Nausea Medialis

This weekend FOSDEM '08, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting, took place in Brussels. It started with the Beer event on friday evening - which I did not attend, I'm not much of a beer fan :-P. Sunday's programme looked like the most interesting to me, with a lineup of talks about Drupal, OpenWRT, suspend, and interaction between the kernel, HAL, udev and networkmanager. I ended up attending a presentation on Project VGA too, which is a project to design and produce an OSS video card. Since getting to Brussels from my hometown is quite a pain with public transport, I decided to go only one day. I'll give a quick overview of how it went.

Drupal
The morning started with an introduction to the new Drupal version, Drupal 6 by one of the developers, Gábor Hojtsy. He highlighted the following improvements:

• Easier setup procedure
• Multilanguage support moved into the Drupal core
• Drag-and-drop interface for menu items, forums, taxonomy terms, uploaded files, input formats, etc.
• Support for OpenID accounts
• Actions and triggers support to customise the workflow
• CSS-only theming

Well, these are the ones I remember :-P. Anyway, it looks very promising, I already set up a HTTP server on my LAN and started testing 6.0 myself, but it seems porting my websites will still take some time (mainly because me & MySQL aren't close friends - yet).
After that the bigg boss himself (Dries Buytaert) stepped in to talk about Drupal 7. Yes, you read that right: seven! Version six is barely out the door and those guys are already working on version 7. The Drupal developers held a survey within the community and will be focusing on the major gripes both developers and end users pointed out.
Finally some graphic wizzkids talked about theming Drupal (which of course was mainly focusing on Drupal 5), but since I'm no PHP ace either, this was a bit over my head. Those guys did point us to a guide to convert 5.x to 6.x themes though.

Kernel, D-Bus, HAL, udev and networkmanager
Next on my wishlist was the talk from an OpenSUSE dev on the interaction between the kernel, D-Bus, HAL, udev and networkmanager. By the time I arrived (it turned out Mozilla and OpenSUSE had swapped rooms) the talk was well half way, and the room was quite crammed, so I didn't have much of a view on the slides. I missed half of the talk, so don't expect a coherent story :-P. He schematically explained how all those systems interact with one another, and how you can easily find out where the communication goes wrong by using a few lines of monitoring code.

Suspend
For laptop owners, suspend often is a pain to get working, lots have trouble either with suspend to RAM, disk, or with resuming from suspend states. This presentation looked at the state of suspend, and also at what lies a head. Stefan Seyfried (working for OpenSUSE too) lined out the different views on how suspend might evolve (kernel- or userspace, elimination of the so-called 'freezer' in the kernel on which TuxOnIce relies, etc.). Although there was nothing tangible (after all it was just a reflection on how things could go), it was a very interesting look into kernel politics and suspend technology. Pavel Machek's Sleepy Linux project to extend suspend into new areas (timed wakeup, micro-suspends, ...) was also touched upon, as was the possibility to suspend only parts of machines - e.g. to shut down everything but the screen (including the graphics card) so you can read your mail, do a presentation, and wake up the system when you want to read the next mail or go to the next slide. It seems some hardware parts already support this, and Nokia's latest internet tablets are even said to use a very similar technique.

Project VGA
Project VGA is a project to create a low budget, open source VGA compatible video card. I have no experience with printboard layouts and chip design (let's say I have some moderate interest in it; I always devour general articles on CPU design). Michael Meeuwisse, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands) who started the project, gave the presentation and talked about the initial difficulties to overcome (scaling back to a simpler chip, a circuit board with fewer layers, to keep the price of the prototypes within bounds), and shed light on the present status of the project. The card, sporting a Spartan 3 S400 FPGA, was designed in such a way that another chip can be easily dropped in, so the card is 'multipurpose' if you want - its use is not limited to being a VGA card, you can use it for e.g. encryption and other stuff. Furthermore additional JTAG and USB interfaces are provided for communication with the device.
Michael had a card with him but was not able to demonstrate it on the spot (I believe because there was no desktop around), although that did not lessen the interest in the device; after the presentation people flocked around the card. Everybody wants to touch that stuff, no? ;-)

OpenWRT
This is the talk I most looked forward too, and it seems I wasn't the only one - people flooded the auditorium to hear the OpenWRT devs (and they were many - five - of them speak). I didn't get disappointed, not at all; this was the icing on the cake :^). Florian Fainelli, one of the developers, talked about the concept of OpenWRT, their focus on portability of the code (they ported OpenWRT to Google's Android platform under 2 hours (!), which is quite impressive if you ask me), the stress on KISS (which seems to be one of the reasons why they did decide not to base their project on Embedded Debian), and their buildroot environment which I covered already. After that we had the occasion to ask questions, so I asked the obvious one - what is holding OpenWRT back from migrating to 2.6, like they have done for almost (if not all) their other supported platforms? It seems one Broadcom driver developer recently got in touch with them and things like station mode (which are required for an AP) are being worked on, which means a migration to 2.6 is starting to look realistic.

Of course I took advantage of the occasion to pick up some goodies (I have a FOSDEM '08 T-shirt baby!), and donate some to the organisation - it's a free event, and FOSS is always a good goal to donate to, no?. Anyway, thanks a bunch for sticking with me till the end, and see you next year! It was surely exciting, and leaves a taste for more :-).