DebConf 11 – Debian Day

The first day of the conference is Debian Day,

We registered at the front desk, got packages we may need, including a pre-paid SIM card that we can use here (no micro-SIM though). We met many friends from the mini-DebConf and mini-DebCamp (Paul Wise, Arne Goetje, Joerg Jaspert, Christian Perrier, Andrew Lee, Jonas Smedegaard, Paul Liu) and new friends (Velimir Iveljic – local staff, Jesus Climent – a google guy), and of course many DDs in the room.

The opening ceremony was something. The president of the republic of Srpska came to give the opening speech, along with minister of science, and other political people. Well, DebConf11 is sponsored by the government of the republic of Srpska anyway.

Then, the talks. Debian Day is a kind of non-debian-technical talks for general people. Bdale gave a talk "Understanding Debian". Here I have learned something from his talk – "Never underestimate value of values". He learned from HR training courses of his employer (HP) in the past . It’s important to clearly understand values, which would lead to visions, strategies, objectives, and some other things later on. Most people set their vision first, but when you got a big problem, sometimes even stepping back to stick on the vision cannot get you an answer. The core values will.

Enrico Zini talked about "Life in Debian". It was very fun talk about Debian community. People are different, it’s also true for Debian people. They are students, teachers, employee, employers, etc. Some build rockets for fun (i.e., Bdale Garbee) ! , some travel to space for fun (i.e., Mark Shuttleworth) ! .. But, they do have something in common – social contract and DFSG.

Jesus Climent gave a talk about a case study of Debian in Enterprise like Google. Well, we met Jesus in the morning. He lived in Thailand for 3 months, went to many places, falled in love with Thailand so much, enough to tattoo words in Thai on his ankle! Jesus did give a talk about Debian in Google infrastructures which is large scale, resilient, high availability system. Google engineering teams also use one of Debian derivative — Ubuntu.

The last session was about Austrian e-health system presented by Gerfried Fuch and that was all about the Debian Day talks.

BTW, I think the DC11 video team will put all the talks on the net sooner or later.