Andree's Debian & General Musings

I was fortunate enough to attend lca2007 last week and to meet Bruno Cornec, the Mondo Rescue project leader, for the first time in the flesh.

The conference was pretty cool, and I found the quality of the program to be generally impressingly high: Excellent topics, superb presentation skills, humor and genuine passion for the topic at hand. The atmosphere and organisation were great, too - extremely well done, 7 Team!

My personal two highlights were:

• Andrew Tanenbaum's keynote because he really sticks to his guns and even after 20 years or so finds new aspects that could make microkernel architectures appealing. This time it is system self-healing and robustness. Even though I yet have to try out the Minix 3 CD I found in my conference bag, I guess he may have a point (and moving functionality into user space has been a happening thing for years now). I found the keynote to be both amusing and instructive and dealing with a pressing topic. Also, even though it probably is far from usable in real-world scenarios, at least with Minix 3 there is code and an actual system to demonstrate the ideas and concepts.
• Christopher Blizzard's keynote about OLPC, his participation in the Debian Miniconf distribution discussion and a conversation that we had over lunch after. (Admittedly, I was so excited during parts of the latter that I couldn't decide what topic to bring up, oh well.) My impression is that Chris is a person of integrity and real compassion for Free Software. He appears to have a very positive attitude and comes across as genuine. Chris may not have said that much new during his keynote, but I think he worked the subject of relevance for projects well. More importantly, Chris was the only one in the Debian Miniconf distribution discussion to make a firm stand for Open Source as an ideal and against binary drivers. (Not 100% true, AJ was as well, but really more appearing to report what Debian does. And a question for openSUSE: Do you really think a marketing guy on a discussion panel will appeal to people?)

Apart from the conference as such, it was super cool to meet Bruno. We had a number of good conversations and did some nice hacking, burning the midnight oil a couple of times. And HP gave me a (used) zx2000 (which Bruno carried all the way from France to Sydney!) to enable me to work on the (Debian) Itanium port of Mondo Rescue - thank you HP and Bruno! Bruno's talk was well received, and it was great to actually meet people that use the software that I spend quite a bit of time on. :-)

Finally, there is the Linus phenomenon (so you can tell this is my first
Linux conference) - he amazingly is basically left in peace: People who know him obviously talk to him and he participates vividly in discussions and so forth, but everyone else does the business as usual thing - no autographs, no photos, no nothing. I was (positively) impressed and refrained from asking him to sign my copy of Just for Fun (just kidding).

Finally, finally, I propose to find an alternative for the term 'awesome' next year. ;-)