Sandro Mathys

A bit delayed, a short report of day 2 at FOSDEM.

I’ve been visiting the first two CentOS talks that day which were really useful and I wasn’t bored a single minute. I didn’t even wander off into daydreams and that’s really rare when I have to listen >30min to a talk, particularly in the mornings. In other words: Fabian Arrotin and Dag Wieers have been doing a great job! During his 1h talk slot, Dag even found the time to demonstrate his small application that made the wiimote a cordless presenter much like the one from Logitech. Actually, it’s in a very early state (he wrote in during the previous night,  while a python version seems to be around for a longer time already) but has all features of the Logitech model – except for the laser pointer, of course.

Later that day I visited the talk on Cobbler and Koan which was a good mix of theory and practice. The live-demo showed us how easy it really is to use Cobbler while the theory showed us how easy it should be actually. Oh, wait…the slides and the demo made the same statements – that it’s easy to use. Normally either the slides or the demo make it looking very complicated (which might be the reason why most people only show one of both). Not this time – that must either mean that the statements made are true or that they lied at us and tricked us. But living in the greater FOSS community we know that they would have no use to do the latter and that we could verify their statements for free whenever we want to. Obviously, it *is* really easy to use. I even tested it at the beginning of the week and I can fully confirm their findings…

Well, shortly after that talk, it was time to go back home. All afternoon long there were people making the impression that they have to leave soon – much too early will that event end and some of the people even had to leave early. So whenever you met someone, they started to say goodbye already or asked whether you’ll still be there after the talk they’re going to visit. Later that afternoon I had to catch the bus too, which brought me straigt to the Central Station where I got on the train to the national airport. The flight back was fine and short, too. While I was waiting for my baggage to get ready to be claimed I even met Georg Greve from FSFE. I’ve also seen him during  FOSDEM but we’ve never really had time to say more than just ‘hi’, well knowing that our offices in Zurich are only about 100m apart. After some small talk we had our baggage and left to catch our girlfriends and take the next train home.

I believe I’ve never said anything about our booth during my FOSDEM posting, let me change that. The booth was really nice looking, as usual. The new ‘four foundations’ posters are really cool but I also still like the old message and posters, too. Thanks to Joerg Simon to print those posters and for bringing them along! Thanks also to the people setting up the booth. The Fedora people standing at out booth were doing a great job (sorry, that I didn’t really do something at the booth this time!) but for me it didn’t really fit to FOSDEM. Feels a bit strange to have marketing-talks at a developers meeting. Also, thanks to all the people from other projects and the organizers of FOSDEM for making this such a great event!