1 February 2007

(update: numerous typos removed) This year, attending the whole Solutions Linux event wasn't compatible with my paid work (for those who care, I'm since September head of the Personal and departmental computing unit in the Networks and Information Department of ONERA, the French Aerospace Lab). Despite this, I booked at least yesterday afternoon to visit the expo and more particularly the Debian booth. It is always a pleasure to meet again French developers and contributors as well as all these old dinosaurs which I learned electronic communications with 1200bps modems with, some time ago. The Debian booth was as crowded as usual. It was still featuring a Babelbox, built in one night by Pierre Habouzit and Julien Blache. Congratulations, you did an awful job here. I'm glad I saw all those good people. I was tempted to cite everybody and will finally refrain because I'm too afraid of forgetting one of you guys. For our international readers, this includes several of the people I may have had a few flamy discussions and even blog "wars" with in the recent past (I'm just missing you, Joss, being told that you couldn't attend that Wednesday). As usual, we all survived very well. The other "big" event was also the first formal meeting of the Debian France non-profit organisation. Everything is pretty young but the hidden creation work done by the founding members has been huge and the base is now here. Debian now officially exists in France. I'll do my best to play my part in this action and work with other members of the board to fit the organisation goals and bring Debian more prevalence in our country. I also had a very long talk with Bruno Cornec and Louis Bouchard from HP. We discussed about HP customers needs for official support for Debian on HP machines, and not only servers (ONERA has an internal project to deploy a few hundreds of workstations aimed at being the scientific platform for ONERA scientists and PhD students. We already have more than 100 of these, based on RHEL and guess what are my mid-term plans for them? :-)). We just need some official commitment from HP to support using Debian to unlock the internal fears. It sounds like HP could go this way if customers show enough interest. Of course, ONERA's project is pretty small but we are one of the key players in out domain in the country so that could be kind of interesting marketing for HP...and Debian..:-). Bdale, I need to talk with you soon.... Back to work now, for a few days. Then, I'll take 3 days off next week to attend the 3rd Free Software World Conference in Badajoz and present the results of the Extremadura i18n session we held in September, along with other people who held some of these sessions, namely Frans Pop (about the D-I session), Wookey (about the Embedded Debian session), Knut Yrvin (about the Debian-Edu session) and Martin Michlmayr (about the QA session). All people who I will be very glad to meet again.