Day: February 26, 2007

The last three days have been quite amazing, I’m still stunned by all these impressions (basically meeting all those people you usually know though IRC), how nice people can be if they want (yeah dad, I’m talking about you :P)

Although I was pretty sad about leaving so early (I think, if I’m going to attend next year, I’m going by train and starting on Monday morning so I got one night more in Brussels), I’m also quite happy to be home again, as I was pretty phreaked (haha, self-pun intended) by all those people.

The Booth was fine from my POV, but it looks like users already requested some stuff already on the forums, which we hopefully will have next year/the next event (Christel or even Chris – get the event kits sorted out and prepared – pretty please with sugar on top 😛 ).

The talks in the DevRoom where great (at least the ones I attended) – most of them were well prepared (hi Christel 😛 ) and the company I had for these three days (all the senior devs around – especially vapier, wolf31o2, kingtaco, pylon and some of the former ones – hey Mr. “I want SeJo’s HumpGang on the picture” 😀 ) and of course our youngins (that’s Peter, Alexander and Robert).

Today, I got up again at 0630 *ugh* went to bath, woke up Torsten, afterwards the mystery guy and went downstairs to get some breakfast. I ate some cornflakes and some bread along with a glass of chilled orange juice, then went back up to get all our stuff and prepare the room the way we found it.

After we finished that, we went downstairs and met Alex along the way went to the cars and Torsten led us to the university. I went to the booth and noticed that Torsten and me where the only ones that early at the booth. So we sat down for a moment, cleaned up the booth space a bit and finally sat again preparing the notebooks.

Suddenly some of the Debian guys came along and asked for a Gentoo Linux Install-CD and is was like “WHUT”. Apparently they only needed it to fix a borked lilo.

I went over to the DevRoom to see if anyone else was there already, but there was “only” Petteri doing his presentation about Gentoo/JAVA stuff with Rob’s help (he lend Petteri his somewhat broken notebook because Petteri’s hard disk broke on the day before).

So I watched a bit and went then back to the booth. After hacking for half an hour on my broken system (haha, I tried updating glibc via binary packages yesterday again, I know I do suck 😎 ) slowly the other devs showed up one after another. So we manned the booth yet another day. The booth wasn’t that much visited as yesterday (which I kinda was pretty lucky about since yesterday was kinda rough) and I sort of vanished 1100’ish to get to Mike and Chris’s presentation.

I even managed to catch Danny talking about paludis and enjoyed it. Afterwards was Dad’s talk which was really interesting as well as Chris’s talk, though I mostly knew about that, as I’m currently building the hardened 2007.0 stages (which by the way still suck horribly, somehow the gcc ebuild still creates lib32 and lib64 directories on a x86 stage-build and puts the lib_gcc.so.1 into the lib32 directory, I’ll probably have to poke Chris or Andrew again when I’m back home or try to build a 2006.1 stage with grp’s I may get from the old livecd/dvd).

Afterwards we had sort-of a lunch break (hah, no food again for me) and heard Christel talking about “What makes Gentoo a community based distribution?”. Her talk was interesting (admitted she was a bit unprepared, she admitted it herself, don’t sue me :P), though she prepared the slides like during Mike’s and Chris’s talk. 😮 The presentation was still pretty much interesting (hah, Al-Quaida and P0RN were mentioned on the community’s thoughts *ugh* – I doubt it though) from a users POV.

Afterwards I said goodbye to an pretty “good, old” friend (my handsome Rob that is) and a newly won friend (djay-il from userrep working for exanet.com) as they wanted to get to the airport in time, Rob for his flight to Geneva and Alexandre for his flight back to Israel (I don’t know where exactly). Ah, btw (and on behalf of djay-il) – the recent dbus update broke the complete GNOME, hah 😛

In addition to the previous presentation, Marius talked about portage foo, which I have to admit, only listened to with half an ear, as I was bashing Alex and Peter in #gentoo-dev at that time.

Nearly after Marius’s speech we left for the car to get home, since Markus needed to get to work on the next day. But before we could get outside of the door, Christel snapped us and we all did a sorta-like group photo (even SpanKY is on it, after some persuasion – including Surprise Buttsecks). Afterwards we headed for the car, and started our run for home.

It took us about 8 hours straight to get back to Hamburg (and Marius to Bremen), Markus probably needed half an hour more since he gave me a ride to the central station where I sat in McDonald’s for about 3 hours, eating McChicken, Chicken McNuggets, a McFlurry, drank a Coke, an orange juice (they do offer Hohes C now at McDonald’s) and about 5 or so cups of tea 😎 (I know, I’m crazy .. I usually drink about the same amount for breakfast when I’m supposed to get to work).

I’m sitting now in the train back home (first class of course), writing this blog-o-report for all those people, crazy enough to actually read this “report” about my experiences at this years FOSDEM.