FOSDEM 2006

FOSDEM 2006 was a remarkable edition : first of all, I find it getting every year more and more professionally done, so hats off to the organisers. But most importantly, it featured a new player on the ground, namely OpenSolaris. It wan't so prominently present as other FOSS operating systems, but it featured two lectures by Sun-employee Jon Haslam, off course covering DTrace. Very good demo's about DTrace, though the overlap between the sessions was a bit too large maybe. Oh yeah, Jon, I really like the Ferrari laptop, it makes me very envious.

My laptop is getting terribly slow : the last dist-upgrade took me three hours, which is getting insane. I installed it with a stock 'fat' Debian kernel, which makes it crawl twice as slow. Back to good old 2.4, which is the only thing making it perform decently. I took it along, because I wanted to fiddle with DTrace during the talk, but I remarked the VMWare image wouldn't start cause of the borken Nevada27 build. Bah.

Other interesting talk was the Xen lecture by Ian Pratt. Server virtualisation is big nowadays, and Xen recently surpassed User Mode Linux as hypervisor in Linux. A bit too theoretically, cause I really wanted to see the thing set up and working. Good thing to know is that they are working on non-modified kernel support.

It was the first FOSDEM edition too where I didn't spent any time in the developer rooms. Pity, but the time eluded me.

Serge is right : it even hit me last year, but the number of people running Mac OSX is really vast. Seems that Jamie wasn't the only geek migrating to OSX, or it must be people showing off their Intel edition.