This is merely a reminder for myself since I tried to boot the woody kernel on my active PARISC machine today. That's not the usual kernel which is a custom kernel in order to benefit from a working mouse and stuff. Hence, for the woody kernel the boot loader needs to be altered to use the woody kernel, which also resides in /boot. To do so, press ESC at the HP boot prompt. When the BOOT_ADMIN> prompt is available select the boot technique: "boot pri ipl". This will open a line based menu where the path to the boot file can be set. It is usually /boot/vmlinux and needs to be modified to /boot/woody for the original woody kernel. Delete the '0' and press 'b' to boot the machine. Voila.

I spent a few days in Krak w, Poland for the CALIBRE workshop on Quality, Security and Safety and for KKIO 2005 and I used this opportunity to do some sightseeing. After the workshop on Tuesday, Matthijs den Besten and I wandered around the city for a a few hours, then went back to the hotel for a swim, just in time to go for dinner with the CALIBRE people. We went to a restaurant which served traditional food from the 17th century. It was a really amazing place with animal fur and carpets on the wall, big wooden tables and menus which had nice drawings on them. We had a selection of different food which we shared and it was really great. The following day, as part of KKIO, dinner was served in the Wieliczka salt mine after we went on a tour of it. It's pretty amazing what kind of art you can make out of salt. On Thursday, I did some more sightseeing, basically walking around the city center and looking at some of the nice attractions. Which turns out to be churches, given that this is Poland. I particularly liked the basilica of the holy trinity but many other sights, such as Wawel castle, were pretty impressive too.

On Tuesday I attended the CALIBRE workshop on Quality, Security and Safety in FLOSS in Krak w, Poland. There were several interesting talks, including one looking at flight safety control and one about the large-scale deployment of Linux based thin-clients for the Polish government. I presented my work on quality management and discussed problems of release management in large, volunteer projects. The following day KKIO 2005 started, the Krak w Software Engineering Conference. Niklaus Wirth gave the keynote speech, looking at ideas which seemed like a good idea when they came up many years ago and evaluating them from today's perspective. I presented my paper Software Process Maturity and the Success of Free Software Projects and listended to several talks. Some talks were in Polish but the proceedings are in English and I look forward to reading some of them.

On Friday and Saturday this year's Berlinux event took place in Berlin, Germany. It's a regional event with a small exhibition and a conference program. The Debian project took part with three talks and a booth, plus Skolelinux, and two companies that demonstrated their Debian-based distribution. On Friday a lot of students visited the exhibition area since it was built more or less in the middle of the usual university maze. The entire exhibition had to be dismantled during the night if the equipment shouldn't get lost in the morning. That way we had the fortune to see more of the building of the Technical University of Berlin that is quite impressive. The building was old, with huge walls and a very high ceiling, paired with wide and voluminous stairs and hallways. A very classical and very nice building. On Saturday there were more visitors and more parallel tracks. It was a bit unfortunate that the exhibition was split into two levels of the building and that the conference rooms were farer away from the exhibition. Getting there meant to walk through the usual University maze since Berlinux was embedded there and not separated from it.

A small regional event covering Free Software and GNU/Linux took place here in Oldenburg on Saturday. It comprised a Debian installations party, two tracks of interesting talks and a small exhibition. There were about 500 visitors, I guess. Circa 40 people listened to the Debian talk in which I presented the goals of the Debian project, its internal structure, explained how the distribution is developed and by whom and demonstrated why well defined dependencies are so important. Several visitors came to our booth which was located in a classroom together with 9 other small booths. The exhibition room wasn't crowded ever, but it wasn't too boring either. Even during the talks there were always a couple of visitors lingering around in the exhibition.

It seems that Linux-Kongress which took place last week in Hamburg, Germany, has lost a bit of its spirit. I missed Ted T'so. However, the conference was still a nice one with several people attending and good discussions. I was invited to attend the panel discussion that closed this year's conference. The topic was "the future of distributions" and I was asked to represent Debian on the panel. The discussion lead to... I don't know, but several aspects of distributions were bothered. It was interesting to see that representatives from Red Hat and Novell talked about enterprise level support that only starts with five years of support, and is so totally different to even release cycles from Debian.