Foss.in 2008

Its been about 5 days since foss.in 2008 got over and I couldn't blog about it as I was busy with exam.
As I mentioned before, I only got to attend the first day (25th Nov) for my first ever foss.in.

Day-1

I made sure to attend the keynote, and hence reached the venue pretty early. After getting the delegate card, I headed inside only to meet a bunch of KDE folks who had gathered there - Pradeepto, Sharan, Adriaan, Madhusudan, Santosh Vattam and few more friends of Madhu and Santosh.

Adriaan gave us the cool KDE tags and that added up like a topping to my already cool summer of code t-shirt :D



Most of us then headed to the formal inauguration where Atul introduced the focus of foss.in 2008 - "Show me the code (i.e get work done)" in a funnier fashion. He had an apple in his hand which he regarded as the only low hanging fruit @ foss.in which he gladly ate it off :)

Harald then took over the dais to address the keynote where he spoke about "Doing Embedded Linux Right".
The funnier instance was, I took exactly the whole keynote session to configure network on my laptop, and to succeed I had to switch between Vista and Kubuntu to get help and try the same.

After the keynote, I found it more appropriate to socialize than to attend further talks. So i headed to the KDE(4 ;)) booth where we setup the awesome KDE4 pillar posters (Thanks Wade, Kamal and others for the lovely posters!!)

I joined Kamal, Santosh at the booth explaining people about KDE. We were giving away KDE handbooks and Kubuntu-Interprid remix live Cd's. The cd's got over soon, so we had to replace kubuntu with fedora 9 which Kushal had got with him.

Here is pic of the booth (oops forgot to take pic after hanging pillar posters :( )


The KDE handbook deserves lot of credits. I heartily thank Madhusudan, Santosh Vattam and their gang, Pradeepto, Kamal and others for coming with such a lovely piece of work.
Here are a couple of snapshots from my canon.

1) Making the official release ;)


2) The front page of handbook


3) The back page of handbook (bug fixed by me : Added Kushal Das in credits :D )



Well, the time passed by fast and I had to leave early as I had to catch up a train to Hyderabad. So we all barged into Adriaan's "hack room" and requested him to pose for us. We had a good chat with Ade and I was really inspired by his ability to motivate and encourage folks to contribute for FLOSS. The kde4-solaris port info which he gave was really some good knowledge which we wouldn't have known otherwise (as we hardly use solaris)

Posing with Ade



I was a bit late, so bid a bye to all the friendly floss folks and then quickly left the premises in my two wheeler.
More pictures from my canon at my picasa.

For better coverage of other days of foss.in as well, check out kushal's blog.

Foss.in taught me a lesson by embarrassing me for not contributing in the recent days. I didn't code a single line @ foss.in either as I really had less time and chose to socialize than to code, which means I failed this year's focus :(
However I am motivated positively enough to bounce back after my exams (31st Dec is my last exam)