Hum. This year’s FrOSCon… sucks. At least the catering, which was so much better last year (remembering the Chili con Carne, as well as the Chili non (sin) Carne, fondly… these were produced by wbx@’s family members, which haven’t been included in this year’s planning so some other persons did the catering). And being waked up at 04:00 in the morning due to a call on the mobile phone, for taking care of some drunken booth slave *grml…*, didn’t help either.

The evening’s social event also sucked totally. Since it had been raining until shortly before, they decided to have it inside, except the barbecue of course, but didn’t adjust the volume of the music played to the environment, which caused me to leave the MirOS/XF86 booth in favour of the Debian/grml booth, talking to Mika and Joey… who, like me, didn’t quite like being LITERALLY punched into our stomach by the basses. I left relatively early then, especially as the cocktails (Vutral brought me one, since I couldn’t go near the counter due to the volume of the… whatever they call music) tasted pretty bad and had a (too?) high percentage of alcohol. But talking to the various people, not just Mika and Joey, was good, even though just being at the FH (university) during the social event was really unbearable and physically endangering one’s health.

Other than that, we had quite a lot of fun at the conference, as usual. I still think it has chances to close up to FOSDEM, but they will have to make sure the catering does not get even worse. While FOSDEM does not have any catering, FrOSCon 2006 and 2007 had good food, and regressions count as malus.
Once I found Marc Aurele La France at the train station (which was quite a task), things went well — he even fixed a bug in our xdm configuration at the conference. The bug was inherited from OpenBSD, as usual ☺
Marc also said he enjoyed himself.

I hacked an Asus EeePC… MirOS mostly works (no NIC though), and the graphics card runs at 640x480 VESA… with the new 915resolution port of today, it might do the 800x480, but I can’t test now.

I took the chance to discover a geocache in St. Augustin yesterday, but, while Benny suggested we (him, me and gecko2) go caching in Bonn today, they seem to prefer hacking on the laptops (considering the weather, this is not the worst idea though), so I got time to write a wlog entry (too). I still have some things on my TODO, like fixing the ports with unfetchable distfiles, but hey.
Taking the day before and the day after the conference off is A Good Thing™.
Next one will be the Software Freedom Day in Baarn, Nederland — where not even Wim will go ☺ But I need a car… parents don’t help even if you ask them once a year, but maybe Jonathan from (near) Aachen will join me, he has a car.

My Thinkpad X40 will probably arrive today or tomorrow. Sadly, I didn’t invest any time in evaluating the products before… I learned that the ‘T’ series has 2.5" HDDs instead of the sucky 1.6" HDDs, and a much more solid lid chassis, at FrOSCon. My decision to buy an X40 was based solely on the observation that it was “in” at most OpenBSD developers some years ago (and thusly would most certainly work well with MirOS). Don’t do that then…

Once it’s there, I got to set it up and continue working. It’s bad odem broke so badly, especially as my current contractor (employer, except not quite so) would rather have me working full-time on the project, which is not entirely possible since I still have a life here. But upon setting it up, I might upgrade and/or fix some of the ports, since I’m at it anyway. Plus I get /home encryption.

Marc agreed to merging as much of our X11 changes (both these inherited from OpenBSD’s XF4 module and our own patches) into the XFree86® main tree, some ifdef’d, and helping us migrate to the new 4.7 or upcoming 4.8 release (or probably, 4.8.99.01, since I don’t think the merge will be there in time for 4.8 proper). He was a fun guy and well understanding our issues. The most funny part however was Thomas from Sourcemage (SMGL), who also maintains the mksh spell in their grimoire, considering to retain supporting XFree86® (and modular X.org, but not the buggy monolithic X.org) iff it’s still actively developed, which Marc assured me it is.

Benny agrees that the “Kaiser’s BIO-Kaffee” is decent, despite its pricing of only 3.99 €/£ (may be my high quality milk too, though).

Update: looks like I’ve got a package to fetch from the post station.