Fosdem 2008: Sunday

Yep, went back to fosdem today. First saw the LVM2 talk by Alasdair Kergon, very interesting (except for some demo's not working in his cvs). I learned some new command options like lvcreate vg1 -l25%FREE (use 25 percent of free space in the vg) and lvextend vg1/lvol1 -l+100%LV (grow 100 percent). He also talked abut the future of dmeventd being able to handle hot spares. And he renamed a vg with vgsplit.

Alasdair was still talking at 15h, so i left (probably only minutes before the applause)(yes, i hate being late) to go to Janson for the PackageKit talk by Richard Hughes. Again an interesting talk! Richard pointed out the most obvious flaws with current $linuxdistro application installers: "Not good enough for his mother/fiancée." The effort sounds similar to autopackage (but i'm not an expert). I do agree however that a cross linux and easy to use "add/remove programs" tool would be useful for end users. But who cares about end users ?

I stayed in the Janson for klik (application virtualization), but Simon Peter and Kurt Pfeiffe were unable to convince me. It sounds indeed like static linking of applications, a debate that ended years ago (dixit someone from the audience). I also have questions about application updates, and sharing data files between sandboxed applications. Their "i can use a thousand different animations in my" slideshow did not help their cause.

I finished fosdem in the debian devroom to get a feel of the debian community and their effort to get Lenny out in September 2008. Clearly the message in debian-world is more important than the presentation of the message. A black and white slideshow does get the job done! Imho they should have more releases (typing this on Sarge).