Two hours after I blogged about having no camera I got one :-) Being hit by #350333 I had to reboot another kernel anyway, so I decided to try a newer one, namely 2.6.16-rc5, to see if that bug is fixed there. It is, but I got hit by yaird bug #352010 when I installed it. Fun :-) Especially because Jonas provided a fixed yaird quickly...

Oh Shock and horror! The videos show ugly artefacts! The grabbed files and on the cameras lcd, though they disappear on the lcd, when I unplugg the firewire cable. Strange! p2-mate suggested electrical interference as the cause and was right. Using different power-outlets for the notebook and the camera made the artefacts go away. Oh joy!

To end a long story quickly: Here they are!

For yet unknown reasons these ogg theora files play well in vlc, kaffeine, xine and totem, but not so in (my version of) mplayer.

Better quality oggs are being encoded and uploaded atm, followed by xvid files (highest quality) and mpeg2s (for producing a video DVD).

The forth talk, "The Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port" by Aurelien Jarno was recorded in HDV and will be released soon... Due to circumstances beyond our control, the video team failed in recording "Women in Free Software: Findings from FLOSSPOLS"... Luckily an audio recording was made, which hopefully can be made available once the study quoted by Halla Wallach is published.

Currently only four out of ten slides are available. Pointers welcome!

My other notices about FOSDEM still need to published :-) When (or if?) I find time...

And finally, I succeeded in producing my first video DVD, yay! The DVD contains all videos from the debian-edu/skolelinux gathering in January in Erkelenz. Since it was made with webdvd, which Ben Hutching wrote after producing the debconf5 videos, I think I can have reasonable good confidence that this DVD will also work in most standalone DVD players.

Now I'll take a break and go out to enjoy the snow landscape in mid march :-) Even though I'm real busy atm (video was only number three of my current priorities) it's important to take a break and relax once in a while.

Yesterday I have setup a kfreebsd-amd64 (ie GNU/kFreeBSD on an amd64 CPU) build daemon. Its name is shockley.aurel32.net (all my machines are named related to electronics), and it has Sempron 2600+ CPU. As you can see on the photo, it is still missing a decent case. There are actually two machines on the the photo, the motherboard in the case is maxwell’s one (one of the kfreebsd-i386 build daemon), while the one on the top front is shockley’s one. That’s a bit strange, but the amd64 motherboard needs a power supply with a P4 connector, while the other one only needs a small power supply. Thanks to Ingo Juergensmann, the kfreebsd-amd64 architecture is now listed on http://buildd.net. As you can see on the graph, this machine is very fast (it only runs for 24 hours!).

I was not a part of the devrooms team this year (like the last two years), Pascal did all the job! I was just a simple visitor and it’s a very cool position. Mark already bloged about the Classpath’s presentations, so you can find some interresting slides there. Saturday (25th February 2006) RMS Excellent talk about the patent. As always, Richard Stallman has great images to explain complex things. I still can’t understand all the GPL3 changes but I’ll try to read some more articles about it. Putting ‘Free’ into JFreeChart The presentation from David Gilbert was very cool. I did not know JFreeChart and it is really cool! This is a very big project and it makes very beautiful charts. I’d like to find some charts to do just to use it! Eclipse for GNU Classpath Development Tom Tromey did a fantastic presentation again. I already saw his presentations past years and it was still excellent. He already tried to explain me how to set up this Eclipse/GNU Classpath setup on IRC but I missed the “Don’t build automatically” hack. Everything should be on the Classpath’s wiki. Xen A presentation by Ian Pratt, leader of the Xen Source project. I heard about this project but I didn’t know that you could move an instance from a machine to another one! Amazing! Sunday (26th February 2006) I met Wouter in the bus but he lost his voice and asked me to introduce the speakers of the Debian room. I’m sorry for the three speakers I announced if it was not just as good as if Wouter did it. I wanna intend to the two conferences anyway. Women in Free Software I already wanna be at the talk of last year but I was in the Classpath devroom. Hanna M Wallach did a fantastic talk. I learned a lot of things and I know now that there really is a need of the debian-women project. I proposed her to put a phrase or a logo or something on the Debian-Java projects web pages and she seems to be pleased. Tonight, I went on #debian-women and it seems I did not understand nothing . 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 Aurelien Jarno. I wanna listen to this talk because I completely don’t know *BSD… I’m sorry but I don’t know more. And I still don’t know the difference with Linux and don’t know why I should, as a simple user change to some *BSD port? Debian-Java Meeting After the kFreeBSD talk, I introduced the SLIND talk in the Debian Room, told Wouter that I go to the Classpath Devroom… and listen to the end of the talk of Christian Thalinger (CacaoJVM — the site was down when I tried). Sorry Christian, I just don’t understant these thing During the talk (or was this just after the talk of Robert about JamVM?), I went eating with Wolfgang Baer. We went back during the Christian’s talk. Then we had a Debian-Java talk (I should be writing down the summary of this meeting instead of blogging)… I’ll send an email about the meeting, don’t worry 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 I discussed a little bit with the woman that seems to be the director and she asked for my email (no, Hanna, it was not because she felt I am sexy , nobody tells me 100 times I’m sexy ). I told her I was not one of the main contributor but she just wanna talk about free software and understand how it works. Closing Talk: The Challenge of the GNU/Linux Desktop by Jeff Waugh Jeff Waugh is an excellent speaker, I really enjoyed the presentation. A lot of humour, a lot of facts, it was really an excellent presentation. But Jeff, I still do not understand the Ubuntu business plan. I’m not a native english speaker and I did not understand a lot of jokes and some responses. Back! I messed up with my GSM, lost my PIN number or someting I don’t know (I did it a thousand times!), I went to the shop today (Feb. 28) to be able to call again. I also went to the office and the alarm was on… I asked for the security guard (I did not want to take risks the day of my birthday: February 28th)… we found nobody but someone tryied to enter on Sunday. I’ll try to prepare some report about Debian-Java tomorrow. The report will be reviewed by Wolfgang and Michael and I’ll send it on the debian-java list on Saturday or on Sunday.

Holidays is going down... Tomorrow I must come back to work, and it's not my preference in this moment. I've been enjoying my wife and sons. I must think in work again. In this hollidays, I've did:

- Packaged pngwriter for Debian. Nice person Paul Blackburn, the upstream. I've added to my contacts on messenger.
- Packaged a new version for acx100 driver (0.2.0pre8+44-1).
- I'm translating a d-i document to catalan (long)
- I'm translating FET to catalan (long looong)
- I have been working in correct RC bugs in Debian (none corrected, one I found was a false bug, and the another one is not a package bug, it was a kernel bug!).
- I offered me as a co-maintainer for cdrtools.

I must to thank to my sponsor Aurelien Jarno for sponsor me for my new maintained package pngwriter.

By request: Here's a list of people who've confirmed they're going to give a talk in the Debian Devroom at the next FOSDEM. This list isn't final yet (there are some more people who've asked for a time slot but did not confirm yet; and I didn't assign slots yet, either) but it might be interesting for those who are coming to have a preview of the subjects that will be available. Well then.

Lars Wirzenius: Nobody expects the Finnish Inquisition: Confessions of a package torturer

Piuparts tests that .deb packages can be installed, upgraded, and removed without problems. Lars uses it to torture all the packages he can get his hands on. This talk will explain how to use it on your packages before uploading them, and thus improving their quality and not having them suffer in Lars's hands.

Martin Zobel-Helas: Debian-Volatile - behind the scenes

This talk will give an overview of how packages are handled for Debian-volatile; what changes are allowed, how security is handled.

Martin F. Krafft: Improving workflow in Debian through process integration

This talk will be about the same subject as Martin's doctorate thesis. The abstract for that is:
This research paper/project details the technical challenges the Debian project faces as it continues its tremendous growth in size and popularity. It describes a research endeavour designed to increase the use of version control within the project for improved coordination of globally distributed teams of volunteers working on the software packages that make up the system. The research primarily focuses on the integration and consolidation of the involved processes. With tools already available for some parts of these processes as well as the coordination of teams, the goal is not to reinvent the wheel, but rather to reuse and improve these tools, to better integrate them, and to make them more accessible by providing abstraction wrappers with interfaces intuitive to Debian developers. It is further the intent for these tools to be optional and fully compatible to existing practices, thus not forcing developers to adapt. The research starts with process analysis and studies of the work habits on the side of the developers, and targets the final output of tools, which implement improved workflow in Debian package management through meaningful integration of existing (and proven) methods

Enrico Zini: Debtags, and what you can do with it today

This talk will introduce the Debtags project, what it has accomplished so far and the wonderful advanced tools that are now available, using debtags, to make sense of the huge package archive.

Bill Allombert: Inside the Debian menu system

The debian menu system transparently keeps the menus in sync with the list of installed applications; so transparently, in fact, that a lot of developers do not know how the system really works. This talk will detail the various components of the system, what the technical challenges are and how they are solved.

Frans J. Pop: Debian Installer internals

An introduction to the inner workings of Debian Installer. Starting with what happens when the installer boots, the talk will go on to discuss how the dynamic menu structure allows the installer to be adapted for different architectures and installation methods. Other subjects will include the special nature of udebs, the contents of a D-I initrd, how cdebconf knits everything together and allows the use of different frontends, preseeding and the use of hooks. If time allows, a short introduction into the build system and CD building may be provided. Some knowledge of Debian package management (like priorities and dependencies) is assumed in this talk.

Aurelien Jarno: The Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is a port of Debian using the FreeBSD kernel and a GNU libc library. It is currently the most advanced non-Linux port in terms of packages ported.
This talk gives an overview of GNU/kFreeBSD, and a quick comparison between the FreeBSD and the Linux kernel, to give users the necessary information to let them find how the FreeBSD kernel could fill their needs. It then describes the status of the port and the choices made concerning the architecture of the port (libc, threading library, etc.). It will continue by giving the various ways to try out this port and to give help, giving pointers to useful documentation and some useful hints.
Best portability practices are also covered, for both the Debian packaging and the upstream code. It will be based on real examples of non-portable code, and will show the best way to change it into portable code.

Summing the times that people gave me, I'll have anywhere between 5h25 and 6h00 of talks already, and two more people who've shown real interest in doing something in the Debian devroom (but who haven't sent me the information I ask for to be able to confirm their talk; please do so!). I'll probably get 9 hours in all (10 if I squeeze a little bit; but then I might have some issues with the key signing party, which I'm also co-organizing), so there is still some time left for interested parties. However, if you're interested in giving a talk, you shouldn't wait too long anymore!