 years olds kits, they enjoy learning and working with arduino and Fedora to code them. This was posible thanks to Monica Mora and Alexis Heiva from Floss-pa.



Other eventos as Software Freedom Day hosted by Universidad Interamericana de Panama were organize by the new members of Panama team, tutor by experience ones.

Fedora 22 Release Party was hoste by Universidad Tecnologica de Panama organized by Luis Manuel Segundo




At the end of this year Gonzalo Nina from Fedora Bolivia, spend some time in Panama working, but as a good Fedorian we ask him if he could talk about his expertice Security and Fedora Security Spin on two universities, and he was happy to do so. Thanks Gonzalo.


Last night we meet and enjoy our last Floss-pa and Fedora meeting of the year.

Last thing to say is it was great year many work done too much still to do, many thanks to all Fedora Panama team. Floss-pa members.

 

April, is Flisol (Free Software Installation Festival in Latin America) and normally it is held on April 3rth Saturday  we planned and held it on April 11 on David Chiriqui the main reason we don't live in David and is about 7 hours drive to get there for us.

Prof. Ender Gonzalez from Universidad del Istmo helps us organize the evento on its Univiersity in David. We took a bus at mid night and arrive there early in the morning everything was ready for us.

Event started at 9 with a full house we started talks about free software, Fedora, Firefox OS, Mozilla, Docker and many other topics, we talk with students and teachers who were really into learning about Fedora and Free Software.

It was our first visit to David and its people make a big impression we added more Fedora members and help install some machines plus give away stikers and Fedora ISO. We hope to have some of those new Fedora members start collaborating on translation and other areas within Fedora.


Thanks to U. del Istmo.

 

It is the first time Panama celebrates the Open Data Day, this time organize by the recently new Panama Mozilla Community, as part of the foss local community, Fedora Panama and Floss-pa was invited to this event.




Local members share talks about big data, open data, open hardware, it was an interesting experience with many people from the out side tech world. It was fun day.

Many thanks to Mozillians Omar Vasquez Lima and Lia Hernandez from IPANDETEC who organize it and to Centro Cultural de España who provide the venue.

 

After a long wait Fedora 21 Release is a few days away, since alpha has been testing Fedora 21 on virtual machines, with no  real issue how ever do to my work load had not time time to upgrade my main notebook.


Today run fedup and upgrade run flawless, simple upgrade instrucion:


sudo fedup --network 21 --product=workstation

Notice the additional parameter added to fedup for Fedora 21, values are workstation (Gnome desktop), server, Cloud and nonproduct which let fedup work as in its previous version.   

After downloading 3248 packages a warning about some external repository packages dependencies nothing critical, reboot and about 30 minutes waith, until upgrade process finish at the end it greet me with this beefy miracle asci image.




Next reboot and I was running Fedora 21 Workstation. It works fine. Thanks to all the effort and congrats to all involve into this release, it is looking really great.

 

 Mozilla community was there and Luis Manuel from Panama show how to develop small app for Firefox OS.

 Hacking nights thanks to the people at Mansion Teodolinda Hotel