FOSDEM Debian Devroom: annotated schedule

FOSDEM is a 2-day weekend of insanity. 218 talks this year; if you want to understand exactly how insane that is, have a look at the schedule grid. There are 19 rooms where events are held; possibly more, since I understand not every devroom has sent in its schedule yet.

Might be hard for people to make a choice that way, I guess.

Now there're supposed to be abstracts of each talk on the FOSDEM website, but reading them all can be quite tedius. In an effort to help, at least for the Debian devroom, here's the schedule for our devroom with a bit of explanation of what it's about. Note that this is mainly aimed at people not familiar with Debian; those who are should probably understand it enough by looking at the titles.

Saturday:

13:00 - 14:00: 'Outside broadcast on a budget - the DebConf video team and DVswitch'. DVswitch is the software used to create those excellent Debian videos. The best ones yet, IMO, are the ones of Debconf8. Check them out. There's nothing Debian-specific about DVswitch, except that it was written by Debian people. It's a great way to do live Internet .ogg streaming by using nothing more than DV cams, Firewire, and plain old Ethernet.

14:00 - 15:00: 'Ultimate Debian Database: datamining Debian made easy!'. UDD is a SQL database containing a shitload of data related to Debian, and which should allow easy datamining. Hence the title. This probably won't be of any interest to people who are not either a Debian Developer or a statistician, but I might be mistaken.

15:00 - 16:00: 'Introducing DDE, Debian Data Export'. This is a new project Enrico came up with, and which is related to the same subject as the previous talk. I don't know much more beyond what's in the abstract. However, given the fact that Enrico is going to be doing this talk, it can't be bad. Seriously.

16:00 - 17:00: 'The Debian status quo on the Openmoko Neo Freerunner'. Yup, Debian runs on the OpenMoko, and has done so since Debconf8, last august. This talk should give some more insight; if you have an OpenMoko, this definately is for you.

17:00 - 17:30: 'Running Debian on Inexpensive Network Storage Devices'. I've been running Debian on a Thecus N2100 for a few years now, and it's great. There are more options, however, and Martin does most of the hard work related to these devices. He's done a similar talk on the two previous FOSDEMs (go check out the videos), and this one will mainly be an update on what's going to be new in Lenny.

17:30 - 18:15: 'Grid Computing with Debian, Globus and ARC'. These guys are a group of academics from three different universities who've been doing grid computing (i.e., something like 'SETI@Home', but then somewhat different) with Debian and some other technologies. They'll be explaining how, exactly. I don't know much about this talk; it could be great, or it could fail miserably. I guess we'll see.

18:15 - 19:00: 'What does the DPL do?'. This is really firmly targetted at Debian people. If you're not in the least interested in how Debian does things, you'll be bored.

Sunday

09:15 - 10:00: 'The state of Virtualization in Debian'. If you're a Debian user interested in virtualization, this talk is for you. Henning will explain what virtualization options exist in the upcoming 'Lenny' release, and how to use them.

10:00 - 11:00: 'TDebs'. This might not be too interesting to you unless you happen to be involved in Debian infrastructure. TDebs don't exist yet, but will sometime soon; Neil will be explaining how, why, and what.

11:00 - 12:00: 'Internationalization in Debian: How to improve further?' If you're interested in i18n, this is probably for you.

12:00 - 13:00: 'The Common Debian Build System (CDBS)'. CDBS is one way to build a Debian package. This is probably only of interest to Debian people.

13:00 - 14:00: 'Release management in Debian - can we do better?'. Frans isn't a member of the release team, but has some criticism on how they function. He intends to present his arguments in order to start a discussion. This is Debian internal kitchery, really.

14:00 - 15:00: 'Lenny - the road to release'. Neil is a member of the release team, and is going to explain how we got to the current state. I hope he'll also explain why we still haven't released. I guess we'll see

15:00 - 16:00: 'The long road to KDE4 in Debian'. Um, yeah. I'm not a KDE guy, but I understand some other people are. In any case, might be an interesting talk even if you don't use Debian, since I understand it will look at some of the new features in KDE (and how they relate to packaging).

16:00 - 17:00: 'Debian and Google Summer of Code 2008: wrap-up and insights'. I guess Leslie will be there. The speaker was a student working on Debian during this year's SoC, and he will present what's been accomplished.

There, that's it. Now my only hope is that there'll be many people attending. If previous editions are any indication, however, that won't be a problem.