[plug] Cameron's Conf Comments - Monday 12th

[Russ Pitman]

Cameron Patrick wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> Since no one else seems to be doing anything along these lines, I
> thought I might write stuff about what's going on here in Adelaide.  I
> don't claim to be exhaustive, and may or may not write anything for days
> after yesterday, but it's a start. :-)  Also, I have blatantly ripped
> off the subject heading of this email from a suggestion by Harry McNally.
> I would submit this to the plug web site too but my web access here is a
> bit dodgy.
> 
> So here we go...  Yesterday (Monday) was the first day of the miniconfs.
> After eating breakfast - mostly surrounded by Perth people, PLUGgers and
> UCCans - we set off to get to Adelaide Uni.  Despite Bernard having a
> map on his PDA, we still got lost and ended up going around the long
> way.  Unlike in Perth last year, there were few signs up around the uni,
> although there seemed to be a few more by the end of the day.  After
> registering and getting our back of conference goodies, we wandered off
> to the Debian Miniconf, where Jon Oxer was wrestling with X on his
> laptop and eventually resorted to showing his presentation using a
> proprietary operating system.
> 
> The Debian Miniconf - which I spent most of the day at - was interesting
> for interesting (for those who like that sort of thing).  Bdale, as
> usual, had stuff to say about satellites and how he had machines of most
> of Debian's architectures in his home, as well as other interesting
> stuff that I've forgotten...  aj's talk ran for about twice as long as
> it was supposed to but was an interesting look at how you end up
> being one of the Debian bigwigs.  (Summary: harass people about your
> ideas and then actually implement them even when the ftpmaster thinks
> you're a nut.)  Anand's talk on the debian installer rubbed in how even
> the new Sarge installer is nowhere near as swish as the offerings from
> Mandrake, Red Hat and Suse.
> 
> There was lunch somewhere in there, too; and many failed attempts at
> getting my borrowed laptop to work with a borrowed wireless card.  (It
> alternated between not recognising the PCMCIA card, seeing it but
> refusing to load the driver, and hanging when the card was inserted.)
> I'm typing this over a wireless network using Putty and Windows XP :(
> [Update 8:45pm - Bernard has compiled me a kernel which /should/ work,
> with lots of bizarre patches in it to make it go.]
> 
> After the miniconfs, we walked (for half an hour!) over to a pub for
> dinner and Conrad's Linux Audio demo/jam session, which fizzled after a
> short time.  Returned home.  Slept.
> 
> I may or may not write one sometime later tonight or tomorrow morning
> about today.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Cameron.
Thank you Cameron. I'm sure there are many lurkers here.

Hang in there for us.

Enjoy :-)
-- 
Cheers
Russ.