FOSS.IN 07: Day 3

Day 3: The first day of the main conference. We thought we were running late (left home only at 09:50 after getting our Gentoo T-Shirts on) but the inauguration ceremony started half-hour late (as usual!) so we were able to catch the whole action. After FOSS.IN/2007 was kicked off by Atul & Kishore, Naba Kumar came up to give the keynote on Anjuta DevStudio. I didn’t know the origin of the name Anjuta earlier, but it was certainly fascinating :)

I had my talk on contributing to Gentoo right after the keynote, and we started at 11:30 on the dot (the schedules in other rooms were on-time). Gora gave an excellent introduction, and I began speaking to a somewhat-filled room about the different entry points to Gentoo development. The audience were really interactive and the questions were brilliant – this is something that I really liked about this years edition of FOSS.IN. There was a lot more interest in Gentoo than I had originally anticipated and it was nice to see our stall really crowded immediately after the talk. Hopefully, we’ve brain-washed atleast two-dozen people into using Gentoo :)

The remainder of the day was spent talking to people who approached our stall – it got a bit monotonous though, answering the same question “Why is Gentoo different?” over and over again. We’ve decided to print out an FAQ poster and put it up to make things a little more easier for us ;)

I had my third talk on Plan 9 from Bell Labs scheduled in the evening, right beside some really interesting stuff including the talk on PulseAudio and the lightning talk session. Again, I really didn’t expect much of a crowd for my talk, but I was happily mistaken. The room was not only full, but there were also people seated on the stairs and near the door! The talk went off really well, and I think it was *the* best talk I’ve delivered so far. The crowd was really smart and it was fun to interact with such an audience.

We’ve planned to have a small Mozilla hack-a-thon today, let’s see how that goes. Besides that I’ve planned to attend a few other interesting talks. Looking forward to keeping the pace up, I’ll catch you all tomorrow!

Experience Plan 9 on Linux!

Plan9 is an operating system that is designed to make up for all the mistakes that UNIX made. And it’s quite different from any of the current UNIX clones, be it any of the BSDs or Linux. To ease the migration, there’s a project called Plan9Port; which is essentially a port of several Plan9 utilities to the POSIX platform.

I recently made an ebuild for  Plan9Port, also called Plan from User Space. Just ‘emerge plan9port’ and spread the Plan9 love!

Speaking of which, my Summer of Code project for Plan9 is progressing well. More details on my SoC blog, or the aggregator at KiX. Laters!

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