EU OS Hackathon in Paris: Day 1 Progress and Perspectives

On the first day the EU OS Hackathon in Paris, the EU OS project team, a group of fourteen individuals from across Europe, dove into focused work on our Proof-of-Concept for a public sector desktop. We made methodical progress on several key technical objectives throughout the day.

Our early efforts centered on the foundational elements of the operating system we're proposing. We dedicated significant time to building the base EU OS image, a crucial first step. Alongside this, we progressed with implementing full-disk encryption to ensure data security at rest, and successfully integrated FIDO2 hardware key support for an additional layer of authentication to unlock the encrypted volumes. We were pleased to see these initial security-focused goals largely met by the day's end.

As these components solidified, we also turned our attention towards the challenges of managing such systems at scale. We undertook the task of setting up and configuring Foreman for potential fleet management of these desktop environments. This aspect of our work involves us carefully considering how established server management tools can be adapted to the specific requirements of client devices – an area that requires careful thought and often presents unique technical considerations compared to server orchestration. We've noted this as an area for ongoing work and welcome potential community input.

Our agenda for the hackathon also includes exploring user management integration, potentially using FreeIPA, should time allow.

We continue our project with further development and integration planned for tomorrow.