FOSDEM 2006 is over, I am now sitting at one of the weirdest airports
I have seen so far: passages are intertwined and long, and it seems like you
have to walk several hundred kilometres in circles before you finally end up
at the place you ned to go to.
I gave a talk Saturday on my Ph.D. research. Having spent almost an entire
week preparing it, which involved rethinking my topic, the approach, and
fighting doubts several times, I was all too pleased that a new aspect of my
research was dawning upon me just in time to change a lot of the slides around
a bit on the plane from Zurich. Even though my goal is to work a lot on
Debian, I think the question on which I really want to concentrate is along
the lines of "how to get volunteers to adopt new models and methods." Debian
seems like a perfect environment in which to search for an answer, but
I assume I shall also be looking around the
Zope and
Plone communities.
Unfortunately, my talk didn't go as well as I had hoped. Part of it was on the
Debian security situation, and having talked to a couple of people up front,
and receiving even more feedback to my online personna, which apparently
sometimes misrepresents my intentions, I took specific care to do with the
delicate topic of Debian security with utmost care (and I think I succeeded;
oh, and as a German I have a right to run-on sentences...). As a result
though, I lost about 10 minutes of time, and additionally, I got confused
about the length of my talk slot somewhere in the middle of the talk.
So after giving an overview of my research idea, model, and approach, and the
security situation, and just before coming to the exciting meat on possible
extensions to Debian package management and the upload process which are
geared to making it easier for others to contribute, h01ger kindly pointed out
I had 10 minutes (not 25) left, a bunch of people walked into the room,
generating noise and switching lights on and off, and on top of it all,
OpenOffice crashed with the remainder of my slides -- those that contained
graphs and other means to convey the complex ideas I was about to introduce.
So everything seemed to be going wrong. I tried to give brief overviews of the
ideas from the top of my head, but I didn't manage to piece together all the
details that made the ideas interesting in a Debian context, and how the
approach differs from Ubuntu's Launchpad and their new tool
hct. So at the
end of the talk I felt like I hadn't persuaded anyone of anything. Oh well.
I was down for a while afterwards, it's been a long time since I felt a talk
of mine failing as I did this time, and it wasn't until Hanna and some others
consoled me by mentioning that they appreciated the contents I
did convey
(especially the security stuff), and quite a bunch of people found me
afterwards with questions, suggestions, and comments.
My
slides are available online (~ 4.3 Mib) and I am looking forward to your
feedback. I apologise for the size of the PDF and herewith promise never to
use OpenOffice.org again. A
bzip2-compressed version is available
here
(~ 1.4 Mib).
Saturday night then ended with dinner and a bit of beer drinking, but noone
was really up for anything more after the excessive opening party the night
before.
Sleep.
Sunday morning, my laptop was still frozen by OpenOffice, and I rebooted it to
find myself dumped into
busybox as
/dev/hda5 (my root) didn't exist.
I quickly found the problem to be a missing
udevd and
udevsynthesize
in the
initramfs, but I did not manage to bring the system back up until
Tollef gave me a hand to get
pivot_root to do what it was supposed to do.
Here's approximately how:
busybox mknod /dev/hda5 b 3 5
mount /dev/hda5 /root
mount -o move /sys /root/sys
mount -o move /proc /root/proc
chroot /root /sbin/udevd --daemon
chroot /root /sbin/udevsynthesize
exec run-init /root /sbin/init 2 < /root/dev/console > /root/dev/console
While we were at it, Daniel Silverstone showed us a wonderful way to help
debug problems of this sort:
/usr/bin/open. If
bash only has
/dev/console, it won't enable job control. This is exactly where
open
comes in:
/root/usr/bin/open /root/bin/sh
This will put an interactive shell on the next free
tty with job control
and all. Thanks, Daniel!
I think that the above approach actually failed in the end for some weird
reason we did not investigate further, so Tollef resorted to fixing the
initrd instead:
update-initramfs -c -t -k 2.6.15-1-686
The important part is
-t, which essentially redoes the filesystem so that
custom changes are undone. I hadn't made any custom changes, but from the
point of view of
initramfs, I had deleted the
udev binaries.
Within an hour I had a working system again, and a
dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-2.6.15-1-686
zcat /boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-1-686 cpio -t grep udev
verified that the problem was only intermittent (I rarely reboot my laptop but
update it often).
The T-Shirts Uncle Steve and I were selling pretty much all found new owners.
This is great because I had been sitting on about a dozen shirts in XS and
XXXL, and I thought I'd never get rid of them. Unfortunately, I sold them at
no-profit, but given it was the last batch from
Kernel Concepts, I am now
thinking of arranging something with Steve to get a bunch of
his shirts
(which are nicer anyway).
With talks coming to an end that day, everyone's departure was a stressful
time and I was all the more glad to have had another night to spend in the
city. I linked up with Jordi and some of the Debian Catalan people who were
staying with a friend, Raoul, in the city. Raoul took us around a bit, showed
us some of the historic sites in the centre of the city, and finally lead us
to the bar of 2000 beers, where supposedly "the best beer of the world" was
served: Trappist Westvletern Bleu 8. We ended the night around midnight for
our flights were in the early morning.
This having been my first FOSDEM, it was a great experience and I shall
definitely try to be in Brussels again next year. Thanks to Wouter and all
others who have helped out.
Update: My slide links were previously not working. Thanks to all who
pointed that out to me. They are fixed now. See above.
. So maybe I’d better do nothing about this unless I understand what I could do to help.
Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port
After the talk of Hanna, I introduced the kFreeBSD talk of 
Future of Classpath
It is the time when Mark ask everybody: What do you do? How can we help you? It’s a great social/technical time when everybody listen carrefully to everybody. It’s wonderful. Maybe it’s the part I prefer in free software. I must say that I read some mailing lists before joining some project and the ‘Classpath’ (and friends) projects were the one I prefer because of that respect.
Then came the camera… A team came in the room to film us. They claim they were making a movie about Free Software. Funny 
