50 things you did not know you could do with Ardour (Content & Design)

• Robin Gareus (Ardour, Linux Audio)

Room: Lambda – Talks Digital Audio Workstations are a complex piece of software that cater for many different distinct workflows. After a brief introduction to Ardour, this presentation will explain how to do common DAW operations with Ardour, move on to show workflow specific tricks, and dive into things you didn't know Ardour can do.

5 security best practices building an app with Ubuntu as the base image (Security)

• Nnenna Ndukwe (Developer Advocate at SlimAI)

Room: Lambda – Talks Learn how to implement 5 security best practices for your Ubuntu-based container images to make them more secure for production deployment. We will walk through improvements to be made to a container's Dockerfile and leverage the SlimAI CI/CD platform and CLI to analyze and optimize the container via automatic vulnerability reduction and overall image size reduction.

Alioli ROV Submarine Drone (Devices)

• Juanmi Taboada

Room: Omega 2 – Plenary In this presentation, I will discuss my journey of creating an Open Source submarine. Its purpose is to scan areas where scuba divers explore and generate a 3D map of the recreational scuba diving areas. I will also explain how various Open Source technologies were integrated to make this project successful.

Linux Gaming beyond Steam: Building native support for GOG, Epic, and more (Gaming)

• Paweł Lidwin (Heroic Games Launcher)
• Dennis Sädtler (Legendary / OBS Project)

Room: Sigma – Talks One of the biggest strength of the PC as a gaming platform is choice. However, for Linux gamers using storefronts other than Steam usually involves tinkering, poor support, and sometimes the original client won't run at all within Wine. Especially for beginners, this process can be intimidating and fustrating. Over the last two years the Legendary and Heroic projects have started to work on addressing this problem by providing native third-party clients for the Epic Games Store, GOG, and Amazon, with more to come! In this talk we will go over what started these efforts, what challenges we faced with past and current work, how platform reacted to our work, provide a look at upcoming features and projects, and let people know how they can get involved in brining more choice to Linux gaming as a whole.

From Pets to Cattle: Revolutionizing Edge Computing with Screenly's Edge Apps (Devices)

• Viktor Petersson (Partner)
• Murat Ursavaş

Room: Sigma – Talks A decade ago, the cloud computing landscape was defined by the "Pets vs. Cattle" debate, and the cattle paradigm emerged victorious. This shift toward treating servers as interchangeable, easily replaceable units paved the way for the current state of Cloud Native applications. Now, it's high time for edge computing to undergo a similar transformation. Traditionally, edge devices have been managed as unique, specialized entities—akin to pets rather than cattle. At Screenly, we're advancing the "Cattle Era" in edge computing with our Edge Apps solution. This software platform provides a flexible runtime environment for executing screen-related workloads such as kiosks and dashboards, streamlining their management at scale. In this presentation, we will delve into the architecture of Edge Apps and highlight how it harnesses the robust capabilities of Ubuntu Core to revolutionize edge device management.

HPC with Containers on Ubuntu (Infrastructure)

• Jaime Freire de Souza (Omnivector)

Room: Omega 2 – Plenary In the session, we will demonstrate how to install and configure Enroot and Pyxis by NVIDIA on a Slurm cluster to run containerized applications based on Ubuntu images. A wide variety of applications across many industries run on high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructures. Software diversity, complex workflows, and security considerations make providing and maintaining a cluster infrastructure challenging. In this context, container technologies remove the need to build complex environments and simplify the application installation and execution process. As part of the initiatives to expand Ubuntu adoption on HPC, we aim to show how to easily run containers based on Ubuntu images regardless of the host system of the HPC cluster. Containerization enables the use of Ubuntu to run applications on such environments and creates the opportunity to demonstrate that Ubuntu can be used to deploy HPC workloads. In collaboration, Canonical and Omnivector created a community to promote discussions around Ubuntu and HPC topics, which is open to anyone interested in contributing or learning (https://matrix.to/#/#ubuntu-hpc:matrix.org).

Arras, MoonRay’s distributed computational framework (Application Ecosystem)

• Randy Packer (DreamWorks Animation)

Room: Omega 2 – Plenary Ray-Trace rendering, like MoonRay, has been industry standard for years because of the visual quality and life-like images it can generate. But Ray trace rendering is very compute intensive as it simulates the physics of how light travels and reflects in the real world - millions of rays. Moonray was designed to be uniquely scalable with almost linear scalability to thousands of cores. The challenge is how to use cores beyond the confines of a single compute node and our solution was Arras. Arras is a scalable computational framework for composing distributed computations into cohesive assemblies capable of complex data manipulation (Engines) such as MCRT rendering, model deformation, physical simulation, etc. Engines like MoonRay can be split across multiple physical machines, allowing computations that are traditionally bound by the resource limitations of a single physical host to leverage potentially unlimited computational power to accelerate processor-intensive operations. This talk will give an overview of how Arras works and how it is used to leverage MoonRays scalability as well as the various workflows it has enabled in the production of DreamWorks Animation’s films such as Everest, Trolls World Tour, Puss In Boots: The Last Wish and many more.

Freedom, flexibility and fun. Taking back your live streams with Owncast. (Content & Design)

• Gabe Kangas (Owncast)

Room: Sigma – Talks Live internet video streaming isn't as complex and scary as it's made out to be. Let's talk about why you might want to run your own self-hosted live video streams using Owncast, and learn about how video streaming works along the way. During the session, we will create a live stream from scratch by installing Owncast, and find out what's needed to successfully offer a quality stream to your viewers, scaling it to a larger audience when needed. - What is Owncast, and why would you want to use it to run a self-hosted live video stream? - How does live video streaming work? What does it require? - We will install and configure Owncast to create a live stream from scratch. - Discuss chat, social, interactivity, and viewer engagement features to enable different levels of viewer participation. - And we'll go over how to scale your video stream to a larger audience.

Art and ownership - the confusing problem of owning a visual idea (AI/ML)

• Eylul Dogruel (Ubuntu Studio)

Room: Sigma – Talks Recent mainstreaming of neural networks that can create images has brought in heated discussions of ownership of art. While the ability to create art from a few keywords made the potential and issues visible to a wider audience, the complicated issue of ownership of an artistic idea (and art as a product) predates image generating AI. From Yves Klein and to macaque selfies, this talk will attempt to bridge these discussions around sustainable artistic practice and free culture, and put the current issue of image datasets and ownership of AI generated art into this larger context. Within this context we will discuss how FLOSS ecosystem and culture could help turn AI into a tool that works with the artists.

Building the largest working set of apparmor profiles (Security)

• Alexandre Pujol

Room: Lambda – Talks This talk tells the story of how we build the largest working set of apparmor profiles. The default set of apparmor profiles in Linux is small. It makes Apparmor less useful to prevent thread. apparmor.d is a work in progress project that aims to provide a full set of profiles tailored for all major Linux distributions: Debian, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Archlinux and Ubuntu Core. It includes over 1400 profiles; together, they ensure that most Linux processes remain confined. In this talk, we will be going over the main challenges we faced while working on these profiles. The security architecture of the profiles. How did we select the program to confine and why? As there are over 50000 Linux packages, we need to carefully select the profiles to write. How we use integration testing that uses Go, some VM and hundreds of both manually created and automatically generated tests to ensure the profiles do not break your setup. The profiles, tooling and documentation for the project has been published at https://github.com/roddhjav/apparmor.d

The RISC-V revolution (Devices)

• John Ronco (SiFive)

Room: Omega 2 – Plenary RISC-V is a fast growing CPU architecture. This talk will give you an overview on what is driving the RISC-V eco-system. We will look into RISC-V profiles and extensions and the resulting challenges for the development of the software. Finally the hard and software support in Ubuntu will be discussed.

Dark matters: the security abyss of distroless containers (Security)

• Cristovao Cordeiro (Canonical)

Room: Omega 2 – Plenary Distroless containers revolutionised container design, yet they come with their own unique set of challenges —specifically hidden vulnerabilities. Rezilion Research's 2023 report "Hiding in Plain Sight: Hidden Vulnerabilities in Popular Open Source Containers" uncovered the presence of hundreds of docker container images containing vulnerabilities that are not detected by most standard vulnerability scanners and SCA tools. This session will shed a light on the 'dark side' of the distroless approach, calling for comprehensive software transparency. We will discuss potential mitigation solutions, including the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) and adding back the "distro" to distroless with build tools such as Chisel. Chisel blends the best elements of both distro and distroless, crafting chiselled Ubuntu containers that are secure, stable, and ultra-small... while preserving a seamless development experience.

Community Council: Ask Us Anything! (Community)

• Nathan Haines (Ubuntu Community Council)
• José Antonio Rey (Ubuntu Community Council)
• Merlijn Sebrechts (Ubuntu Community Council, Snapcrafters)
• Monica Ayhens-Madon (Independent)
• Torsten Franz

Room: Sigma – Talks Members of the Community Council are getting together to answer any and all questions you might have. Let's share ideas!

Join the RISC-V revolution (Devices)

• Heinrich Schuchardt (Canonical)

Room: Lambda – Talks This session will help you getting started on the RISC-V architecture. We will start with an overview of Ubuntu supported hardware and look into RISC-V virtual machines and docker images. We will will investigate the boot flow and have a glimpse on building packages and snaps for RISC-V. The state of available software will be discussed. The RISC-V ISA is evolving fast. Let's see what this will mean for Ubuntu.

Importance of Measuring Trust in Organizations and How Community Presence can Help (Community)

• Aparna Sundar (OpenSearch Project)
• Kris Freedain

Room: Omega 2 – Plenary While transparency is a key pillar of open-source projects, questions on trust often surface. Critics of open-source code question the level of self-critique that contributors demonstrate that could end up in “bad faith” commits. Critiques also argue and question if the open-source system is designed for security given the nature of the lack of accountability, given the open-source or “free” nature and vulnerability of developers to hackers etc. As the source code is available to anyone to modify or distribute, developers trusting the project is important. Individual developers and companies alike trust open-source software as it is easier to use than developing code from scratch. The Linux foundation offers ways to measure security awareness, and the success of an open-source program. That said, other ways to measure trust in organizations exists. The basic premise of trust in an organization is to define the quality of a relationship between individuals and the organization. Trust essentially is a multi-level construct, that is culturally-rooted, is an outcome of communication by the organization, dynamic, and multi-dimensional. Trust has a measurable financial impact in an organization. Measuring a community’s trust in an organization can be multi-pronged. The project could measure perceived dependability by the community, the perceived sense of control mutuality, perceived commitment, satisfaction, communal relationship, and importantly exchange relationship. Depending on community perception, the open-source project could enhance trust in multiple ways. Strategies recommended by the Linux foundation include seeking out influential peers and mentors, encouraging and practicing an Open and Collaborative mindset when implementing open-source infrastructure, adopting IT flexible IT infrastructure that is supportive of open-source development, adopting and tracking metrics that are designed for open-source environment, adopting a tailored but lightweight approach to code contributions, sharing information, contribute to products and services to remain relevant and up to date, support maintainers, reduce technical debt, develop talent internally, support and develop mentorship programs, participate in technical discussions to increase visibility.

Go live with confidence: enhancing security with .NET on chiseled Ubuntu containers (Security)

• Richard Lander (Program manager at Microsoft)

Room: Sigma – Talks In anticipation of the awaited .NET 8 LTS release, Richard Lander —Program Manager for the .NET open-source platform— takes the stage to present how Microsoft and Canonical have worked and innovated together to elevate security standards, while migrating .NET applications to containerised infrastructure. This talk will showcase the inception of chiselled Ubuntu containers, specifically designed for .NET, their impact on the software supply chain, and how they can help you move to production with confidence. From beginners to the more advanced technical audience, this session offers a comprehensive understanding of robust container security practices without compromising on development experience, efficiency and flexibility, with the example of .NET applications on Ubuntu OCI containers.

How to Create Flutter Applications for the Ubuntu Desktop (Application Ecosystem)

• Dennis Loose (Canonical)

Room: Beta 1 – Workshops With the help of Dart libraries developed by Canonical and the Ubuntu Flutter Community, we will build a simple desktop application that seamlessly integrates into the infrastructure and the visual style of the Ubuntu Desktop environment. We will also discuss common testing strategies and learn how to use them with Flutter applications.

Bringing Windows applications to Linux app stores (Application Ecosystem)

• Merlijn Sebrechts (Ubuntu Community Council, Snapcrafters)

Room: Lambda – Talks We want to make it as easy as possible to publish Windows applications in the Snap Store for Linux. For this reason, we created the [sommelier](https://github.com/snapcrafters/sommelier-core) project, which uses Wine and Snapcraft to create a universal Linux package containing a Windows app. The project is currently used by about 40 snaps for open and closed source software such as [Notepad++](https://snapcraft.io/notepad-plus-plus), [foobar2000](https://snapcraft.io/foobar2000), [Cryptool 1](https://snapcraft.io/cryptool), and [TrackMania Nations Forever](https://snapcraft.io/tmnationsforever). We explain the long and complicated history of the project, how it works, the future roadmap, and end with a small demo showing how to get started packaging your first Windows app for Linux.

Local Community Lunch

• Philipp Kewisch (Community Team Leader | Canonical)
• Mattia Rizzolo (Ubuntu Developer, Ubuntu Membership Board, Debian Developer, Reproducible Builds)
• Khairul Aizat Kamarudzzaman (Ubuntu Membership Board)
• Aaron Prisk (Canonical)

Room: Omega 2 – Plenary Couldn't get enough of the local communities session? We couldn't either! Let's meet up for Lunch in the Esplanade Restaurant on the ground level. We'll be sitting either to the right of the buffet, or in the back area that is usually barred off.

Building an Open Source Community Beyond the Code (Community)

• Carolina Alves Portugal (Kaleidos)
• Andres Gonzalez (Kaleidos / Penpot)

Room: Sigma – Talks This presentation will highlight the importance of fostering an inclusive environment that welcomes contributions from all stakeholders. The talk will exemplify how such a diverse community has contributed to shaping Penpot into a better product. The diversity of ideas, perspectives, and experiences has fueled innovation, improved product functionality, and broadened the tool's appeal across different user groups. Furthermore, the presentation will share valuable insights into fostering inclusivity and openness in open source communities. It will delve into practical strategies and initiatives that break down barriers to participation, making open source more accessible to individuals across various roles, skill levels, and geographical locations. This will underscore the belief that an open source community can, and should, be a welcoming space for all who wish to contribute, learn, and innovate.

Behind the Scenes of tox: The Journey of Rewriting a Python Tool with Over 10 Million Monthly Downloads (Application Ecosystem)

• Jürgen Gmach (Canonical)

Room: Sigma – Talks Do you recall what developer legend Joel Spolsky called the "single worst strategic mistake" in [Things You Should Never Do](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/)? Rewriting software from scratch. That is what we did. For the [tox](https://tox.wiki/en/latest/) test automation tool. A tool, downloaded more than 10 million times a month, both heavily used in the open source community, and in multi-billion dollar companies alike. I invite you to join me on the very personal journey of rewriting tox, a journey, which already started in 2019. We will have a look at the initial motivations for the rewrite, the design decisions, the challenges, and the lessons learned. We will reconstruct why it took more than three years from the idea to the release, why this was a good thing, and why you should consider a rewrite, too. I will explain what we did to take care that the release would cause the least amount of issues, why the rewrite was necessary to make the software future proof and modular. But most importantly, you will get to know the maintainers and their motivation.

9 tips for better writing (Content & Design)

• Graham Morrison (Canonical)

Room: Lambda – Talks Writing is difficult. It takes time and effort, with many distractions along the way. Whether you lack the confidence to write, or find yourself thinking too little (or too much) about your words, it doesn’t have to be this way. In this talk, Graham will share some of the lessons he’s learnt while trying to be a better writer, with practical advice and hacks for overcoming common problems. From the benefits of poor memory and the relevance of anti-aliasing algorithms, to how the movie Tenet is an accurate metaphor for technical writing. Expect quick tips and experience-driven thoughts on producing brilliant copy, taking you from the seed of an idea through to a published result you can be proud of, whether it’s a single page or six hundred.

Achieving A Circular Economy With Free Software (Community)

• Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss (KDE)

Room: Omega 2 – Plenary Digital technology is a major contributor to environmental harm, from the 'tsunami' of e-waste filling landfills to CO2 emissions on a par with with aviation industry. Oft overlooked is that software itself plays a crucial role. Software and hardware are inextricably linked. A Free Software license means the linear digital economy of consume, use, and discard can be interrupted, shifting instead to a circular economy of reuse and repair -- both for software AND for hardware. In early 2023 KDE published the handbook "Applying The Blue Angel Criteria To Free Software", the culmination of a 21-month project funded by the German government. The handbook presents the whys, whats, and hows for certifying software as sustainable with the Blue Angel ecolabel. In this talk I will provide an overview of the environmental harm driven by software and how Free Software is well-positioned to address the issues. I will link the inherent values that come with a Free & Open Source Software license to sustainable software design, and I will present the various ways that Free Software aligns with the Blue Angel ecolabel. Finally, I will provide an overview of the current sustainability goal of KDE and the work of the KDE Eco initiative through the FOSS Energy Efficiency Project. This includes publishing the KDE Eco handbook, setting up a measurement lab for FOSS developers (KEcoLab), squashing hundreds of efficiency bugs, among others.