JRRZZ Blog

I’ve just arrived back home after a weekend of geekery at FOSDEM, Brussels.

I didn’t know almost everybody I know professionally would visit the event. It has been kind of a reunion, heh. Anyways, the highlights I really think everybody should check out for themselves:

• The Debian keynote by Bdale Garbee. Everybody loves Debian. His keynote was a pretty good explanation of what Debian’s all about. Especially the people who are new to Debian should watch this keynote.
• What’s next after Firefox 3.1 by Mike Connor. Two reasons why you should see this, actually. First, Firefox is the most important tool in the struggle for a free web. Mozilla’s efforts at making a better browser should not stay unnoticed. Second, it serves my anti Mac OS X tirades quite well. I hope I’m quoting Mike correctly here: “Mac OS aught to be user friendly”, while trying to get the beamer to work.
• Syslinux and the dynamic x86 boot process by H. Peter Anvin. A very, very interesting talk about syslinux and friends. I’ve been working with syslinux for years to boot custom Linux images, but I didn’t know it could do all that. Syslinux has really become toy worthy. Peter even made Linux boot over an HTTP connection halfway across the globe. Really cool indeed, a must see.
• Emdebian 1.0 release – small & super small Debian by Neil Williams. I’ve been working with Emdebian a while ago at Fontys, which suddenly made embedded software development a lot easier. Release 1.0 features lots of really cool stuff like early support for TDebs and two flavors called “Grip” and “Crush”. Grip is a (way) smaller Debian Lenny. Crush simply gives the embedded software developer even more control over the Debian packages by providing finer grained rules and new packaging tools. I can’t wait to give Crush a spin.

I’m sure I’ve missed some great stuff. Feel free to comment and recommend talks.