30 Mar 2004 mbanck   » (Journeyer)

Last saturday I went to Linux-Infotag Augsburg together with Jens Schmalzing. For some reason, they thought installation presentations would still be en vogue and had people give presentations on installing Knoppix, Fedora, SuSE and Mandrake there. Jens decided that showing off an ordinary Debian woody installation was not worth the time and went for an FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) instead. He first explained stuff and then fired off FAI with one touch from his notebook, waking up, booting and installing the target box over LAN, without ever touching the box once. I guess people were quite impressed because he told me yesterday that the guys from the Augsburger LUG asked him to give the presentation again...

Unfortunately, he was talking quite a lot and it took him almost one hour (he thought it would take him about 30 minutes) to finish the presentation which left me with no time to show off debian-installer, as we orginally planned. Actually, we spent most of friday evening and some time on saturday trying to figure out how to boot and install d-i with a USB keystick (which was quite easy) and installing stuff over WLAN (which did not work due to the lack of an access point. We could get neither my prism2 nor his airport card to work properly with hostap). In the end we did a private presentation for two interested people in a different room using the sarge mirror on his powerbook, but driving to Augsburg still felt rather like a waste of time afterwards, as the event was quite small and there was not much else to see.

On sunday, I finally uploaded xdrawchem, my last major package lacking behind and it looks like ghemical will enter sarge tomorrow.

Yesterday, I met a couple of other Debian developers from Munich again in the Augustinerkeller, along with a couple of other interested guys. It seems we're trying to organize a hacking/bug-squashing party in Munich on April 17th/18th if there is enough interest. People from out of Munich can sleep at my place which is just around the corner of the mathematics department, where the session will be taking place, so I hope at least a couple of people from the rest of southern germany or austria will come around.

I've also played a bit with bitlbee, which looks really cool. Unfortunately, I was having issues with my SOCKS setup again, I'll have to sort that out. Further, I finally managed to change the key-bindings of ion2 to my likings (i.e. the way I had them configured back when I used ion), so I'll probably be using ion even more than before. I still have to check out Gnome-2.6 and see whether that makes me switch back to a fancy desktop environment though.

Latest blog entries     Older blog entries

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!