From June 23rd till June 28th i spent my time in Berlin at the Linuxtag/FUDCon conferences together with several other people from my team. Arriving on late Tuesday evening we settled down in the hotel and went to bed early to get a fresh start early in the morning the next day.
Wednesday was the actual 1st day of the Linuxtag. Fedora had a small booth in the 3rd hall at the end on the left side where we had a couple of Fedora 11 laptops up and running and showed people what you can do with it nowadays. It was a real blast and organisational was pretty well done. We always had 2-3 people at least at the booth doing "duty" while others could either go around and check out other booths or meet with people to hack or discuss things.
I personally had lots of good talks and hack sessions with Hans Picht and Steffen Maier from IBM regarding IBM System Z on Fedora 11. We've made tremendous progress over the last few months on that, mainly thanks to Karsten Hopp who nearly single-handedly bootstrapped a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to a Fedora 11, over 8000 source packages all in all... You can find his blog here:
http://karstenhopp.livejournal.com/
The main focus for us was to get all the necessary stuff sorted that was still unclear or unfinished. Those boiled down to 3 pieces:
* Network interface support (in anaconda and the live system)
* Storage support (especially DASD as parted is incomplete in that respect atm as well as FCP configuration)
* Anaconda images and installation
I've managed to put together a completely working and bootable hercules emulator image of our current state together with some config and startup files and a readme to make things easier. They can be found here:
http://secondary.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/spins/S390/
At the end of the week Steffen managed to basically do a complete dry-run of anaconda in a live-system, so with the exception of missing DASD support and bootable install images things are already looking pretty good.
Joel Granados, the parted package and upstream maintainer will be looking into fixing the DASD problems over the next few weeks, he already tried and tested the hercules images and they seem to work for him.
On Friday i then had a full day at the booth (my booth "duty" day ;) which was really fun. I hadn't done that in ages and really enjoyed it. Especially working together with the Fedora Ambassadors that were present a lot at the booth and on the whole conference was really nice. It showed once more how attractive Fedora has become over the years and why it's really worth doing.
Saturday then the i held a short presentation about Power Management history for Linux/Fedora with a short outlook of whats to come in the near future at the FUDCon. As it was the last talk of the day most people had already left, so attendance wasn't that big. Nonetheless i've had a few chats afterwards with some interested people and tried to figure out some of the issues they saw on their machines.
Sunday we then met again at the FUDCon, mainly me, Stefen and Hans from IBM and Hans de Goede and hacked the day away until our planes left for home.
Overall i saw so many people talking with each other that i was once more baffled how extremely important it is to get together personally and do things. The internet with emails and irc and whatnot only goes so far, doing things together in person is still the most efficient way to work in teams. But anyone who ever worked in a team probably knows that.
In my view the whole conferences were a big success, although i'd wish for the next time that Linuxtag and FUDCon wouldn't overlap as that really thinned out both conferences during that day.
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