DebConf feed

Talks for DebianDay wanted

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:24:00 UTC

This year, DebianDay will take place in Buenos Aires, on Monday August 18th, the day after DebConf ends. We are still in need of talks for DebianDay, so, if you are coming to DebConf and you’ll be staying a few more days in Argentina after the conference, you are invited to give a talk on whatever you want as long as it’s Debian related.

Some suggestions for talk subjects for DebianDay:

Debian in Latin America
Internationalization in Debian
How to help Debian
Debian Live
Making a Debian derivative distribution
Packaging for Debian
… And anything else you feel might be interesting to people who are not DDs, but are interested in Debian.

We are planning on having two tracks, one for newbies and one for advanced talks; talks in Spanish are welcome, but don’t worry if you don’t speak the language, for talks in English, we will probably have a translator.

To submit a talk, just log in to your DebConf account and click in the “New event/Paper” link.

Reconfirmation deadline approaching

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:14:00 UTC

June 15th is the last day to reconfirm your attendance to DebConf8. If you are certain that you are coming, please reconfirm by setting the ‘Reconfirm Attendance’ box in your PentaBarf’s account.

If you have decided not to come to DebConf8, we are truly sorry about it, but we ask you to please state this by unchecking the ‘I want to attend this conference box’.

Currently, 397 people have registered for DebConf8, 340 plan to attend, but only 122 have reconfirmed (live stats).

DebConf8 Travel Sponsorship

Mon, 26 May 2008 23:49:00 UTC

I finally sent out a flood of mails to those people that applied for Travel Sponsorship for this years Debian Conference in Argentina. We have 58 people who got a position in our sponsorship queue, asking for nearly 60.000 USD in total. We are not yet sure if we are able to reimburse all of them, but we will at least try to.

We also have 24 people rejected from this queue and possibly some people haven’t been able to fill out their settings in our conference management system correctly/in time. While we are sorry for them, we can’t do much here.

Spread the word!

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:59:00 UTC

Stefano Zacchiroli proposed the idea of spreading the word about DebConf8 in a recent blog post, in a way similar to what FOSDEM did this year. So be a part of the meme! Add this HTML snippet to your blog posts and help spread the word!

<a href="http://debconf8.debconf.org">
<img src="http://media.debconf.org/dc8/images/debconf8-going-to.png"
     alt="I'm going to DebConf8, edition 2008 of the annual Debian 
     developers meeting" />
</a>

DebConf8 registration open and CfP

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 16:09:00 UTC

Registration is now open for DebConf8, which will take place in Mar del Plata from Sunday 10 to Saturday 16 August 2008.

To register follow one of the processes outlined below:

If you registered for last years conference, DebConf7, go to this page to login.
If you haven’t registered for last years conference you need an account in the conference management system. To register one, go to the following page and create an account. After visiting the activation URL sent to you by email, go to your user’s page and log in.

After you logged in

After you successfully logged in, please fill in at least the ‘General’, ‘Contact’ and ‘Travel’ tabs reachable through the ‘Registration details’ button on the bar on the left of the page. Please pay special attention to the ‘DebConf’ and ‘DebCamp’ boxes on the ‘General’ tab. You need to select at least the “I want to attend this conference” checkbox or your registration won’t be valid.

Note to users who have an account from last year: We did our best in making sure you do not have to reenter all your personal data again, just the conference specific changes. But please check if it is all still valid.

We suggest that attendees begin making travel arrangements as soon as possible. Some travel information has already been collected at the DebConf 8 site.

Submitting a paper/event

To submit papers, first register for DebConf as described above. Then use the ‘New event/paper’ button on this page and fill in information about your submission on the various tabs. You can use the same interface to submit papers for DebConf and DebCamp, by choosing the appropriate track.

DebConf7 Final Report

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 15:53:00 UTC

After a lot of work, the DebConf7 Final Report has been released. The report is intended for a large audience, and includes impressions and facts from the conference. Whether you were there or not, we hope you will find the report an interesting read!

The report is available as a PDF.

Many thanks to those who assisted in the production of this report, and to all those who were there at DebConf7! See you in Argentina, August 2008!

DebConf8 dates decided!

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 21:49:00 UTC

After a very short meeting, the DebConf team agreed on having the next DebConf the first two weeks of August. That will be August, 2nd to August, 17th. Also, the Debian Day will be held after DebConf in Buenos Aires, just before the eigth edition of the Regional Free Software Conference, a very big event with people coming from different countries in South America. This way, we expect to reach much more people.

DebConf maintenance

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 21:31:00 UTC

In the last few days we (as in DebConf admins Steve Gran, Mark Hymers and myself) have been doing some DebConf maintenance work.

Some time ago one of DebConf’s permanent sponsors, ByteMark sponsored a new machine, krabappel, which we use as a replacement for the older machine we have from them, cmburns. It was neccessary, as good old cmburns had a lot of stuff running and so was always pretty loaded. Imagine it running most of our websites, main mail and dns server and then also having 4 vserver instances on it. Those vserver itself where also running things that do use some resources, like our wiki and the main DebConf7 site, the PentaBarf test-host and our LedgerSMB instance.

While it was long decided to move stuff our - we just had to find time to do it. This weekend seems to be it, everything is migrated except cmburns itself, as that needs a fix in the reverse dns entries for the new /28 we got.

We are using xen-tools to make installation of new images easy. For that I wrote a script that is used as a role script, automating all that various setup tasks that one can automate easily. Which means that it takes about 5 minutes to get a complete new XEN domain up and running. (Add some minutes to add it to nagios2, munin, our mail setup and to sync the userdatabase.)

Mark and Steve also did another migration: gallery.debconf.org is now using gallery2. Still needs a nice layout designed looking similar to our normal DebConf website, but that shouldn’t be too hard to get. While they have been on it they also integrated gallery.debian.net, so that it is back up again. Feel free to use both of them!

gallery.debconf.org offers space for all DebConf related pictures, be it the main yearly DebConf (and related) or regional DebConfs, like the one planned for Panama soon.

gallery.debian.net is a place where pictures from all Debian related events/parties/whatever can be put. Basically - whenever people working on Debian meet (like a BSP, a work meeting, etc) - feel free to put pictures up there. Just put them into a folder matching the year it happened in… Basic goal is to get a huge set of pictures from people involved in Debian.

DebConf Resources

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 21:38:00 UTC

I just setup a DNS entry for panama.mini.debconf.org, on request of David Moreno Garza. He also got a mailing-list for that upcoming mini Debian Conference.

Which reminded me to blog about debconf.org resources again, so that more people know/remember that there is something they can use whenever they organize a Debian meeting.

If you happen to organize a meeting of Debian Developers / interested Debian people you can chose to use any debconf.org resource you need for it. This currently means:

DNS	a name within .debconf.org. Either pointing to your host, if you have one, or see below for hosting.
	Current style seems to be $something.mini.debconf.org, but we also have some miniconfX.debconf.org entries, so are pretty open. And in case it doesn’t fit into .debconf.org - there is always .debconf.net without restrictions (as its not really used currently).
Mailing-List	Want a mailing-list?
Hosting	Don’t have an own server for it? .debconf.org possibly has space for you.
	You would manage the content via a svn repository.
CMS	Conference Management System - AKA pentabarf. Available in future, more info on that point when we finally switched to a version that let’s us easily give access to other people without giving out all personal data. :)
Gallery	Use our gallery. Actually - don’t bother asking, just use it, as long as you use it for Debian related event pictures.

Want more? We have a page listing most of our resources, maybe you find something you need.

Want something? Mail admins@debconf.org and describe what you want, most possibly we will make it happen. Or try to get one of us admins on IRC, you are looking for one of the nicks Ganneff, mhy, sgran, gwolf or h01ger. No, we do not bite … usually. :)

Damn statistics ;-)

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 21:35:00 UTC

Looking at the munin stats of the video streams watched (link only works from the DebConf7 network) today was a bit disappointing. About 40 viewers in average for all four rooms combined, worldwide and on the local network together. The upper talk room alone had a peek of 35 viewers today.

But I think (or hope?) the streams were and are still useful, since they allow Debian contributors to participate in DebConf, who otherwise couldn’t. So if you’re one of those, please let us know what you think about the streams, and recordings as well.

What I am really happy about is the software framework we created before and during DebCamp and DebConf. IMO it is really impressive and very very helpful, compared to previous workflows. Ben already blogged a about it a bit. Unsurprisingly the documentation can be improved still and it’s not the only thing that can be improved. And we do have more great stuff in the pipeline for DebConf8 :-)

Streams are up

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 21:35:00 UTC

To say it again and upfront: streaming is optional. While we do try to make them work as best as we can, we also want to state again, that our priority is to preserve DebConf7 for eternity and not for the viewing pleasure of those few, who can’t wait :-D

That said, http://streams.video.debconf.org:8000 is up and running. Yay! Yay! This time also with a lolstream over night.

That announced, we’re still sorting out minor and not so minor glitches. So, I’ll stop blogging now.

And we’re still looking for more servers in Australia, Asia, Africa and Antarctica :-)

And now let’s hope everything will work out in the real world! Have fun at DebConf or watching on your sofa, if you’re lucky :-)

Some more streaming relays wanted

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 09:35:00 UTC

It’s 24h until DebianDay, the day promoting Debian to the general public in Edinburgh, which is the preceeding event of DebConf7. The video setup is almost completly done now. It will allow us to publish the recordings shortly (within hours) afterwards, with very little manual work. Today we’ll be polishing it some more and test everything with three simultaneous streams. Yesterday we successfully tested mixing video from three cameras, which was recorded and streamed to the net.

While recording has still the highest priority, the streaming setup this year will (hopefully) also really rock: thanks to the help of some friendly OFTC people we’ll use geoDNS, so that there will be one DNS name for all and the users will automatically be directed to the closest server. The problem is, there is only one server in Australia, and no servers in Asia, Africa and Antarctica.

If you have a server in one of these regions, and if can open port 8000 in- and outgoing, please contact us, as described in this mail. Clients will use about 300 kbit/s each.

As soon as the geoDNS is in place, I’ll blog again and publish the URL, so that you can watch us testing… :-)

DebConf7 Gallery

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 09:46:00 UTC

Similar to last year we opened a DebConf7 gallery on our gallery server.

We would like to have this again as a central point for all pictures taken at DebConf7, so we would really appreciate if you can (in addition to your own gallery) upload there.

As it is open for everyone just create a user and send a little mail to gallery-admins@debconf.org to get your account activated if you do not have one already.

Yet another camera…

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 15:35:00 UTC

We’re sitting in Teviot, the network is up and running and everyone here is happily hacking. So we can make detailed and concrete plans about the video setup now. And we just realized, that seven cameras are just not enough ;-)

If possible we would like to use eight cameras, because we’ll be switching between three cameras in the two main talk rooms, plus another camera in each BOF room. So if you happen to have another DV camera, please get in contact with us (to make sure we don’t end up having fourteen cameras…) and then bring it with you. That way, we won’t have to switch equiqment around and the people operating the cameras will always know what to expect in a certain venue.

DebConf7 accommodation: breakfasts

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 16:45:00 UTC

Hi there! We are working away on preparing an infomail for DebConf7 attendees, which will cover the specifics of Hostel check-in times, what to bring, key arrangements, etc. etc.

However, we could really use some figures on who might make use of the breakfast facilities offered by one of the two hostels, Budget Backpackers.

BB offer an uncooked breakfast (cereal, toast, tea and coffee, etc.) at a rate of 2 GBP per morning, payable on the morning. They are keen to know who might be interested in this service in advance, so they can prep the kitchen if the numbers are huge.

Both hostels have very good kitchen facilities and I’d expect that most people would be more inclined to group together and buy communal milk, cereal, etc. which is likely to work out cheaper too.

If you are staying in Budget Backpackers (check here if you are not sure) and you think you will be using the breakfast service, please mail accommodation@debconf.org as soon as possible with the days you may be doing this so I can let the hostel know and they can ensure they are adequately prepared for the demand.

Thank you!