Tag: Czech Republic

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Announcing Flock to Fedora 2026 (14-16 June): Join Us in Prague!

Banner image for the Flock to Fedora 2026 conference. The image shows Colúr, the animated mascot of Flock, holding a megaphone. The "Flock" logo appears with "Prague, Czech Republic" and "June 14 - 16, 2026" written below the Flock logo.

The official dates and location are set for Flock to Fedora 2026, the premier annual conference for Fedora Project contributors. The event will take place from 14-16 June 2026, in Prague, Czechia.

For Flock 2026, we are returning to the Vienna House by Wyndham Andel’s Prague, located at:

Stroupeznickeho 21
Prague, 150 00
Czech Republic

While all three days will be full conference days, the arrangement of the schedule will change slightly in 2026. Sunday, 14 June, will be designated as Day 0, featuring workshops, team meetups, and hands-on contributor sessions. The main conference activities, including streamed content, the opening keynote, and other sessions, are scheduled for Monday, 15 June, and Tuesday, 16 June.

Coordinated Scheduling with DevConf CZ

Following community feedback from last year, Flock 2026 has been scheduled to align more closely with DevConf.CZ. The conference will conclude just before DevConf.CZ begins in Brno (18-20 June 2026). This compressed travel schedule is intended to make it easier for community members who wish to attend both events.

Call for Proposals & Conference Themes

The Call for Proposals (CFP) for Flock 2026 will open in early December 2025 and close shortly after FOSDEM 2026 (31 January – 1 February). Speaker confirmations are scheduled to be sent in March 2026.

For Flock 2026, we are taking a more focused approach to session content. The Fedora Council, FESCo, and the Mindshare Committee are shaping key themes for the CFP. All presentation and workshop submissions should align with one of these themes. More details will be shared when the CFP opens.

Planning for Flock 2026

Here is what you need to know to plan your attendance:

  • Registration: Conference registration is scheduled to open in January 2026.
  • Sponsorship: Is your company or organization interested in sponsoring Flock 2026? Our sponsorship prospectus for Flock 2026 is now available on the Flock 2026 website. Organizations interested in supporting Flock and the Fedora community are encouraged to review the prospectus and contact the organizing team with any questions.
  • Hotel Block: A discounted block of rooms is arranged at the conference hotel. More information about the discounted hotel block can be found on the Flock website.
  • Travel Day & Connections: 17 June is designated as a free travel day between Flock to Fedora 2026 and DevConf.CZ. Frequent bus and train connections are available for travel between Prague and Brno.
  • Sponsored Travel: We intend to offer sponsored travel again for Flock to Fedora 2026. More details will follow in December 2025.

Get Involved & Ask Questions

The official Flock to Fedora 2026 Matrix room, #flock:fedoraproject.org, is the best place to connect with organizers and other community members. We encourage you to join the channel for the latest updates and to ask any questions you may have.

Flock to Fedora 2026 web site

A Note on Our Flock to Fedora 2026 & 2027 Plans

We recognize that returning to the same city and venue for a second consecutive year is a departure from Flock’s tradition. This decision was made intentionally with two key goals in mind.

First, by working with a familiar venue, our organizing team can optimize its processes and plan further in advance. This stability for Flock to Fedora 2026 will give us more opportunity to improve our internal processes and explore new ways to incorporate community input into the design of Fedora’s flagship contributor conference.

Second, this allows us to plan for a significant change in 2027. The Flock organizing team is committed to exploring new locations for Flock 2027, with a particular focus on regions outside of North America and Europe. We acknowledge the travel difficulties many of our contributors in regions like LATAM and APAC face. We learned valuable lessons from past planning cycles and are eager to achieve this goal, while also recognizing that unforeseen circumstances can impact our plans. We will work with community members in these regions to explore possible options and conduct thorough research on pricing and availability for 2027.

We look forward to seeing you in Prague for Flock 2026, 14-16 June.

— The Flock to Fedora Planning Team

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Fedora at the Czech National Library of Technology

Where do you turn when you have a fleet of public workstations to manage? If you’re the Czech National Library of Technology (NTK), you turn to Fedora. Located in Prague, the NTK is the Czech Republic’s largest science and technology library. As part of its public service mission, the NTK provides 150 workstations for public use.

In 2018, the NTK moved these workstations from Microsoft Windows to Fedora. In the press release announcing this change, Director Martin Svoboda said switching to Fedora will “reduce operating system support costs by about two-thirds.” The choice to use Fedora was easy, according to NTK Linux Engineer Miroslav Brabenec. “Our entire Linux infrastructure runs on RHEL or CentOS. So for desktop systems, Fedora was the obvious choice,” he told Fedora Magazine.

User reception

Changing an operating system is always a little bit risky—it requires user training and outreach. Brabenec said that non-IT staff asked for training on the new system. Once they learned that the same (or compatible) software was available, they were fine.

The Library’s customers were on board right away. The Windows environment was based on thin client terminals, which were slow for intensive tasks like video playback and handling large office suite files. The only end-user education that the NTK needed to create was a basic usage guide and a desktop wallpaper that pointed to important UI elements.

User guidance desktop wallpaper from the National Technology Library.

Although Fedora provides development tools used by the Faculty of Information Technology at the Czech Technical University—and many of the NTK’s workstation users are CTU students—most of the application usage is what you might expect of a general-purpose workstation. Firefox dominates the application usage, followed by the Evince PDF viewer,  and the LibreOffice suite.

Updates

NTK first deployed the workstations with Fedora 28. They decided to skip Fedora 29 and upgraded to Fedora 30 in early June 2019. The process was simple, according to Brabenec. “We prepared configuration, put it into Ansible. Via AWX I restarted all systems to netboot, image with kickstart, after first boot called provisioning callback on AWX, everything automatically set up via Ansible.”

Initially, they had difficulties applying updates. Now they have a process for installing security updates daily. Each system is rebooted approximately every two weeks to make sure all of the updates get applied.

Although he isn’t aware of any concrete plans for the future, Brabenec expects the NTK to continue using Fedora for public workstations. “Everyone is happy with it and I think that no one has a good reason to change it.”