LinuxCon + CloudOpen + ELC-E Europe 2014

Although being fun to do and quite easy to start the Linux kernel development is considered hard, time consuming and it is said that it requires access to hardware. With this in mind many people might hesitate to try it out. In this presentation Konrad is going to use himself, a newbie contributor, as an example of how easy it is to start what did he learn (during the Eudyptula challenge and so far) and how this knowledge can be used to submit patches and participate in the upstream kernel development.

Karen will talk about what it was like to ramp up from lawyer to Executive Director, when GNOME 3 was just released and Unity only recently had become Ubuntu's default desktop. In three years in the position, it's an understatement to say that a lot happened to the GNOME project and the GNOME Foundation. Karen will most likely the discuss the question she received most often while Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation - is GNOME dead?

Coccinelle is a program matching and transformation tool for C programs that has been extensively applied to the Linux kernel and is used on a number of other C code bases. Coccinelle makes it easy to specify software specific rules for finding bugs and for updating software to use new APIs. These rules can then be applied automatically across an entire code base. Over 40 Coccinelle rules are already available in the Linux kernel source code. The goal of this tutorial is to enable developers to write their own. The tutorial is designed to be hands on. Participants should have Coccinelle (available via most Linux distributions) and the Linux 3.2 source code installed on their machines.

Come learn about the great work our kernel interns have accomplished! The FOSS Outreach Program for Women (OPW) provides a three-month paid internship for women and genderqueer/genderfluid individuals to work on an open source project.

Seven of the OPW interns from will give lightning talks on their Linux kernel projects. Teodora Băluţă will present her project on generating kernel oops QR codes. Valentina Manea will present on her work getting the USB over IP driver out of the Staging tree. Ana Rey will present her work on nftables. Andreea-Cristina Bernat talk about her RCU projects. Kristina Martšenko will present her work on Staging drivers.  Rashika Kheria will talk about her work eliminating gcc warnings across the kernel tree.  Himangi Saraogi will present her work on Coccinelle fixes.

The Linux kernel OPW cooridinator, Sarah Sharp, will provide more info on how mentors can get involved with OPW, and how companies can sponsor OPW interns.

The roots of Linux lie in the community of hobbyist programmers and technical enthusiast. Nowadays still about 15-20% of accepted patches are developed "in mother's basement" by programmers without affiliation.
This talk presents how to start kernel development as a hobbyist based on the view of an outsider. It covers ways of finding a task as starting point for your first patch and how to submit it. Dos and don'ts of kernel development are discussed and, based on the author's experiences, patches and reactions from the developer community are exemplified to overcome the newcomers' "inhibition threshold".