On October 30th the Fedora 29 edition was announced and this can mean only one thing… release parties all over the regions. A release party (aka RP) is a local event organized by contributors of the Fedora Project (not necessarily ambassadors) where people gather and have presentations, workshops and/or meet ups in universities, hackerspaces, cafes or wherever you think people might be interested to hear and learn more about a Linux distro.
F29 Release Party in Tirana
On December 18th we had our own RP in Tirana at Open Labs Hackerspace, the place where I met Fedora for the very first time myself. Let’s say our RP was a bit late in comparison to other RPs in other cities as university classes and working hours of the organizers didn’t allow us to have our event sooner.
Unfortunately, the date of our release party coincided to be in the middle of massive student protests on the entire country and that affected the overall participation. 😔 Our event started with an ice breaking session to get to know better the background of each other and understand better each one’s engagement with Linux and Fedora in particular.
As we had newcomers who had never heard of the Fedora Project again, we had a general and wide presentation on the FP which included info for the fedora community and how to be part of it, the fedora distro, the release cycles, all the fedora editions, the different desktop environments, the difference between spins & labs and of course the subprojects within the project.
The second part was a bit more technical/hands on. Anxhelo Lushka (FAS Anxh3l0), while using a computer running Fedora 29 Workstation with Gnome 3.30 showcased how Fedora Workstation looks and feels like. Anxhelo showed us how to complete basic tasks like installing the OS itself, installing a new software both from the Software center and the terminal (he also explained what COPR is and how to install a software from these repos), how to customize and personalize the interface according to the users’ needs (he showcased that a bit later also on a computer running F29 with XFCE) and last but not least … he emphasized the advantages in security while using Fedora. One of the attendees was a “devoted” Kali user. You can imagine the discussion that followed … 😛
As all the above were a bit too much for the newcomer attendees to “digest”, we left for the last part information that are addressed to people who are having their first steps on the project, like the ambassadors program, organizing a local event, the subprojects within Fedora, the different internships that people can get involved in Fedora (like GSoC & Outreachy) and the various websites/wikis/forums people can find “Fedora people”. The above were introduced by Jona Azizaj (FAS jonatoni).
As our agenda changed a bit on last minute, one thing remained as it was planned…. the cake. During the presentations attendees were served snacks and drinks and at the end of the event we cut our “release cake”. But before we literally cut the cake we had our traditional “family picture” so we show you what you missed if you were not there…
The aftermath
People attending our event were mostly computer science students and their perception of Linux was that you need to be a command line genius to use a Linux distro. We are happy that we made them understand that with Fedora they can perform all their everyday tasks and learn from a large global community that is willing to share more of its experience. The Kali guy insisted that you need to be a command line genius to use Linux…