Went to FOSDEM 2010

Having an extraordinaire hangover is, by far, not the best way to start attending a conference. But with FOSDEM there doesn't seems to be any alternative. The night before the conference a bar is kidnapped from the night circuit so FOSDEM-goers can get together to have a drink or two... or three, four, I-lost-the-count. You have to buy 'tokens' from the organizers (EUR 3, standard price) and then exchange them at the bar. I bought 4, which probably it was a little too much for me (I weight around 60Kg and my food input during the day was not even on the 'enough' level), but that was not the reason I was so hungover the next day. The reason was that clever people were leaving early and left their extra tokens behind, and that I didn't control myself. That's probably because the first one I had was a Delirium Tremens, which is above 8% instead of the normal 4/5%. Whoever to blame, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get off bed before 15h the next day.

So the first thing I did in FOSDEM was to miss the talk about beernet1, something that sounds like a transactional and replicated DHT. I also missed the KDE group photo, which would have been a good way to introduce myself to the (rest of the2) KDE guys.

The first talk I saw was Will Stephenson's talk about OBS which at first I wasn't really interested in seeing, but end up being really interesting. The OpenSuSE guys have a huge farm of machines for building packages. They can build packages for most of the mainstream distributions (I remember OpenSuse itself, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Mandriva and more), for all the versions that run KDE4, for several archs. All that it's needed is the source code and the packaging instructions. And all this is available to us, developers, just a registration away. The other half of the talk was in charge of Luboš Luňák, who promised to also release a tool to help to generate the .spec and the debian/{control,rules,etc} files. I await spectantly for them!

That night I hung around with some Debian guys, some of them I knew from DebConf8. We found a nice italian restaurant, where we ate pizza and pasta almost alone in the fisrt floor. The waiter was all the time telling jokes and when we were asking for the bill someone asked for another beer, which led the rest for asking for dessert and coffee. Fun time, which continued in the Monk bar until 24h. One thing about bars in Belgium: they don't have the smoke ban, so by the end of the night I was reeking of smoke even when I don't smoke at all.

The second day gave me the surprise that the KDE track had already finished (it was only the previous afternoon), so I wandered around a little. I went to a talk called "apt-get for Android", which given my current work got all my attention. Unluckly it was only just an Android app store (a free one, both in the beer and freedom sense) and not an effort to port some Debian stuff to the platform (it wouldn't make any sense anyways). I also saw the Ofono talk, but I didn't even got it's motive of existence.

Sebastian Trueg gave a talk about the Nepomuk stack. It's impressively huge and it's incredibly useful, but it still needs more integration into apps. I got the apportunity to talk with Trueg after the talk and I promissed to look into a Konqueror plugin who's sitting in playground. I'm also concerned about the UI for tagging/adding tags. Let's see if I can keep my promises.


  1. again, given the size and behaviour of my hangover and the project's name, even if I could crawl off the bed in time to see it, probably it would be not advisable anyways :) 

  2. being a user and a more-times-off-than-on developer makes me a KDE guy, but I'm still not confident enough.