ken’s blog

Well it is over, it was a great time. Here is a little recap of how Sunday went.

Had a very late night Saturday and just a couple hours sleep before heading back to the festivities. The turn out today wasn’t nearly as good as Saturday, but in true BarCamp style there was plenty of pizza and beer. I was a bit worried about my talks today because I started the day with next to no voice. I just spent so much time talking (in a rather loud environment) on Saturday, my voice was shot.

I did a demo of the MythTV Appliance, specifically highlighting the appliance model and talking about how it was produced with rBuilder. I didn’t really get into what MythTV was, everyone there really already knew.

A little later I did the Foresight Linux talk, which I think went very well. Had a packed room and the crowd was more interactive than I had expected. At the end of the talk, I started getting more rBuilder questions, how conary works, and why it makes sense for appliances. At this point there was even someone in the audience that had just started setting up wordpress-mu for his company shouted out that he was gonna rush out and download the wordpress-mu appliance instead of struggling with it.

We also had the first Chicago GNOME Users Group meeting, mostly discussing why there needs to be a group and how people can help give back to GNOME. There was some good suggetions made and some tenative plans to try to get a GNOME release party planned for 2.20.

Throughout the day I got a number of questions about conary, just like Saturday. So I did a little session talking more about conary, how to write conary packages, some release management concepts, shadows, etc. Even did a demo of rMake building both x86 and x86_64 versions of a package. People really seemed to get it, which of course makes me happy.

I am also pleased to report we have gained at least one more developer, and had some great ideas for things we can do with Foresight to make it really stand out. And another guy that might be able to help with creating the XFCE edition of Foresight.

I have to give a big thanks to all the people that pulled this event off. It was amazingly well organized and things really went off without a hitch. There was great sponsors that made sure we had everything we could want for a weekend geek get together. And of course a big thanks for the hospitality.

First day was amazing… this is such a cool crowd. I don’t have a count of how many people were here on day 1, but it was packed! This place was basically like a night club all day… and well into the night. I didn’t leave until 4am and there was still people hanging out. There was more beer than I could imagine, lots of liquor and snacks. And most of all… oh my they pizza…. you couldn’t imagine how much pizza there was 🙂

There was definately allot of people asking about conary, I spent the better part of the day answering all kinds of questions. Specifically how does conary differ from dpkg (apt). I am very pleased to report that everyone that asked, seemed impressed. I showed off conary rollbacks at least 10 times. It is amazing that something I have gotten so used to now as the “norm” really blows those ubuntu guys away.

Bottom line… conary was a big hit. I even spent 2:30am to 4am showing off conary and rbuilder to some guys while enjoying even more beer 🙂

Just a reminder, the first ever meeting of the Chicago GNOME User Group will be this weekend at BarCampChicago 2007. Sunday at 3pm. I think this is actually the first GNOME User Group meeting in the US, but I could be wrong.

Come out and join us, it should be a blast. And while you are there, check out the Foresight Linux talk at 1pm and the Conary/rMake talk at 2pm including a demo of a MythTV appliance.