Debian/Conf/06

Debian Developers Conference 2006 happened during FOSS.IN 2006 as a miniconference on 24th 25th and 26th Nov 2006 at National Science Symposium Centre, IISc, Bangalore, India

Background

Debian Developers Conference was initiated by Sundara Nagarajan with a goal of encouraging more Debian Developers from India. (Initial Announcement)

This year the suggestion was to conduct the event as part of the FOSS.IN (http://foss.in/2006) conference to attract more participants.

Photos

Day 1

  • Stall setup - Morning

We setup a system with Debian 4.0 RC1 (Etch) (we used new graphical installer in Hindi for Debian India and in Tamil for IndLinux stalls). We got some nice comments for the Hindi interface. Prof Rahul De of IIMB apreciated our work and was happy to see the interface in Hindi.

  • Debian i18n BOF - 3 PM

Do you know you can install Debian in Tamil? Wondering how many Indian languages are supported in Debian Installer? Would like to participate in Debian localisation? Not sure a team exist for your language?

Co-odinators: Praveen A, Prasad Kadambi Vikram Vincent

We had people working on Debian localisation for many Indian languages like Gujarathi, Marathi, Telugu, Malayalam. We discussed the current status of various Indian language translations in Debian and the challenges we are facing. There was an emphasis on the importance to reach out to the actual beneficiaries.

Day 2

  • GNU/Hurd BoF - 11:30 AM

We discussed the current status of the Debian port to GNU Hurd. Kapil was using GNU/Hurd 3 years ago and he narrated the steps he had to take in installing using crosshurd and how he could not get it working when he had to move to a new hardware. We concluded that for GNU/Hurd to get more people it has to run on the current hardware if not the cutting edge ones. Ongoing work of writing glue code to Linux/FreeBSD device driver framework is a step in the right direction. We hoped to demo Xorg 7.0 working with GNU/Hurd but the k14 snapshot was not ready by that time. We hope it will be available soon. Update: K14 released and you can download it from here

  • Debian User BoF - 3 PM

Do you use Debian on your server/desktop? Did you feel it something can be improved? Not happy with ease of installation? Wanna share a success story?

We had users from days of potato and woody and it was exciting to listen to their stories of installation using floppies. We also discussed the problems we had to face with the Xorg migration. Some issues with apt-proxy like failing to get a package without restarting apt-proxy at times.

  • Key Signing party - 4:30 PM

One key step in becoming a Debian Developer, have your keys signed by a DD. So if you aspire to be a DD don't miss this chance.

More than 10 people turned up for the key signing party including 2 DDs - Sudhakar 'Thaths' Chandra and John Leuner (jewel).

Day 3

  • Talk

That number is confusing as some DDs of Indian origin are staying outside India and some DDs of foreign origin are staying in India. He discussed the steps in becoming an official Debian Developer and contributing in various ways. He demonstarted packaging of libyahoo2.

  • Debian Developer BOF - 4.30 PM

We shared our experinces and tips to contributing to Debian. Kapil talked about the response from upstream with specific example of pngcrush and cdrtools/Joerg Schilling. Kapil also suggested about some useful packages like devscripts. Kartik and John expressed their views regarding Debian Development processes.

Blogs/Comments

Teams

  • House Keeping (basically get posters printed and put up at the stall , get CDs, T shirts and other goodies ready for the stall and any organisational logistics)
  • Campaigners (prepare presentations and design posters and arrange BoFs and make sure maximum number of people are aware about Debian)
  • Core team (does the actual presenations, demos, workshops...)

Co-ordinator: Kartik Mistry

  • Hackers (sit down and fix bugs/localise and make etch the best release ever)

Calendar

Google Calendar entry

Planning Meetup aka Debian Conclave

We are meeting up at BMS College on Sunday 29th October 06 to discuss the ideas we have and finalise the plan. We will delegate tasks to different groups.

See Debian Conclave 06 for more details and registration.

Volunteers

Co-ordinator: Praveen A pravi dot a at gmail dot com +919986348565

The Co-ordinator of each BoF has to make sure the session details are well published (time, Hall no ...) in the main display as well as the Debian Expo disply. The Expo co-ordinators has to make sure there is some one at the stall every time any one visits the stall and explains any clarification he wants.

  • Prasad Kadambi
  • Deepak Tripathi
  • Karthik R
  • Shashank Bharadwaj
  • Madhusudan.C.S
  • Santosh.G.Vattam
  • Naveen Kumar.B
  • Puneeth Bhat
  • Krishna Bharadhwaj
  • Pulkit Bhuwalka <pulkitbhuwalka@yahoo.com> +919342390203
  • Bipin kumar

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