I'm back home after the IV Jornades de Programari Lliure, the fourth edition of a Conference I already visited last year.
I went to Vilanova on Thursday afternoon, as I was invited to join an open table about technologies to build LiveCD systems. I'm not an expert on this subject, mainly because I have not had the time to look deeply into the latest systems and technologies, but as I've tried knoppix, morphix and metadistros in the past I had things to tell.
We had some points of disagreement, for example I'd love to have two names for distribution, at least for a lot of the Debian based LiveCD Distributions out there.
I don't have anything against LiveCD systems, I feel they are good for things like demonstration systems (great for free software advocacy), rescue systems, or as a quick system to clone installations, but they are not the same thing as the product of a project like Debian.
The Debian distribution is driven by a big developer and user community, has a well defined policy and a full development infrastructure behind it (package archive, auto builders, bts, qa, mailing lists, security updates, ...), while the Debian based LiveCD distributions are simply snapshots of an installation of Debian, generally based on unstable or testing, with packages taken from repositories that don't have to follow the Debian policies nor be compatible with it in the long term.
Anyway, all of us agreed on other things, for example everybody feels that the way to go on the LiveCD systems the near future will be related to technologies that let you mount the file system image as read-write, something that avoids the need of dirty hacks to be able to write files on a read-only file system and making the live system run almost as an installed one.
The air conditioning on the room we were having the meeting was not working right, so we moved the discussion to a pub near the University, in front of a some beers. After that I went to have dinner and to the residence we were sleeping to finish the slides I was going to use for my morning talk.
On Friday I had a complete day, at 10 I had to give a half an hour talk representing the company I work for, T-Systems.
The talk was titled Free software development from the IT Industry and I decided to write it after being at a round table with a lot of people from companies from Catalonia some months ago.
Unluckily I have not had all the time I would have liked to have to work on the talk (i.e., I would have loved to review the Mako article), but everybody told me that the talk was good and in fact some of them also asked for the talk slides.
After the talk I went to the residence to finish the slides of my evening tutorial, called Building Custom Debian Distributions with the CDDTk (tutorial slides). I ended up reusing most of my last year's talk and adding some slides about the cddtk.
At 14:00 we went back to the University to meet other people from the Congress and have lunch, I met Martin there and also was introduced to Markus Gamenius, from Skolelinux. While we were starting to eat I got a call from Toni Hermoso, a member of Softcatala, that joined us at the Restaurant.
After lunch Neli went to the residence and I went to listen to the Toni's talk about l10n of mozilla. The talk was good, as the people on the room participated a lot on it, but I have the feeling that I spoke too much, as I usually do... ;)
Once that talk ended I went to the auditorim when I was going to give my tutorial, as I wanted to use my PowerBook with the cannon, and I was unsure if it was going to work. Fortunately it did, and I was able to do all the presentation with it, half of it using an OpenOffice.org presentation and the other half using a full screen terminal with white over a black background.
My tutorial was supposed to be one and a half hours long and that was the time I spent with the slides. After the explanation I told them that I could show them some examples of the cddtk system using the current LliureX packages after the questions, if they were interested on it.
The questions and my demo ended up being one houre more, as the people in the public asked me to keep going. This kind of thing make me feel good, as I got the feeling that my work is not only interesting for me.
After the tutorial we went to the Congress dinner, we were on three tables on a restaurant near the beach and we had a very good time; once we finished we went to drink something on a place on the beach, but we were so cold that we ended up going back to the residence to rest a little bit.
This morning we woke up late and when we went to the Conference to say goodbye, there were some interesting conferences going on, but as we wanted to come back early, we saw none of them. It's funny that Neli was afraid of not going to a talk this morning, as she does not know anything about CS, but after listening to me and the others during two days she is more interested on Free Software, although mainly on the social part of it.
Ah, btw, have a good time at the Debconf, maybe next year I'll try to go, this year I have too many things to do.
