... or how I spent a week+ and ridiculous amount of money in Canada DesktopCon & OLS 2005 ... or how I spent a week+ and ridiculous amount of money in Canada Prepared by Colin Charles byte@aeon.com.my http://www.bytebot.net/

Itinerary Get to Ottawa on Friday, July 15th Desktop Developers Conference – July 18th – 19th Ottawa Linux Symposium – July 20th – July 23rd Leave Ottawa on Monday, July 25th Sneak some random touristy things in there

DesktopCon #1 Began with a pub night on Sunday It wasn’t well received – not many folk in Ottawa yet! Monday morning started with an Inotify tutorial – especially useful seeing that Linus merged it SuSE and Fedora rawhide kernels have this (FC-4 is expected to get an updated/re-based 2.6.13 kernel soon too)

Eclipse & China Eclipse is an interesting platform! Building applications on top of it is easy Look at Eclipse Trader when time permits (and if you’re into stocks/currency trading) Desktop Development in China was interesting Looking into getting an Open Reference Platform Creation of a Linux Technology Support Center – incl. Writing drivers if required

Unicode & The Rasterman More Unicode than you’d want to know Its 21-bit (not 16-bit – i.e. 16+log17) U+0041 = Latin ‘A’ “Bling bling is much more important than functionality” - Carsten Haitzler Edje is like Winamp’s skinning feature – it makes use of AJAX, and has a compiler to compile from the source distribution language.

Digital Photography <ran away to the Kernel Summit> We need better tools for digital photography dcraw isn’t a library libopenraw (on fd.o) might be worth looking into/working on F-Spot (Mono) seems to be a clear winner

Peeking under X & more Dtrace demo’s mainly Xrestop, xscope (from KeithP’s local CVS) and xmon was the focus GNOME Office has a presenter (sort of) Cairo will help fix up ugly graphics Vineyards for beer was mighty fun... consequently missed the OLS pub night

OLS Day #1 Talks so good, torn between Conary and BlueZ in the morning Len Brown made ACPI lively – it knows everything on the PCI bus, minus plugged in cards (unlike OF) /proc/acpi/processor/*/power – i.e., unplugging USB might save you 2W Your screensaver uses more power than your average screen. Black screens use more power than light screens!

More Day 1... Great talk on making Linux handle lots of memory requirements Keysigning was productive (with a digital camera!) Nice welcome reception by Intel Art Cannon gave an excellent speech on talking to business folk about the value of open source Some ideas there are useful for the rest of us doing business in Linux

Day 2 While I wanted to attend Rusty’s nfsim talk... I got into Greg Kroah-Hartman’s USB tutorial I wrote my first kernel driver that made use of the USB subsystem Gregkh was also kind enough to give me the temperature reader for free ;-)

More Day 2... Looked a the e1000 networking drivers Firmware documents are now at their website – go Intel! Linux I/O scheduling was an academic talk – read the paper, and it looks somewhat flawed BOFs – dkms, Xen, audit were somewhat interesting Party room...

Friday was Xen MiniConf Or virtualisation day, if you want No beagle talk (thank United), and I caught the usbmon one early in the morning Fedora BOF was rather successful Drinks, scotch BOF, party room!

Saturday Sysfs is your /proc replacement, and the talk+paper was excellent Dave Jones had the best keynote I’ve heard in a long time – good talk on bugs, kernel rebases, how triaging could work, tools, etc. Gregkh gets the honors next year Drinks cost upwards CDN$35,000 No one got arrested :)

In closing... Thanks heaps Linux Australia & Sun for their RDP Go next year (I know I am) Its about the people... putting a face to a hacker is so useful

Resources www.linuxsymposium.org/2005/ - papers are published before the conference! Read NewsForge or LWN.Net (subscription?) for “Ottawa Linux Symposium, Day N” styled articles (N=1,2,3,4) Kernel summit surely got some coverage on LWN.Net

Thank You! Colin Charles byte@aeon.com.my http://www.bytebot.net/