So, DebConf is over and it was a blast. I wanted to blog about my talks for a couple of days, but the conference was so great that I did not get around to it until now.
The unique thing about this year's conference were the outstanding contributions by non-Debian FLOSS people from the east coast. I am really glad the organizers decided to reach out to the communi ty and take this opportunity when a lot of great minds were just a couple of hours away. Also, discussing and hanging out with the local team people was so much fun and interesting that it was wor th the visit alone.
The venue was just perfect, the dorms were on campus, the cafeteria had an all-you-can-eat buffet, everything was in short walking distance and the Columbia campus is beautiful. I would have liked to go to a couple more places in the evenings, but hanging out in the Carman basement lounge with awesome people was just as good. A big thanks to Richard Darst, Biella, Micah and the rest of the crew.
The Debian GNU/Hurd talk went quite well, I was pleasantly surprised so many people made it to the Davis auditorium. I wanted to do the presentation on Debian GNU/Hurd (and I had it working before the talk), but as my notebook has a different resolution than the projector, I decided to play it safe and just show a d-i run in qemu. Nevertheless, Jeremie's wo rk on debian-installer is impressive, I got it installed on my ThinkPad without a problem (using qemu) and it automatically installed and setup grub2. Unfortunately, grub2 seems to be having issues when booting my notebook natively, but I got it to work with grub-legacy, including X and evince.
There were quite a few comments and I had interesting conversations afterwards with a couple of people. It is a shame Emilio Pozuelo Monfort (pochu) could not make it to DebConf to give the talk himself, he did lots of great work on porting packages and fixing the Hurd and glibc for various testsuites over the last couple of months.
My other talk about GOsa and FAI was a bit rougher, I scrambled to get FAI integration in GOsa to work based on Mark Pavlichuk'sinstallation scripts which I fixed up over the last couple of weeks to the point where one can install a client using the FAI simple demo classes (which I ported to GOsa's FAI LDAP). There were some problems with the demonstration during the talk and I guess it was a tough audience for a web-based admin tool but I hopefully got my point across that we should salvage this work done for the city of Munich. Indeed, I had great discussions with Andreas Mundt from debian-edu afterwards who posted a summary and call for discussion to the debian-edu mailing list.