FOSDEM writeup
I had an exciting weekend at the FOSDEM Conference in Brussels. Initially I planned on writing a few blog entries while at the event (while memory was still fresh), but the Internet access there was very flaky and it was almost impossible to get a working wireless connection. So here is my (slighly belated) writeup.
Naturally I did not make it to the Le Roy d'Espagne on Friday Evening, as my flight got delayed and it took me quite a while to get to my Hotel. Which is sad, as the organizers stated that they had around 300 people there (and spent around 4k EUR on beer alone!). The Hotel "New Louise" I stayed at was located on Avenue Louise, which provided a direct Tram connection to the "Universite Libre de Bruxelles" (ULB), where the event took place. The hotel room was big, but quite shabby and breakfast was not too exciting either - but I survived.
The first day started after some delay with a keynote by Richard Stallman about the evilness of Software Patents and how foul the entire sofware patent system is. Richard phrased the issues and dangers very well, it's very sad that the general public is not really aware of the threats. Afterwards Richard discussed the state of GPLv3 and the motivation behind creating the new license.
In the afternoon I wandered around the hallway and talked to the various projects that were presenting their work: OpenGroupware, OpenWengo, Syllable, just to name a few. The OpenSUSE project was represented by an impressive number of people, they had their own developer room in which various presentations took place. I attended Sonja's talk about the Motivation and Goals behind the OpenSUSE project and Adrian's talk that introduced the SUSE Build Service, which sounds like a very cool offering. It allows you to create packages of your OSS project for a number of distributions and platforms. It's not limited to SUSE Linux only - you could even build DEBs for Debian Linux there! So you simply submit your sources and spec file and the Build Service will churn out the RPMs for the platforms you would like to support. Oh, and it's based on Ruby on Rails (and MySQL), too! Very cool stuff.
Afterwards, I participated at the GPG Keysigning party, where around 80 people verified each other's IDs. It started a bit chaotic, but we soon formed a line and I was able to check almost everybody's ID. I still have to perform the actual key signing, however - looks like chaff from the pgp-tools will be handy for that.
After the key signing, I initially intended to listen to the talk about Xgl by Matthias Hopf. Alas, I was already running late (as the key signing session took longer than expected) and the room was so packed that they denied more people to enter when I showed up. Bummer! Xgl provides some serious eyecandy - the OpenSUSE people had a few Laptops at their desks where you could toy around with it. 3D desktop changing, wobbly windows - I really liked it. Too bad that it currently does not work too well with ATI Radeon chips...
In the evening, the kind folks of SUSE allowed me to join them for dinner at a restaurant at the Grand Place in the city center of Brussels. We had a good time and the food was excellent, thanks a lot!
On Sunday, I started the day by listening to the RPM package tutorial by Henne and the talk about cross-distribution building talk by Michael Schröder right afterwards.
After these, I spent some more time walking around and just talking with various people. One of the last talks I attended was the Novell AppArmor presentation by Crispin Cowan. AppArmor uses the Linux Security Module (LSM) API and allows to define the capabilities of individiual applications by applying access control rules on them (whitelist approach: list all files that it is supposed to access, deny everything else). He ran a live demo, securing a web site against attacks using a tool that automatically created a template profile of a running application that he then refined with an interactive editor. After trying to wrap my head around SELinux for quite some time now, I must admit that this is much more simple and easy to use! TODO: create a profile file for MySQL, to be included in the SUSE RPMs.
The first day started after some delay with a keynote by Richard Stallman about the evilness of Software Patents and how foul the entire sofware patent system is. Richard phrased the issues and dangers very well, it's very sad that the general public is not really aware of the threats. Afterwards Richard discussed the state of GPLv3 and the motivation behind creating the new license.
In the afternoon I wandered around the hallway and talked to the various projects that were presenting their work: OpenGroupware, OpenWengo, Syllable, just to name a few. The OpenSUSE project was represented by an impressive number of people, they had their own developer room in which various presentations took place. I attended Sonja's talk about the Motivation and Goals behind the OpenSUSE project and Adrian's talk that introduced the SUSE Build Service, which sounds like a very cool offering. It allows you to create packages of your OSS project for a number of distributions and platforms. It's not limited to SUSE Linux only - you could even build DEBs for Debian Linux there! So you simply submit your sources and spec file and the Build Service will churn out the RPMs for the platforms you would like to support. Oh, and it's based on Ruby on Rails (and MySQL), too! Very cool stuff.
Afterwards, I participated at the GPG Keysigning party, where around 80 people verified each other's IDs. It started a bit chaotic, but we soon formed a line and I was able to check almost everybody's ID. I still have to perform the actual key signing, however - looks like chaff from the pgp-tools will be handy for that.
After the key signing, I initially intended to listen to the talk about Xgl by Matthias Hopf. Alas, I was already running late (as the key signing session took longer than expected) and the room was so packed that they denied more people to enter when I showed up. Bummer! Xgl provides some serious eyecandy - the OpenSUSE people had a few Laptops at their desks where you could toy around with it. 3D desktop changing, wobbly windows - I really liked it. Too bad that it currently does not work too well with ATI Radeon chips...
In the evening, the kind folks of SUSE allowed me to join them for dinner at a restaurant at the Grand Place in the city center of Brussels. We had a good time and the food was excellent, thanks a lot!
On Sunday, I started the day by listening to the RPM package tutorial by Henne and the talk about cross-distribution building talk by Michael Schröder right afterwards.
After these, I spent some more time walking around and just talking with various people. One of the last talks I attended was the Novell AppArmor presentation by Crispin Cowan. AppArmor uses the Linux Security Module (LSM) API and allows to define the capabilities of individiual applications by applying access control rules on them (whitelist approach: list all files that it is supposed to access, deny everything else). He ran a live demo, securing a web site against attacks using a tool that automatically created a template profile of a running application that he then refined with an interactive editor. After trying to wrap my head around SELinux for quite some time now, I must admit that this is much more simple and easy to use! TODO: create a profile file for MySQL, to be included in the SUSE RPMs.
While taking a break at the cafeteria, I stumbled into Stefan Hundhammer, who was kind enough to give me a personal tutorial on how to write a YaST2 module in a few minutes (I had missed his presentation). I was quite impressed by the simplicity and how powerful the scripting language behind YaST2 (YCP) is. Thanks to Stefan for the impressive demo! I definitely have to toy around some more with that.
Afterwards I decided to get packed and head for the airport, as the travel by tram and train took some time. I hooked up with Nils Magnus from the LinuxTag organization team, who also was on his way home to Hamburg. We had a good chat during the flight, which was fortunately uneventful.
All in all I really enjoyed FOSDEM, even though I sometimes found it hard to decide with session to attend - there was so much good stuff! It was great meeting new people and getting an insight on what the various OSS projects are working on. Kudos to the organizers for making this happen! Considered that the whole thing is run by volunteers, it was very well organized. The only thing I was really missing was a stable WLAN/Internet connection. I look forward to the next one, where we should consider having a MySQL DevRoom as well!Trackbacks
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