Colors of Noise

agx@sigxcpu.org

A short look back at the FOSS on Mobile Devroom at FrOSCon 2024
19th August 2024

Last weekend FrOSCon took place in St. Augustin (near Bonn). While memory is still fresh: here's a short look back with the focus on what I think worked well and what we could maybe improve for next year (should we want to do it again):

It was the 2nd time we had a dedicated FOSS on Mobile devroom with a mix of talks, discussions and hacking time and the first time we had a booth showing different devices running Linux. It was nice to see people joining for the first time as well as some familiar faces.

The Mobile Linux Booth (image taken from the

(image taken from https://fosstodon.org/@postmarketOS/112976637275476001)

Talks

There were talks ranging from how Qualcomm devices are booting (and how the should boot), Debugging the Mobile Linux stack as well as happenings in the app ecosystem and how the weekly news feed covering our ecosystem is created (to name a few). I think the diversity of different topics was well received.

Lightning Talks

Last year we had two one hour slots for lightning talks which weren't completely filled so we went to 30min total this year. The three 10min talk slots filled up quickly with

so we squeezed in a 4th one between two talks (about posting images to the Fediverse directly from a digital camera). We should likely reserve one full hour for lighting talks.

Discussons / Round Tables

The What are you missing to use Linux Mobile daily… round table/discussion (which was sparked by last year's Phosh community get together) was enlightening as it highlighted the different issues people are having (for some of them others could already contribute a solution). We should likely keep that as a fix point in the schedule. These are the bullet points from the white board we could use as a base the check what changed (hopefully improved) next year.

Time for Hacking / Problem solving

The Let's hack together on Mobile Linux session on Sunday morning looks like a good idea as people can trickle in as they see fit in the morning after the social event. It also allowed people to drop by with questions or devices they wanted to get Mobile Linux on (which wasn't always possible due to not yet working kernels).

We could often spark some hope though by redirecting them to the booth to see similar devices to theirs running Mobile Linux. This made me notice that not everyone was aware that there's a booth as well so we could connect booth and devroom better i.e. mention the booths location and devices present there on the devroom's white board and have a printout with the talk schedule at the booth.

Podcast

The postmarketOS podcast Live Episode was a very nice wrap up of the two conference days. Something similar (or same) would be nice next year.

Misc

Some other random thoughts on what we could keep/change for next year (should we want to do it again):

Thanks

Many thanks go to the people doing a presentation, staffing the booth, the FroSCon orga for a smooth conference and everyone joining, listening in and participating.

Tags: froscon, linuxmobile, phosh.

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