Mauro Morales

software developer

Category: News

  • My Plans for FOSDEM 2024

    Kairos

    Just like in 2023, one of my proposed talks got accepted. However, I will not be delivering it. Instead, my colleague Dimitris Karakasilis will be doing it because he has more experience on the topic. I will still be there taking pictures and giving away some Kairos swag, in case you want yours 😉

    Also prepare for our first in-person Kairos meeting. If you’re using Kairos, please join us, we would be thrilled to know some of our community members. You don’t have to be using Kairos to be welcome, this is also a good time to talk Kairos in general. We will share about the details of the meeting on our Slack, Matrix and Mastodon accounts, where you can also reach us at any moment.

    We also applied for a panel about Special Purpose Operating Systems, together with Flatcar, Bottlerocket and Unikraft. Unfortunately we haven’t heard a reply yet. So stay in tune for this one, we will also announce on one of our channels.

    On Saturday morning we want to go for a run, so if you’re looking for a running group, please reach out. And at night we will also probably join a party or hang out in one of the great cafés in Brussels. So you have many chances to join us to talk Kairos, running, or whatever.

    MNT Reform

    I’m a big fan of my MNT Reform open-hardware laptop. I’ll bring it so you can play with it if you’re interested. And hopefully, I’ll get to meet with other MNT Reformers. You can reach out via my personal Mastodon.

    Talks I plan to attend

    There’s never enough time to attend all the talks I’d like to during FOSDEM. These are the ones that caught my attention without too much overlapping.

  • Revived my Dell XPS 9350

    My work laptop has been giving me some trouble since I first installed openSUSE Tumbleweed. At first, it was just small annoyances, like not properly syncing the time. But installing the OS again is a bit of a hassle, as much as I enjoy doing it, so I found a workaround to reset it whenever it broke. However, last week it started freezing multiple times during the day, the workaround was to hard shut down the machine, which was very annoying, but I was hoping would get fixed in a next upgrade. Tumbleweed has weekly upgrades, so waiting wasn’t that big of a deal. But with the latest update, my Docker setup stopped working with Earthly, which is my bread and butter for Kairos, so I decided to try a different distro.

    Switching distros can be a big deal, and I didn’t want to learn a new package manager and special configurations, so I went with something I’ve already used before, Ubuntu 23.04. But even then, I first waned to give it a try, just in case there was any red flag. So, I dusted off my personal Dell XPS 9350, an 8-year-old laptop, to test it out. So far, everything seems to be working well, much slower than the workstation but still good enough and way more portable, so I’m probably going to start leaving my workstation at the desk.

  • Added ARM/RPI support for Ubuntu on Kairos

    Work this week came with a few challenges, but with enough patience and some help I was able to get the Ubuntu flavor for Kairos working on the Raspberry Pi.

    https://github.com/kairos-io/kairos/pull/1170

    Feedback loops when working on ARM are very slow because I’m cross compiling and because I have to burn the images on the SD cards. Switching contexts between tickets is not easy, but it’s also ok for working on chores, learning other things or playing with new technologies. I was mostly playing with ChatGPT, Copilot and LocalAI which was a lot of fun.

    Most of the lost time was because of a misconfiguration of the serial console. The issue was caused by some files which were not copied in the right directory, but it was not so obvious and without video it was very tricky to debug. Thankfully, after looking into some errors in dmesg and a recommendation from a colleague, I was able to sort it out. Reminder that it’s always good to review one’s own code and to get away from the code occasionally and look at it with a fresh pair of eyes.

  • My Plans for FOSDEM 2023

    FOSDEM 2023 is just around the corner, and I’m very excited. This will be my first in-person tech conference since before the pandemic. My last talk in FOSDEM was back in 2016, so I’m very much looking forward to the presentation I will give on Sunday.

    There are many talks that I’m interested in listening to, and plenty of faces that I want to see in person again or for the first time. If you’re coming to FOSDEM and want to say hi, just ping me via mrls@hachyderm.io (preferably) or mauromrls@twitter.com (if you don’t have a Mastodon account)

    Saturday

    I plan to see all presentations in the Image-based Linux and Secure Measured Boot devroom.

    At some point, I will escape to the FOSS on Mobile Devices devroom because I’d like to meet with Lukas Hartman, the CEO of MNT, who will bring a prototype of the Reform Pocket. I also hope to talk about future extensions to the Reform Laptop.

    At 1500 hours, I plan to visit the Go Devroom to check a talk about Five Steps to Make Your Go Code Faster & More Efficient.

    At 1600 hours, I want to attend the SourceHut meetup. I’ve been occasionally using SourceHut CI for personal projects. I feel we are putting too many eggs in the GitHub basket, and I like the ethos and team behind SourceHut, so I’d like to get more involved.

    Around 1800 hours, if I’m not too tired, I plan to check some talks in the CI/CD Devroom.

    I hope to join some party afterward, but I have no idea if there are any plans.

    Sunday

    I’m training for a race in March, so I plan to run on Sunday morning before arriving to FOSDEM. If anyone is interested in joining, that’d be pretty cool. My plan is to run for an hour or so.

    Once I arrive, I’d like to visit some stands and hopefully buy some interesting books.

    Before 1200 hours, I plan to be in the Distributions room.

    At 12:30, I will give a presentation about How we build and maintain Kairos, the new project I’m involved with.

    I plan to spend the rest of the time socializing before taking the train back to Ghent.

  • It’s Kairos Time

    I’m excited to announce that I joined Spectro Cloud. I’ll be part of the team building Kairos, the immutable Linux meta-distribution for edge Kubernetes.

    Ok, a lot to unpack there, and I’m still very new to it, so I have numerous questions myself, but for my own sake, I will unwrap it:

    • Immutable Linux: there are some parts of the file system in the OS that are read-only. This means that if you want to add a package, or make some configuration change, you need to build a new image of the OS with the given changes. This is good for two reasons, on the one hand, it reduces the attack surface and, on the other, it helps to roll back to a specific version of the OS.
    • Meta-distribution: you can pick the flavor of the base Linux distribution on which Kairos is built. For what I can tell, openSUSE, Ubuntu and Alpine are already available, but others could follow up.
    • Edge computing: systems nowadays are being centralized in datacenters. While this can be beneficial in some cases, it can also be unpractical for others. When you have a system, running as far away from the datacenter, then you’re running at the edge of the network. For example, a computer in a parking lot, taking pictures of car plates and calculating the amount they need to be charged.
    • Kubernetes: it’s a platform to deploy applications. It was started by Google and became quite popular. It’s now part of the CNCF.

    For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a Linux enthusiast, so I’m very much looking forward to this experience.