If you weren’t at FOSDEM this weekend, you missed some great talks and the opportunity to meet lots of free software folks. And I do mean lots — not sure if they have an accurate headcount of attendees, but it’s in the thousands.

Gave a talk on openSUSE on Saturday (slides in previous post). Will work on generalizing those slides a bit so other folks in the community can go out and talk about openSUSE as well. The one point I really wanted to highlight in the talk was all of the great things we have going on in and around openSUSE — particularly around openSUSE.

Some of the great projects I mentioned during the talk: openSUSE Education, MirrorBrain, e5 Datasoft’s work on ARM in the openSUSE Build Service, Csync, Nomad, Helping Hands, working on Netbook support, KIWI-LTSP, openFATE, Kablink, and much more. (If you’re working on an openSUSE-related project, including projects using the build service, and don’t see the project listed there — let me know!)

Having an awesome Linux distro is just part of the fun. Seeing how people use and remix the distro, that’s when things get truly interesting.

Back to FOSDEM itself. I didn’t get to attend too many talks, but sat in on some in the openSUSE Dev room and also caught Ted T’so talking about Ext4. I was just watching, not taking notes, so all I can really say in detail is “cool” and “wow, we’ve come a long way since I started using Linux 13 years ago…” I remember having a limitation on file sizes of 2GB… we’re a long way from that now. (I think there probably is still some limitation on the size of files, but that’s probably way bigger than the dinky 120GB hard disk in my ThinkPad…)

Talk about your “hallway track,” by the way. One of the things that I think about a lot is whether a conference has a good “hallway track,” which is to say — not only the sessions, but do you get anything done talking to people in the (big surprise here) hallway?

All of the tables for projects are in the hallways of ULB, and you have to navigate some pretty crowded halls on the way to and from tables and talks. (Imagine a sort of low-key rugby game, with backpacks…)

Really good show, and it’s obvious why it continues to draw major crowds.

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