post-FOSDEM
It’s been over a week since I got back from FOSDEM, so about time I should blog a bit about it. :)
So coming back from FOSDEM last year I was a bit disappointed about Mandriva presence, this year
we had our own booth at least and I must say that it was quite succesful! :)
I hung out at the booth a lot of the time and our booth was next to the Ubuntu booth (those bastards!;), and guess what?
We seemed to actually attract a “lot” more attention than our neighbour booth most of the time, I’m not sure at what the
Ubuntu people presented in their booth (I actually forgot to really check it out:/), but since they didn’t seem to catch
my attention I guess they didn’t seem to have that much interesting and flashy stuff to offer (hmm, that’s kinda pretty
much in sync with my general view of Ubuntu, coincidence;p)..
I guess that all the different netbooks with the different Mandriva versions was sufficient to catch a lot of attention
from various people to our booth, especially the mips based Gdiums from Emtec running Mandriva G-Linux (which is our mipsel port with special customizations for the Gdium). I got mine powered up at FOSDEM and put it on display and basically everyone else but myself seemed to get to play with it more than I did, which is a good thing since it’s not available for sale quite yet so that way people get to discover it and I got to play with it when I got back home anyways. :D
In addition to the Gdium, Emtec also displayed their new and upcoming G-cube which is a HTPC solution which is also mips based, unfortunately it wasn’t demonstrated so no first impressions there yet, but I’d sure like to get my hands on one later!
For the talks at FOSDEM this year I was a bit disappointed, most of those I attented (ie. the cmake and rpm talks) wasn’t really targeted at developers, but more of the introductionary type for (new) users.. And for most of the talks that I would’ve found interesting I managed to miss, ie. Rob Savoye’s talk about gnash (which I had the pleasure of dining with at Sunday evening, really cool guy!:). :/
I did attend Peter Pöml’s talk about MirrorBrain though which I had interest in since I did the initial implementation of the geolocalized metalinks stuff for urpmi a while back and I exchanged ideas with him on the metalink mailing lists regarding these things, you’ll even find me talking about these things in Mandriva in the video stream of the talk. (Watching it now I think that I with my dry mouth picked up Peter’s german accent in there;p)
Other good things regarding Mandriva was that Anne managed to calm my scepticism towards the Community Steering Committee and the Mandriva Linux Assembly stuff, it seems like we’re mostly on the same page about stuff, aware of the same things with ideas and all that should be quite compatible. :)
I kinda regret that I left FOSDEM early on Saturday to go with Jeff to dine with the CentOS people in Leuvre though as I didn’t really get the chance to discuss such things in dept and interact with all the cool Mandriva d00dz as I hoped for. :/
In summary, FOSDEM was as always great and I’m most definitively planning on attending it next year as well! :D
Well, I had a look and chat a bit at Ubuntu’s booth : they were presenting an eee-pc and eee-box running Ubuntu (of course).
The eee-box was acting as a media-center with elisa, connected to a big flat-screen TV, playing big buck bunny and could be remotely controlled using a regular phone by using bluetooth. All that stuff was working really well and I’ve never seen such a system working in front of my eyes.
But nothing was really Ubuntu specific.
Ah, so that was what that big screen was for. :o)
I really regret not checking out other peoples’ booths in general, I bet there must’ve been some quite cute and interesting stuff in the various booths that I missed out on this year..