Another awesome Fedora release, and another awesome Release Party in Novi Sad!

The party took place, like last time, on the Faculty of Science, University of Novi Sad in the Department of Mathematics and Informatics. To be even more precise, it’s about three minutes away from our Fedora-powered computer lab! About forty people (among who was a Fedora ambassador from Uruguay) attended! We had four talks about different topics regarding Fedora, security, and hackerspaces.

Talk #1

After a short introduction from the head of the Chair of Information Systems, Milos Rackovic, I started my talk. The talk was about what is Fedora and what is new in Fedora 25. It was really similar to the last release party’s talk apart from the F25 stuff. People really liked the direction Fedora is taking, the changes in GNOME 3.22, and Fedora itself. Support for the Raspberry Pi platform was really good news for everyone. I also showed how Wayland was working awesomely on my Baytrail tablet, which is improving every day.

Talk #2

For the second talk, we decided to target new users, so Danijela Tesendic, associate professor on the Department, gave a talk that covered everything: getting Fedora and dual-booting to installing software and using the OS itself. It was interesting and a great introduction on why someone would want to switch to Fedora and what issues they will encounter along the way. I really liked the metaphor Danijela used, that switching from Windows to Linux in general is like moving to another country. Everything is there but everything is just a little bit different!

Talk #3

After the lunch break, it was Doni Pracner’s (teaching assistant at the Department of Mathematics and Informatics) turn to wow the audience. Doni’s talk was intriguing and advanced. He talked about the issue of “Trusting Trust” or who can we believe in the long and complicated chain when building software. Doni covered how one can infect the compiler with malicious code and how that infection can go undetected for a very long period of time. The talk was awesome and there were a lot of good questions after it!

The Quiz!

Like on the last release party, we prepared a Fedora / Linux / FOSS-related quiz for the audience with Fedora awards! The quiz was organized by Natasa Sukur (PhD Student at the Department and a new Fedora contributor). We had fifteen (actually sixteen) funny and awesome questions with a lot of laughs in between. Everything from the first commercial Linux distribution (Yggdrasil GNU/Linux!) to the Four Foundations of Fedora!

Talk #4

The fourth talk was from our friends from Tilda Center and one of the co-founders Meka. Meka talked about what is a hackerspace and what are some of the activities in Tilda Center. It was awesome to hear someone talk with so much passion about educating young people about electronics, music, and photography to Python and web development. A lot of the people from the audience didn’t know about Tilda and hackerspaces in general, so this was an awesome introduction!

Conclusion

Feel free to check the picture albums here:

All the slides (some in Serbian) and the quiz are here.

I would like to thank all the people who came once more, and all the speakers for their time and their awesome talks. I really enjoyed organizing this release party and I am really hoping that this event becomes a tradition. See you in about six months!