On Sunday, I gave a talk at the 1st Skycon titled “Debian etch: does that itch scratch yet” (it’s far less funny now than I thought it was when I came up with it).
I think it was a well-received talk and from first feedback, it
provided a doog overview of our situation with etch to those who
don’t follow the project very closely. I would especially like to
thank Steve Langasek, Sam Hocevar, Frans Pop, Brian May, Anthony
Towns, Theodore Ts’o, Thomas Viehmann. and the other folks of
#debian-devel for their input during preparation. And
a big shout to everyone who showed up to the talk itself, which
included a bunch of the chaps who showed me a “craic” time during
my five week stay in Limerick (“craic” is an Irish way to vent
enthusiasm).
As I’ve come to expect, my (not-so-)lovely IBM laptop hardlocked
whenever I tried to switch on the external VGA port, be it via
ACPI, /proc, or the BIOS, even after a reboot. I also
could not get a Wifi association and did not have a USB key on me,
so I started to get comfortable with the fact that I’d be doing the
talk based off an older set of slides. Fortunately, just when I was
about to start, I restored the ACPI registers to proper working
order using a uswsusp suspend cycle (of all things;
did you hear that, Matthew?), even
though Cathal’s USB stick and Dave’s laptop came to my rescue.
Thanks guys, even though I ended up using my own laptop, mostly
because of Firefox’s Autohide
extension.
The
slides are online under the CC by-sa-nc 2.5 licence. The source
is a reStructured
Text
document (and a
bunch of images), which rst2s5 translated for use
with the sweet S5
presentation system (S6? Haha).
Last but not least, I would like to thank everyone at Skynet and especially Laura for organising this event. It was very fun and the selection of talks as well as the attendants ranked above the likes of such “important” events like LinuxTag. I hope there will be another Skycon next year!
NP: Amorphis / Elegy
Update: Thanks, h01ger for pointing out that
Sun Java is not actually in main, but in
non-free. Slides updated.
