- Wanted to get to kdbus, couldn't
- Galera Cluster IRL
- Sailfish intro
- Sailfish round table
- Debian Contributors
- Sailfish dinner
Travelling to Brussles from The Netherlands is a joy (takes 3 hours from Hilversum to Brussels). There is no excuse to miss FOSDEM when you are in Europe, especially within a <12 hour train's reach.
I had 4 focus points:
- kdbus (by Pottering)
- Galera Cluster IRL
- Sailfish presentations and community meeting
- Key Signing Party
The event started with an opening with general information, which, among other news, claimed "Ipv6 only by default in FOSDEM this year". These great news were met with applauses. After that everybody ran away to the tracks. I started connecting to ipv6 with devices at hand. Here is the status.
- LG Nexus 7 (Android): "failed to connnect". Impossible to use.
- Jolla (Sailfish OS): "connection successful", but glitches when trying to access network. Works but unstable.
- My laptop (Debian Testing): required changes in /etc/network/interfaces and
manually setting up default route:
ip ro add default via <net>::1. I couldn't make it work automaticall in 15 minutes, which was my treshold for manual configuration. - My wife's laptop (Windows 7). Worked out of the box.
I did not have an out-of-the-box Ubuntu laptop with network manager; my
configuration is naked wpa_supplicant + debian INTERFACES(5), that would have
been interesting to test.
Long live Windows.
The room was full and I was not allowed inside. Was really sad. I'll see the video from linux.conf.au, as, according to some people, it was an identical presentation, even the jokes were the same. Later I learned that if you want to go to a talk of potential high interest, you have to go to the previous one to reserve a seat.
Art van Scheppingen gave a presentation about Spil usage of Galera plugin for MySQL. The talk was a very good introduction from the DBA's perspective why would want to use Galera instead of asynchronous MMM setup.
It was technical, and this introduction would be enough to go and give a reason for my manager to go and replace MMM with Galera in certain circumstances. I have a few personal doubts about Galera's applicability, but this is a completely different discussion.
Since I jumped into N900/N9/Maemo/Meego/Nemo/Sailfish/Jolla train quite late, I lack technical background on how the phone works. I expected to be gently introduced to technical software aspects of the phone: the talk title was:
Technical introduction to the deeper parts of SailfishOS, a Qt5-Wayland based mobile OS.
Carsten Munk was presenting some fun work on how they plugged Bionic (android libc) and glibc to the same process and what followed it. It is interesting, I understand the use case, but I think the topic could have been chosen better. For this large audience I was expecting to give a broader (still technical) introduction. They missed a potential marketing talk for a full conference room of geeks.
After I spoke later with a few of my friends with even less background in Jolla, during the talk they got the impression that almost everything in Sailfish is closed. It is a very bad impression to leave in these circumstances, especially that Jolla is actually going the other way. Only UI and a few binary blobs in kernel are closed source; open source UI is being worked on. I don't know how this happened, but this is the impression they were left with. Bad.
Later there was Sailfish round table. That had a few topics in mind with a very strict time plan for each which I loved. Discussions are not noteworthy to go in detail.
Jolla Community dinner was the best part of FOSDEM by far. Me and my wife enjoyed it very much; we met great motivated people and had a great night in Brussels after that. Thanks!
First experience of a factory KSP for me. In 70 minutes I confirmed 72 keys. I left early, because after that 70 minutes I was too tired to continue. Fun, useful, very geek like. Interesting fact: from 72 keys I have verified most were from Europe (obviously), a few from South America (Chile, Columbia, Peru), Australia and South Africa. Contrary to my expectations, there was noone from the USA.
Organization wise, FOSDEM is very different from other conferences I have attended. From the outside it looks like a huge orderless anthill. If you look carefully, everything is greatly organized. Geeks gather and do stuff.
Quality of the talks is a different topic. I can tell for sure that there are really top-notch speakers and programmers attending, and conference organizers are doing a really big job in filtering and picking the talks. But where you actually end up is another matter; it might be great, might be boring, it might be something you completely do not expect and are very happy with in the end.
See you next year!
Edit after talk with stskeeps
Carsten Munk told me why did not want to do a marketing talk. It is for exactly the same reason why I was expecting a marketing talk. Because there were a bunch of geeks in the room expecting to hear something challenging! I had another look into the presentation; half of it is background, the other half is libhybris.
stskeeps from IRC regarding closed source:
a general reflection on your friend's reactions to my talk: partly due to the obscurity of the architecture diagram; but also that for many, the entry point for -doing- open source development is top down <...> ie, from what you touch and feel - which is the ui, be it command line or a qml one; and then you want to develop further down in middleware
That's probably why they got that impression: closed blobs in kernel bundled with a closed-source UI. I will advise my friends to look closer at the architecture diagram. Thanks Carsten for clarifications!
