Breaking New Ground: Mobile Linux Hackday #1 in České Budějovice Outperforms Prague!

If you’ve been following the Mobile Linux journey in Czechia, you know we’ve built a fantastic routine in Prague. We have a really successful series behind us consisting of 7 monthly hackdays, always hosted at the Prague SUSE office. But when the stars aligned last week, we decided it was finally time to take the show on the road and organize our very first Mobile Linux Hackday in South Bohemia.

Honestly, I am super happy with how it turned out. We headed south to České Budějovice and ended up with a significantly higher attendance than we usually get in Prague! Because the city doesn’t get flooded with open-source events all the time, the local Tuxies community stopped by in droves, which was amazing to see.

How Mobile Linux Hackday #1 Came Together

The whole thing came together beautifully thanks to a mix of perfect timing and great people. Petr Hošek from Jihočeská Univerzita is a regular at our Prague meetups, and he helped anchor us locally. Plus, SUSE was hosting its internal SUSE Labs conference in town from Monday to Thursday. Since everyone was already arriving on Sunday anyway, we managed to secure the “Vajgar” conference room at the Clarion Hotel (the venue for Labs) a day before the main event kicked off.

The crowd in the room was incredible. We had David Heidelberg, our iconic Czech Mobile Linux figure, alongside Takashi Iwai from the SUSE Kernel team, who is a legendary figure behind ALSA and the Linux sound subsystem. We also had Michal Suchánek showcasing his eye-catching e-ink phone, and Petr Vorel, who is also very active on the mobile development scene. It was also super nice to meet Pavel Petrman from ICZ Group.

The room was packed with other amazing guests from both the local scene and SUSE employees who came in early for Labs. We even had a friendly Technical Project Manager Hsinyu Ko from Taiwan who is currently based in Czechia, Ostrava as far as I remember. As a TPM myself, it felt pretty nice not to be the only Technical Project Manager in the room for once! People really traveled far to meet up with us.

Announcing openALT České Budějovice

We also used the meetup to announce the upcoming openALT Budweis (České Budějovice), which will essentially be the first larger FOSS-related conference in the area. Roman Blanco from Red Hat, who is organizing openALT in Brno, literally traveled all the way from Copenhagen, Denmark and back just to hang out with us.

While we were in town, we also took a trip over to the Jihočeská Univerzita campus to check out where openALT will actually be happening, and we had a great time checking out the university’s recording studio. It is incredibly exciting to see the openALT brand growing even stronger by establishing roots outside its traditional base.

So far everything shows that openALT Budweis will be a success as the local community is really looking forward to get together in a big format.

Hands-on Flashing, Open Collaboration, and After-Hours

To kick things off, we had a nice introduction round to get a grasp on people’s interests and get to know each other. From there, the hacking began. We chatted about the current possibilities of Mobile Linux, dove into openSUSE on embedded platforms, and grouped together for some amazing hands-on sessions where people could flash various mobile devices.

We wrapped everything up with a great open Q&A and general discussions that carried on long into the evening. In general, this was just an awesome networking event for people with similar tech interests. It proved that the hunger for open source, privacy focused mobile tech reaches far beyond Prague. Huge thanks to Petr and Tuxies for organizing and marketing the event, as well as driving us around, SUSE’s Jiří Kosina for helping me to secure a room for the event in Clarion, and also everyone who hopped on a train or plane to join us.

Of course, no proper hackday is complete without an after-party. Once we wrapped things up at the hotel, we headed over to the traditional Czech restaurant Perla right next to the Clarion for some great food, drinks, and networking. And for the tough, core group among us, the night didn’t end there we ended up keeping the discussions going late into the night at the City Life bar!

I’ll be dropping a few pictures from the event right below so you can see how the day went!

Don’t forget to follow our community updates on Mastodon at mastodonczech.cz/@mobilni_linux_cs_sk to catch the next one! See our google photos album for more pictures.