Well last weekend I ventured to Brussels for FOSDEM 2005. Apart from never having been to Belgium before, I had also never been to any similar Linux event before (my lecturers are inconsiderate enough to schedule lectures whenever there’s an Expo on in London) so it was all new to me. I flew out to Brussels from Manchester with BA and it was a very pleasant flight. For some bizarre reason it was cheaper to fly than go Eurostar. I stayed in a very nice B&B which I found through Bed & Brussels which for only €40 a night gave me a really nice room and a full continental breakfast within walking distance of the venue.
All I can really say is that it was fantastic and I will be going every year from now on. It was really cool to meet up with people from the UK Linux community who I wouldn’t normally see as well as developers and other people I’ve exchanged e-mail with but never met. Oh and the beer for €1 a bottle was good too! Even the decent Belgian beer was only €2 a bottle.
It was also great to browse all the stalls and get the chance to support the various project by buying their merchandise (I ended up with about 4 t-shirts, stacks of stickers and a Fire Fox 
).
The talks were great too. RMS was talking about copyright which is something I’ve been interested in recently and also about free firmware/BIOS issues. He also gave a few new commandments to the community: buy AMD not Intel (AMD are more co-operative with developers) and don’t do business with Adobe (who apologised for the whole Sklyarov thing but won’t refund his legal costs).
It was interesting to hear Jimmy Wales talk about how Wikipedia is getting on as well. They are in the top 10 most popular Internet sites and currently have 50 servers (soon to double and expand into multiple datacentres) – and they employ 1 guy part-time to look after it all! Of course there’s an army of volunteers who do the rest of the work.
The talk I found most interesting was one I wasn’t actually planning to go to, but Alan Cox mentioned that it has been rescheduled to be after his talk so I decided to go along. The talk was by Scott Wheeler in the KDE developers’ room and was about desktop searching and the “semantic desktop” (the official title was Beyond Hierarchical Data: The Desktop as a Searchable Web of Context). Some of the ideas he was talking about are really, really exciting. The talk centred around the fact that it is much easier to find stuff on the web than it is to find stuff on your own computer, which is obviously a stange situation to be in. He was saying that in KDE 4 (expected in about a years time) KDE will store lots of meta and relationship data about every “object” (so not just files, but things like e-mails or options in the KDE Control Centre). He focused on the KDE Control Centre for a bit, which as anyone who has used it will know, is a right pain in the rear to find options as there are so many levels, tabs, etc. But what if the options had relationships stored about them? For example, if you change your keyboard layout, the control centre could suggest that you might want to change the language too and give you the option to do this without searching through the hierarchy. Or if you frequently change your desktop background and then the icon font colour, it would “learn” this and give you the option every time you change the background. Of course this could apply to files too: for example if you right-click on a file you saved from an e-mail, you might get the options to show the e-mail it was attached to, display all other files which were attached to the same e-mail or display all files sent to you by the same person. Often I decompress a file only to find all the files are in the top-level, so they all get dumped in my home directory. How cool it would be to just click on one of the files and say “select all other files from this archive” then be able to move/delete them all in one go.
This makes me excited. Just think how much easier it will be to use an “intelligent” desktop environment, which knows what you like to do and makes it easy to find related information.
Not much code has actually been written yet, there are some major technical hurdles to cross and the ideas exist mostly on presentation slides and on mailing lists, but it is supposed to be functional in about a year.
I may well write some more about other things which interested me at FOSDEM sometime soon. I took some photographs at the event and I should probably do a proper photo album for my site at some point, but for now I’ll just chuck the best of them below:
The Jansson lecture theatre fills up for the first talk of FOSDEM 2005
Richard Stallman preparing to do his talk
The scrum of people trying to get pictures of Stallman
Stallman during his talk
Stallman presenting the Award for the Advancement of Free Software to Theo de Raadt, leader of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects
Alan Cox ventures into the audience to answer questions during his talk
Alan Cox answering a question about kernel maintanence
