FOSDEM 2008

Fosdem 2008 is already over. Definitively one of the most crowded editions, and the one people will refer to as the sauna edition, due to the high temperatures in the different rooms. Hereunder a list of sessions I frequented :

* I started in the Drupal devroom listening to 2 Drupal talks. The first featured some of the new goodies that are in Drupal 6, and will be in Drupal 7. Interesting, but way too short to get a good glimpse of the new version(s). The second talk was about Drupal theming. A bit dissapointing, cause it didn't shed enough light on the difficult task that is Drupal theming.

* Then of to the Mozilla devroom, where the boys of Miro were talking about their attempt of creating a full-featured media player, capable of getting its content from internet. Seems like they were trying to build an open source contestor against Joost or iTunes, or maybe they were just preaching the revolution in medialand, and in the meantime earn a buck with it. I'm afraid Miro will tumble in the big gap that's between Mac OS' media player and some Media Center software.

* The next session was a good intro into CentOS, the famous RedHat EL compatible distribution. Seven years of support, now that's what I call long-term. How can any sysadmin not fall in love with CentOS ?

* At that time, I suffered from a neck ache that was killing me, but I still joined the Debian devroom. Last year the room was way too small, but this year was even worse. Please Fosdem folks, give these Debian nerds a decent room to meet next year.
Petter Reinholdtsen is the sysv-rc maintainer in Debian, and has the power to halt every Debian box in the world by making a mistake in his package(s). The subject of his talk was the problem of the ordening in the rc-script numbering. The solution was a central authorising package, with some control scripts for Debian packagers. I must say I rather like the OpenSolaris SMF framework for starting services, a great centralised way -with logfiles- for service management. Have a look at SMF in a day if you want more detail about this great software.