GNU

The 10th edition of Fosdem was quite crowdy, even in that degree that even the larger rooms were completely filled. In the AW building, some sessions had to disallow people in order to prevent security problems. One might suggest another campus for future editions...
Just like last year, lots of cloud-based talks, and also remarkble, lots of talks about cross-distro management. Anyhow, this is my track :

1. Cloudlets, universal server images for the cloud
2. apt-get for Android
3. Cross-distro packaging with (top)git
4. Large scale data analysis made easy with Apache Hadoop
5. Scaling Facebook with Open Source tools
6. Continuous packaging with project-builder.org
7. Debian secrets : power tools for power users

Also, in a stunning breach with traditions, I decided not to buy a Debian t-shirt, but a Gnome one instead...

FOSDEM 2009 was a remarkable edition : it featured one of the most interesting talk sets ever, almost up to the point where I regretted not attending the Saturday. It was, as I realised myself suddenly, the edition where cloud computing was prevailing in Open Source : high-availability, database shards and distributed filesystem replication.
Defining your agenda is probably the most difficult task when attending FOSDEM; here's my tracklist :

• What's new in Drupal 7 ?
• MySQL-HA
• Poor man's SAN with CentOS and gPXE
• OpenSuSE on netbooks
• SysLinux
• Ext4
• Database shards at Netlog

Also spotted : lots and lots of netbooks (me too !), and a first IRL view of an Android device. Neat !

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.

FOSDEM 2007 is over, and it was, as usual, quite good. I could only make it on Sunday, rushing from one place to another. Content Management Systems are big, every company is using one, so Plone and Drupal were interesting talks. I didn't learned as much new stuff during the Drupal talk, but interesting nevertheless.
Bacula was the reason I attended this FOSDEM day. As backup infrastructure is a large part of my professional occupancy, Bacula was a nice intro in open source backup solutions. Pity there was no time for an extended demo, though.
I ended the day in two developper rooms. The first was an uninspired talk by Sven Luther about the debian kernel in d-i in the next release of Debian. Is it my impression, or are things going from bad to worse in the Debian community ? The final talk featured a first attempt to Access, with the Gnome application Glom. Nice stuff, something to check out.

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.

Due to my car troubles, I spent the shortest FOSDEM visit ever last weekend in Brussels. Just enough time to see these presentations :

• Alan Cox gave a speech about kernel development management. Nothing too much new here that we didn't knew already, but still interesting to hear.
• Thomas Lange explained Debians FAI system, its automated installation process for servers. I already played around with this before, but found it not really something you set up quickly, as also was clearly explained in the talk. Unluckily, FAI has no support for LVM, which is rather a shame, though it's in the development pipeline.
• Finally, I stayed in the Debian developer's room to listen to Jeroen Wolfellaar, who explained the Debian QA team procedures.

Short but good. Pity I couldn't be there on Saturday : I really wanted to hear the talks about Snort and Nagios. The many developers rooms were a great idea, and the new AW building used to accomodate them was a great idea. And God, some nerds really can be a pain in the ass, like the one in the FAI presentation, who really insisted on having a USB storage based FAI system.

There's alot of agitation around software patents lately, and with good reason. Software patents are a serious impediment for software development, and the problem goes further than development too : it would be an open door for more restrictive measurements like enforced DRM, where for example, CDs that you buy would only be playable on certified equipment (not on your PC or car radio). Alan Cox, famous Linux hacker, has issued an open letter in which he asks to vote for members of parliament which are against software patents. Softwarepatenten.be has a nice list of Belgian MP's with their attitude towards software patents.

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 :)