LinuxKongress 2006 Nurenberg (day 1)
It's my 6th LinuxKongress 2006 this year it's in Nurenberg, yesterday I had the joy of travelling via train from Antwerp to Nurenberg, nice trip , much more relaxing to do by train than to drive myselve. I actually got some work done on the trip while my battery lasted and got to finish reading some LinuxJournal and Linux Magazine
The Keynote by Alan Cox is titled "How To GPL a Chair", Alan threw a lot of questions at us , most of them which I had never tought of before. I kwew about the RepRap project etc since I met Victor at LCA2005 (Hmm.. Vic is heading for Paraflows in Vienna later this week giving a talk about RepRap actually) , but I never tought about the impact on licensing and copyright if we actually would end up with a device that would be capapble of replicating about anything. What would the value of antique stuff be if we could reproduce it identically ? What about copyright of logo's and objects when we get working Holodecks ?
More questions than answers ... the most important one being .. what about Free Beer !
Lots of answers coming down to .. the ingredients/resources still aren't free and probably will never be.
On to Jeff Dike of UML fame with a talk titled Linux as a hypervisor. While looking out of the window during Jeff's talk I see a cat looking exacly like one of ours (Scsi) sitting on the balcony of a nearby building. Has she been replicated already ? Hmm..
Jef mentions that no actual opensource virtualisation code currently implements a hypervisor in Linux , Xen is a Hypervisor that boots linux and VMWare doesn't seem to be contributing back. I question , if you really need one.
One of the arguments Jeff has is that from a management point of view you don't want to have to learn yet another platform to manage your virtual machines. You want to do that from Linux your usual platform. I`m lost here.. with Xen I manage the hypervisor from witin my first virtual guest , dom0 , works perfectly, scales, and I can actually still use the Linux platform that runs dom0 for other applications also. I don't see the problem here. I'm probably missing out om something here.
Next he goes on talking about using fuse to export a virtual machine filesystem or and even it's /proc filesystem to be mounted from your hypervisor for management persons .. to go on to mention he wants to be able to chroot into is running vhost. Thnx but no thnx, those are features that I really don't need. From a security point of view for one, from a management point of view on the other side. I want to be able to manage a machine physical or virtual identically , definitely not having to remember that I should chroot into an available filesystem to modify a lost password.
Still no Wifi :(
Smart Cards talk then ... How come that most of the stuff this guy is talking about seems really familiar to me eventough I`m not involved at all in smart card stuff these days. I did some research on the topic for a customer about 4-5 years ago, but it still sounds really familiar.
Ahh.. lunch time .. Matt arrived so we had a short chat on his trip to California , exploding batteries, cops, carcrashes , more cops and openQRM.
Volkert gives the usual Samba talk, I haven't been involved in any Samba projects lateley, Fred usually gets sent in on those , but each of his talks is always a nice status update so I don't loose track
I hop into File System (Ext2) Optimization for Compressed loopback device .. Ok, so they guy was reading litererally from his papers, at a really slow pace but at least he was understandable. We've had worse speakers... interresting stuff .. but still I read the paper before he was even half trough his talk.
root@mine2 ~# /etc/init.d/bluetooth stop Stopping Bluetooth services: OK
Better shut it when heading for a talk by Marcel :)