2011-05-14 Summary of Linuxtag 2011 I've been at the event all four days, like in the previous two years. Again I took shifts at the Debian booth and attended speeches, of course. As many talks sounded pretty interesting this year, I ended in helping only one hour at the Zille. Of the talks I listened to, many had been disappointing because of low presentation skills. Furtunately there had also been really good ones, like: - zack: ``Debian, 18 years and counting'' - Sabine Sobola: ``Wem gehoert Open Source Software'' - Badley Kuhn: ``12 years of FLOSS compiance'' - Philipp Poll: ``OpenSource Fonts'' I had good discussions with guys from LibreOffice, Caligra Of- fice, Gentoo and of course Hauke; it's always great meeting him. As far as I can tell, the Debian booth organisation went well. At least it had often been crowded. ;-) For the first time I had been in discussion with a real zealot. (I've never really discussed with Uriel, that is.) This one was a BSD guy. I could see what some people tell about the BSD folks. It surely was a tough discussion and afterwards I was pretty ex- austed. Actually there hadn't been any discussion at all; he only was telling me. Nonetheless I did learn a lot and received several valuable impressions for further thinking. One is about forking. Zack told that there exist about 120 Debian-based dis- tros and 70 more which are Ubuntu-based. This of course is pure evil in the eyes of this BSD zealot. More openminded people can see potential (but not only) in this situation. I'm a bit disa- pointed that even a community project like Debian is much con- cerned about the ``trademark'' of its identity. Separation between Debian and Aptosid (former Sidux) because of quality differences, but then the idea of Debian rolling ... it seems a bit too marketing-like. Understandable but not my world. Let's switch to concrete technical stuff: I went to Linuxtag (to be part of the Debian Team) with Crux in- stalled. :-) During the days I decided to upgrade parts of the core collec- tion. This included gcc -- what a stupid idea. The compilation time had been hours. *omg* I must admit that there is few sense in upgrading gcc. I should have left it as it was. I also upgraded udev. This really was a fault. It broke my sys- tem. I ended in the maintenance console, unable to fix the sys- tem, though I tried for hours. Installing the old version of udev again helped, finally. Yes, such problems happen hardly in Debian, not even in sid, but I rather like to learn by fixing problems than having everything working fine. ;-) I'm a strong opponent of design for its own sake if one needs to sacrifice something in return, but how cool is this blue Crux Tux at boot time ...! :-D In clear words: I patched the kernel. (For the first time, btw.) I also reworked ports(1), which is a shell script. *yay* The scripting quality can be improved IMO, hence I tried. I like much that Crux leverages software by using the shell, unfortunately, Crux is very GNUish. However, all in all, I'm quite confident with my system currently. http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke