FOSDEM report

So this weekend was FOSDEM, two days of more than a dozen parallel tracks about various FOSS topics. My first impression was that almost twice the amount of people showed up this year, making it a huge success, and sometimes __very__ crowded dev rooms. The flu pandemic got me unfortunately this weekend, and although I could fight and stand it on Saturday, I paid my price today with being at home mainly in bed. Missing the talk about [Drupal|http://www.fosdem.org/2007/schedule/events/drupal], [KDE4 | http://www.fosdem.org/2007/schedule/events/kde_kde4 ], [eCos|http://www.fosdem.org/2007/schedule/events/embedded_ecos_rtos] and so many others...

Well, let's go on with what I didn't miss on saturday. The most inspiring talk was about the [One laptop per child project (OLPC)|http://www.fosdem.org/2007/schedule/events/olpc] (see also http://www.laptop.org). A laptop that only consumes 2-3 Watt, can be charged by anything but dirt, and functions as a wireless LAN hub, even when it's not in use. A true piece of technological art.

Then there was the disappointing presentation about AIGLX (Redhat), in which a core X developer struggled 10 minutes to get his laptop connected to the beamer. That was an omen as it turned out. The design of the GL rendering architecture for X windows is horribly broken and made the impression of being the ugliest hack ever on X.org. Really.

For the remainder of the day, I mainly followed the [embedded track|http://www.fosdem.org/2007/schedule/devroom/embedded], which attracted a lot of people, and was an opportunity to meet some old friends.