RMLL 2008, days 1 and 2

Hi there. Just some quickies on the RMLL, we have so much to do here ;)

Tuesday

I arrived at 5 am on tuesday, after a quit long trip from 10pm by car sharing, we just had some rest on the car seats until the site opened. After getting lunch tickets I wend to discover the association village and other facilities.

I found the booth and started setting things up, with the banner and poster I had printed before leaving. I had a look at the schedule and tried to select from all the interesting conferences what to attend. The weather was quite hot and sunny, and under the tent booths were located we had a difficult time keeping up, but still some people showed up with interest.

At noon the mandatory openning talk took place in the garder nearby, with all the representants of local and national authorities and sponsors, followed by a nice buffet, just before lunch. Then I kept the booth for a while until Olivier arrived. I saw the end of an interesting zsh presentation (I have zsh ported to BeOS but never really used it yet), and one about peerfuse (when the rewrite is done it might be interesting to port it and add query support), then back at the booth to see some more people. We didn’t have a crowd like at FOSDEM, but it allowed to take more time to explain things, and the event takes place the whole week.

Then we went to have some rest and a shower, after finding a room in one of the two schools around. Then we went to town for dinner, and finally took some much needed sleep.

Wednesday

The day started up not as hot, as it rained a bit during the night. I managed to attend some more conferences, like Xenomai (a real-time Linux distro), “How to organize RMLL”, FreeBSD 7, but not as many as I’d have liked to. I also saw a presentation of Rathaxes, a very promising framework for multiplatform driver code generation, as their team came forward to meet us to inquire about Haiku. My own presentation was rescheduled to friday, 16h45. As another conf was cancelled, I saw an impromptu on OpenSolaris and the interesting ZFS. Finally half of a talk about new stuff in linux 2.6, which provided me for quite some material for my own speech about what linux copied from BeOS that we have already and what’s still to take :)

I still found time to be at the booth and see more people, some saying “oh those icons look like the BeOS ones”. We explained and demoed all the features we love so much.

Before sleeping I tried to track down an issue with the usb webcam driver but it still displays black frames despite reading them correctly and displayling a dump correctly as well…