FOSDEM 2008

Hello!

FOSDEM 2008 is nearly there.  OK, not quite yet (February 23rd/24th), but
planning for it definitely is.  Already some weeks ago I installed a
coordination page into the wiki:
<http://www.bddebian.com/~wiki/community/meetings/fosdem_2008/>.  Please
add yourself.

If we want to stay in an appartment this year, instead of again staying
in a youth hostel, we'd need someone to organize that.

The ``Call for Developer Rooms and Stands'' has been posted at
<http://lists.fosdem.org/pipermail/fosdem/2007-November/000302.html>

Question: do we want to have a Developer Room for giving talks, doing
hacking, etc.?  What do we have to tell?  Whom do we want to tell?  Do we
want to reach arbitrary people that don't know how to spell ``Hurd'' yet,
or rather do some BoF-like sessions, i.e., internal presentations?

Some first thoughts, and to drop some names:

A bunch of people have been hacking on kernels at the moment and could
present their findings: Bas Wijnen, Gianluca Guida, Johan Rydberg, Marcus
Brinkmann, Neal Walfield, Richard Braun, Samuel Thibault, Tom Bachmann.
Richard has been working for his university thesis on the Mach
reimplementation X-15.  Samuel has been working on Xen-Mach.  Gianluca,
as well as Samuel, is also working on Xen stuff these days.  Bas, Marcus,
Neal and Tom worked on kernel stuff (more or less) with respect to what's
currently being called Hurd-NG.  Johan was at least working on kernel
stuff in the past time.  I'm quite sure that Marcus and Neal would find a

Re: FOSDEM 2008

Hi,

On Wed, Nov 07, 2007 at 08:20:54PM +0100, Thomas Schwinge wrote:

> Question: do we want to have a Developer Room for giving talks, doing
> hacking, etc.?

Yes, I think we should try to get one if we can. People attending get
much more out of the conference this way.

> What do we have to tell?  Whom do we want to tell?  Do we want to
> reach arbitrary people that don't know how to spell ``Hurd'' yet, or
> rather do some BoF-like sessions, i.e., internal presentations?

According to my own experience, the devrooms at FOSDEM generally tend to
be rather BoF-like. (They are developer rooms after all, right?  )
FOSDEM has way too much other interesting stuff to offer, to hope for
anyone but people already seriously interested in the topic to drop by.
Only extremely catchy topics (like e.g. Xgl in the X devroom in 2006)
will attract outsiders.

Thus, I think the answer is pretty clear: We should focus on exchanging
knowledge and ideas amongst people interested in the Hurd. IMHO that's
also what this community is most sorely missing, so it really makes
sense...

If we come up with some talk that indeed could attract a wider audience,
I think we should rather try to get that one into one of the main
tracks.

Hurdish Sub-Environments vs. Virtualization

Hi,

(Sorry for the crosspost. It is mostly for bug-hurd, but it is also
related to things discussed on the other lists in the past.)

The main idea behind the Hurd architecture, setting it apart from the
monolithical mainstream systems, is the ability for users to modify
and/or extend for themselfs as much of the system behaviour as possible,
without affecting the rest of the system.

Now this sounds rather abstract -- which is probably why people
generally have a hard time seeing how this feature is really relevant in
practice. And I believe that this failure to get the main idea across,
is actually the main reason -- or at least one of the main reasons --
for the Hurd's poor success. Consequently, this is something I have been
thinking about quite a bit.

I am now trying to approach it from an new direction, which allows
expressing the idea in terms I believe people can much better relate to:

   http://tri-ceps.blogspot.com/2007/10/advanced-lightweight-virtualization.html

For your convenience, I'm including the full text below. So, what do you
think?

-antrik-

Everyone is talking about virtualization now. Well, maybe not your mum;
but almost everybody. OK, probably not your aunt either... Well, you get
the point 

Re: Hurdish Sub-Environments vs. Virtualization

Hello!

On Wed, Nov 21, 2007 at 02:06:58PM +0100, olafBuddenhagen <at> gmx.net wrote:
>    http://tri-ceps.blogspot.com/2007/10/advanced-lightweight-virtualization.html

Well written!  I put up a link to it on
<http://www.bddebian.com/~wiki/hurd/virtualization/>.  What about
integrating the text completely into that page?

Also, as your blog is dealing with Hurd or related issues, I think I'll
set up such a blog aggregator within the wiki system and have it include
your blog's content.  Would that be OK?  What other blogs would we want
to have aggregated?  Neal's?  Marcus'?  Michael's?  HurdFR peoples'?
Some of the indian guys'?  Who is blogging about (at least marginally)
Hurd-related stuff?

Regards,
 Thomas

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Re: FOSDEM 2008

Hello!

I was mostly absent for the last weeks.

On Wed, Nov 07, 2007 at 08:20:54PM +0100, I wrote:
> FOSDEM 2008 is nearly there.  OK, not quite yet (February 23rd/24th), but
> planning for it definitely is.  Already some weeks ago I installed a
> coordination page into the wiki:
> <http://www.bddebian.com/~wiki/community/meetings/fosdem_2008/>.  Please
> add yourself.

Still valid.

> If we want to stay in an appartment this year, instead of again staying
> in a youth hostel, we'd need someone to organize that.

Still valid.

> The ``Call for Developer Rooms and Stands'' has been posted at
> <http://lists.fosdem.org/pipermail/fosdem/2007-November/000302.html>
> 
> Question: do we want to have a Developer Room for giving talks, doing
> hacking, etc.?

I only got feedback from Olaf and Bas, who would both have been willing
to give talks, as well as Marcus and Neal might have been willing, too.
However, the deadline for registration of the devrooms passed on
2007-11-26.  I didn't register, did someone else?

Why didn't I register?  I simply missed the deadline.