1. ... 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

2. 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

3. 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 kernel soon too)

4. 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

5. 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.

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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!

9. 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

10. 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 ;-)

11. 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...

12. 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!

13. 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 :)

14. 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

15. Resources
- 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

16. Thank You!
Colin Charles