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EU OS sprint at hackathon in Paris 2-4 June (pre-event 31 May-1 June) (online participation possible)

Call for Participants: Hackdays and Pre-Event in Paris (31 May - 4 June)

Hackathon
Website: https://hackdays.numerique.gouv.fr
Topic: AI & Digital Workspace
Track: operating system track to be added soon on the website above

Through informal talks with zendis 🇩🇪 (maker of openDesk) and DINUM 🇫🇷 (maker of La Suite and organiser of these hackdays), I received support to have a first in-person event to work on EU OS in a dedicated track. Since 22 April, EU OS is now also partner of these hack days.

Important

This is a self-paid event. If you cannot afford transport and accommodation, please contact Robert and explain how your contribution can be significant. EU OS will then improvise and try to find funding. 🤞

Pre-Event

While the other software projects such as Docs, Grist or Visio have already a team and a community for some time, this is not the case for EU OS. To catch up and make the most of the days in Paris, I propose therefore a pre-event on the weekend just before: 31 May (Saturday) and 1 June (Sunday).

It is strongly recommended to join, but there is no hard obligation (as we are all volunteers 🙃 ).

Strategy and Work Plan

The overall goal is to develop the Proof-of-Concept (PoC): unattended setup of bootc-based OS with device life cycle management and with user management (without and with integration of ActiveDirectory).

Event-specific goals are:

  • enjoy the event and have fun, 🎉 🍺
  • leave the hackathon with the feeling of accomplishment, 😌
  • leave with a network of similarly minded developers, and 🤝
  • if possible with the acknowledgement of the French government that EU OS should be the way forward for the free OS in France 🇫🇷 and the EU 🇪🇺 .

I expect other projects during this hackathon to develop new features. For EU OS, this is different. Our task will be to:

  1. integrate different existing upstream software components,
  2. possibly fix a few issues in those upstream projects on the way,
  3. demonstrate that the integration works and describe the features/properties of the system
  4. document everything so that system administrators with no experience of the upstream projects have a chance to reproduce the PoC locally
  5. tell everyone in the Internet of this work, in particular those organisations identified as possible early adopters on the use case web page

The scope depends on the time we can dedicate during those 5 days (including 2 days pre-event) and on the expertise of the people attending. The current list of tasks is provisional and sorted from high priority to low priority.

  1. horizontal: documentation of all tasks (spreading knowledge on involved technologies to a larger audience of system administrators is important, so that people understand the vision and system properties)
  2. create a custom OCI OS image with Gitlab CI and blue-build (also demonstrate nesting with recipes.yaml: build another OS on top of the output of blue-build)
  3. update the custom OCI OS image with Gitlab (trigger manual rebuild, then automate rebuild)
  4. install custom OCI OS image on bare metal (first manually, then automatically/unattended for scalability): PXE, Anaconda with kickstart for OCI images, foreman provisioning (with kickstart), kickstart config loaded from OCI repo
  5. setup fleet monitoring: foreman and kartello (see: intro to Katello, Katello Container Registry Update (with some bootc slides at the end), foreman training material)
  6. setup full-disk-encryption (FDE) (password, then TPM, then FIDO2 token) (hardware integration is easier to collaborate on during in-person events, so I put this on the list) German tutorial for FIDO2 with Silverblue, English tutorial for TPM unlocking open fido2 road blocker, #35 (closed) )
  7. setup SSO: https://sssd.io, FreeIPA (choice should be compatible with existing ActiveDirectory)
  8. setup configuration management with foreman: ansible in pull-mqtt mode forum post in Foreman discourse, redhat satellite docu
  9. setup OCI image scanning for Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) and vulnerabilities: https://github.com/anchore/syft/ or https://trivy.dev (trivy does not support Fedora and syft has a bug, discussion at bootc meeting)

Reach out tasks: Invite Paris-based tech blogs and public sector stakeholders to pass by and learn more about EU OS

  • CNIL (french DPA)
  • Gendarmerie (see web page)

TODO: create issues if not done yet and setup a milestone/epic

Current Team

People who expressed their interest (no names unless Robert received consent):

Robert is in touch with a few more and will update the list here accordingly.

Practical Information

Check the official website that provides the most recent and most authoritative information: https://hackdays.numerique.gouv.fr/en

Sign-Up

  1. Please inform about your intention to join the EU OS team at the Hackathon here in the comments or write to Robert.
  2. Wait for a reaction from Robert in his capacity as EU OS project lead
  3. Upon confirmation, sign up for participation in person in Paris through this website: https://pretix.dgnum.eu/dgnum/hack-lsn-2025/
  4. Robert adds you to the invite-only Matrix room for this hackathon

Note

  • This is a public event with limited spots. You can obviously sign up also as in independent participant. However, coordination helps us to better plan.
  • Online participation: If you cannot attend in Paris, you may still participate online through our Matrix room. Note that this is not an online-first event and it may be impractical to ensure online participation for discussions on-site.

Schedule

30/05 31/05 01/06 02/06 03/06 04/06
Arrival in Paris, dinner pre-event pre-event hackathon hackathon hackathon: demonstrations (open for visitors)

The official closure of the hackathon is on Wednesday 4 June at 6PM.

A summary of this issue has been added to the issue board of the hack days event at https://github.com/suitenumerique/hackdays2025/issues/16 .

Edited by Robert Riemann