FOSDEM 2004

By kristof on Sun, 02/22/2004 - 21:28

Two days of FOSDEM, the Woodstock for free software geeks, as Sir Tim states so eloquently, have passed. First of all : FOSDEM 2004 was *crowded*, especially on the first day. If the event keeps growing on such a pace, the current location on the Holbosch campus might get too small the next years...

So what talks did we frequented ?

  • Saturday was the least interesting day : Robert Love gave an interesting speech about the impact of the desktop on the Linux kernel. The talk about the Linux 2.6 internals by Jonathan Corbet didn't impress me much. And oh yeah, mental note to myself : do not ever sit next to the only entrance and exit door during the two most popular talks of the whole FOSDEM event...
  • I spent some more time in the Debian and Mozilla developpers rooms, allways good talks for a less crowded public.
  • Sunday was way more interesting : I spent the first two hours in the Debian developpers room, listening to talks by Martin Michlmayr and Wouter Verhelst on the build process used by the Debian project.
  • Headed over to the Mozilla developpers room, where I attended a workshop on Mozilla debugging. Nice to see that tech evangelism still works :)
  • Headed to the bar for a snack, bought some geekwear and then returned for a LVM2 status update by Alisdair Kergon.
  • Back to the Debian developpers room, to listen to some of the (mainly legal) problems for packaging Java stuff in Debian.
  • The next two talks were the most interesting of the FOSDEM event : Dave Cross gave a really interesting speech on the current status of Perl6
  • and Richard Kilmer presented a nice introduction on Ruby. Very interesting and clean programming language. Should definitively try this out (but first Python ;) I really like the idea of treating everything as an object, and at least Ruby has some funky basic operators on arrays, unlike Perl. Or does someone know some CPAN module for array operators like intersection, union, difference ? I *really* need this stuff for porting apt to Solaris.

Most funny moment of the day : the sign at the toilets, referring to them as the SCO developers room :)