Tickets for foss-north 2019

The ticket sales for foss-north 2019 has opened. Get yours at http://foss-north.se/2019/tickets.html.

This year the conference consists of three parts: community day, conference days and training day.

The community day is free of charge and consists of a number of workshops and hackathons throughout Gothenburg. The conference, two days, two tracks, is the core of the event and is run as previous years. The training day consists of full day trainings and come with an additional cost. If you want to attend you need to get the ticket for the training session you want.

Speak at foss-north 2019

Would you like to speak at foss-north 2019? This is an excellent opportunity to come join a great conference on the Swedish west coast and meet the free and open source community!

The call for paper is open until late February – but it always helps if you submit your talks early. The submissions are made here. We gather a mix of different speakers – experienced speakers and first timers, technically detailed and process oriented, new contents and really old stuff. As long as it is interesting and fun, you are more than welcome. You can check-out videos and slides for past events for inspiration.

There is also an opportunity for projects who wants to do something fun to join in. Be it a development sprint, an install fest, a workshop or just a general meetup – join in and be a part of the foss-north community day. Reach out to me (e8johan, gmail) and I’ll tell you more.

2018-11: Mender and Reverse Engineering

Last week the last meetup of 2018 took place at ICTech. The event had two speakers. Mirza Krak spoke about Mender and software updates and Philip Karlsson talked about reverse engineering using x64dbg.

You can find the video recordings of both sessions below:

Big thanks to everyone who joined this meetup and who took part in foss-gbg during 2018. See you all again in 2019!

foss-gbg 2018-11: Mender and hacking

It is time for the November foss-gbg. We will meet on the 14th and listen to Mirza Krak talk about Mender, followed by a hacking workshop by Philip Karlsson, so make sure to bring a laptop!

Robust software updates on Embedded Linux devices is complex, and doing robust software updates over-the-air adds to the complexity. The hardships come of course from the embedded environment which differ in many ways compared to desktop or server Linux installations, where you must handle poor mobile network connectivity, sudden power-loss and never leave a device in a unusable state (brick) when doing the update OTA.

There are a lot of examples that have gotten attention in media, where unstable software update solutions have caused real-life problems which could have been mitigated by a robust software solution that is able to handle the corner cases that exist in the embedded environment.

In this talk Mirza Krak will present Mender, Apache 2.0 licensed end-to-end software update solution. This is a deep-dive session that will cover:

– project ecosystem and community
– technical insights
– security insights

And will of course include a mandatory demo.

Mirza Krak is currently part of the Mender.io open source project to deploy OTA software updates to embedded Linux devices. He is an embedded Linux solution specialist with seven years of experience in the field with expertise in within Board Support Package development which ranges from hardware bring-up, boot-loaders, Linux kernel and build systems (Yocto/OE-core).

Mirza was an Mender community member for a couple of years which led to an employment in 2018 to continue to work on the Mender project full-time.

Mirza has spoken at various conferences including Embedded Linux Conference and foss-north.

The hacking workshop starts with the MiGiC Guitar to MIDI Converter and focuses on how the free software x64dbg can be used to understand how the copy protection to MiGiC was circumvented.Shortly after the commercial release of MiGiC 1.0, the product was found cracked at one of the more known torrent pages. Since development hours were spent trying to protect the product he became curious in how the attackers broke the protection. In order to investigate this the open source debugger / disassembler x96 dbg was acquired to perform an analysis of both the cracked and uncracked binary.

In the session Philip will show you parts of the analysis as well as presenting three so called ”crackmes” that you will get the opportunity to find weaknesses in using the x64dbg tool. Therefore, its a good idea to bring a PC so you can use the tool yourself.


The venue host for the evening are ictech. They will provide lighter snacks and beverages, as well as the location.

Image result for ictech logo sverige

As usual you can reserve your seat at meetup.

foss-gbg 2018-10: Workshop om oppenkod.se

Det är dags för en workshop om oppenkod.se. Du kan se presentationen som startade det hela här:

Vi träffas den 16/10 och delar lite mat och skapar innehåll för websidan.

OBS! Om du deltar i detta möte så förväntas du bidra i arbetet!

Värd för träffen är Kuro Studio som står för lokal och enklare förtäring.

Reservera din plats på meetup.

Lyssna till Daniel Stenberg

Evolve Technology kör sin pre-standup meetup nästa vecka och Daniel Stenberg – mannen bakom curl – kommer till stan.

Daniel Stenberg, författaren av curl kommer till Göteborg för att berätta lite om hans resa med att få curl att växa från ingenting för att på 20 år finnas i varje uppkopplad apparat på jorden. Välkommen till Scandic Rubinen i Göteborg på en frukostföreläsning den 10e oktober klockan 08:30

Biljetter och detaljer hittar ni på meetupen.

foss-gbg 2018-09: C on bare metal ARM

Septemberträffen ägnades åt att köra kod direkt på en ARM-processor. D.v.s. ingen bootloader, inget operativsystem, ingenting. Jacob Mossberg talade om hur detta går till under kvällens huvudnummer. Slides och bakgrundsmaterial hittar du här.

Under kvällen spelades även en video in. Tyvärr avbröts inspelningen något tidigt, men större delen av talket finns med (och resten går att läsa om på Jacobs blog).

Efter Jacob så var det dags för lightning talks. Vi talade snabbt om oppenkod.se innan Anders Björklund visade sitt projekt för att kombinera proot och Raspbian.

Slutligen så vill vi passa på att tacka CyberCom som stog för lokal och förtäring!

Lite bilder från kvällen:

Flytt av mailinglistan

Servern som foss-gbg levt på hittills håller på att bli gammal. Därför kommer vi att flytta mailinglistan till samma server som foss-sthlm håller till på. Stort tack till Daniel och Haxx för hjälpen med detta.

Alla medlemmar från dagens lista kommer att få en inbjudan till att hänga med över till den nya. Du kan även hitta den nya listan här.

Baksidan med detta är att vi tyvärr kommer att tappa arkivet från den gamla listan så småningom. Det nya arkivet kommer att leva på mail archive.

foss-gbg 2018-09: Running C programs bare metal on ARM using the GNU toolchain

Det är dags för Septemberträffen. Vi träffas den 26:e September och denna gång pratar Jacob Mossberg om att köra C-kod direkt på en ARM. Som vanligt så avslutar vi med lightning talks.

In this talk Jacob will demonstrate how to run a simple C program on an
ARM Cortex M3 using the GNU development tool chain. He will examine the generated assembler code to come up with the minimal prerequisites that must be in place in order to run C code. He will go on and show how to fulfill those prerequisites using the linker and by writing some startup
code. The presentation will finish up by making use of the GNU debugger
to inspect the execution of the program.

Jacob has worked with embedded related projects in the automotive and
telecommunication domains. His main interest is embedded development
using C and C++. He also tries to stay up to date on Python. In his
current project he tries to make the most of the Ruby programming
language running on an embedded Linux device.

Värd för eventet denna gång är Cybercom Group som står för lättare förtäring och lokal. Biljetter hittar ni som vanligt på meetup.