DebConf4
This tshirt is 16 years old and from DebConf4. Again, I should probably wash it at 60 celcius for once...
DebConf4 was my 2nd DebConf and took place in Porto Alegre, Brasil.
Like many DebConfs, it was a great opportunity to meet people:
I remember sitting in the lobby of the venue and some guy asked me what I did in Debian and I told
him about my little involvements and then asked him what he was doing, and he told me he wanted to
become involved in Debian again, after getting distracted away. His name was Ian Murdock...
DebConf4 also had a very cool history session in the hallway track (IIRC, but see below) with
Bdale Garbee, Ian Jackson and Ian Murdock and with a young student named Biella Coleman busy writing notes.
That same hallway also saw the kickoff meeting of the Debian Women project, though sadly
today http://tinc.debian.net ("there's no cabal") only shows an apache placeholder page and not
a picture of that meeting.
DebCon4 was also the first time I got a bit involved in preparing DebConf, together with
Jonas Smedegaard I've set up some computers there, using FAI. I had no idea that this was
the start of me contributing to DebConfs for text ten years.
And of course I also saw some talks, including one which I really liked, which then in turn made
me notice there were no people doing video recordings, which then lead to something...
I missed the group picture of this one. I guess it's important to me to mention it because
I've met very wonderful people at this DebConf... (some mentioned in this post, some not. You know
who you are!)
Afterwards some people stayed in Porto Alegre for
FISL,
where we saw Lawrence Lessing present Creative Commons to the world for the first time. On the flight
back I sat next to a very friendly guy from Poland and we talked almost the whole flight and then
we never saw each other again, until 15 years later in Asia...
Oh, and then,
after DebConf4, I used IRC for the first time. And stayed in the #debconf4 IRC channel
for quite some years
Finally, DebConf4 and more importantly FISL, which was really big (5000 people?) and after that,
the
wizard of OS conference in Berlin
(which had a very nice talk about Linux in different places in the world, illustrating the
different states of 'first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win'),
made me quit my job at a company supporting Windows- and Linux-setups as I realized I'd better
start freelancing with Linux-only jobs. So, once again, my life would have been different
if I would not have attended these events!
Note: yesterdays post about DebConf3 was thankfully corrected twice. This might well happen
to this post too!
In May, I got selected as a 
August and feels like it finally. July didn't feel like July and felt like June because it rained so much. This is summer.
I was assigned 20 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative,
but only worked 5 hours this month and returned the remainder to the
pool.
Now that Debian 9 'stretch' has entered LTS, the stretch-backports
suite will be closed and no longer updated. However, some stretch
users rely on the newer kernel version provided there. I prepared
to add Linux 4.19 to the stretch-security suite, alongside the standard
package of Linux 4.9. I also prepared to update the
firmware-nonfree package so that firmware needed by drivers in Linux
4.19 will also be available in stretch's non-free section. Both
these updates will be based on the packages in stretch-backports,
but needed some changes to avoid conflicts or regressions for users
that continue using Linux 4.9 or older non-Debian kernel versions.
I will upload these after the Debian 10 'buster' point release.
Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free and open source software world during July 2020 (
Here are my uploads for the month of July, which is just a part of my free software activities, I ll try to catch up on the rest in upcoming posts. I haven t indulged in online conferences much over the last few months, but this month I attended the virtual editions of Guadec 2020 and HOPE 2020. HOPE isn t something I knew about before and I enjoyed it a lot, you can find their