In my humble opinion, two days is too short for FOSDEM. There’s just so much in such a little time span.

The Belgian electronic ID card in Debian by Wouter Verhelst
An introduction of the Belgium eID card that was introduced to the residence not long ago. It’s interesting to note that the Belgian Government supports open source movement in this regard. Wouter Verhelst has somewhat raised the privacy concerns in that anyone can read the eID contents quite easily with the available libraries. The technical documents (in Dutch) can be found here. And the support card readers can be found here.

It’s interesting that both Belgium and Malaysia are employing such a technology. It’d be very interesting to see how both compare in terms of purpose and its utilisations.

Update on Virtualization in Debian by Henning Sprang
Personally, I found it a bit too much on the Xen rather than an equal overview of the virtualisation packages in Debian. There were many concerns about AMD64 Xen support, which I’m quite surprised. Especially since 64-bit CPUs are churning out very fast, and you can’t find 32-bit in this market anymore. Equally important, Xen has gained much popularity in the server environments.

Vserver was briefly introduced. And I must say, Vserver is doing a very good job for server environments in ensuring security and isolation of the host machine. It has full support for 64-bit and performs very well from what I have heard and use so far. They even have a patch for grsecurity!

Though of course, it all depends on your requirements and needs for virtualisation. All I feel is, Xen is slacking behind…and it’s not a good sign.

VirtualBox by Achim Hasenmueller
This is the talk that drove me to come on Sunday. My interest in VirtualBox grew when I first used it about a month ago. No kernel patching, a (quite) simple installation via their download page, and overall up-to-date and good documentations.

Achim Hasenmueller provided the background of Innotek and their position in the market. They are here to make money. But their modular architecture allows them to open source various components, which is great! In essence, they generate income through specialisation and licensing specific components to those who need. They remind me of ZResearch and Gluster.

He surprised me when he mentioned that VirtualBox has been an ongoing project for a number of years with government agencies and companies! Only recently, they took off for end-users like us. They come from the virtualisation background with many years of experience. Thus, for Innotek, VirtualBox is known as the 3rd generation virtualisation application. The architecture is highly complex, as he mentioned, that is suitable for most, if not all, use case scenarios. The silver bullet of all virtualisation? Only time will tell.

Important to note that their USB module will be opensourced in the future, which would be very interesting and beneficial for many people.

Through Sun Microsystems‘ acquisition, let’s hope things will continue as it is and much better, as Achim Hasenmueller has assured us.

etch-n-half: Supporting new hardware within stable by Andreas Barth
Kernel-wise, Etch is a rather old. The current linux kernel in Etch (2.6.18) can’t support new hardwares. What happens when you buy new servers? Or desktops? I experienced it, and it wasn’t amusing!

Here comes the movement for Etch-n-Half. Lots of considerations to take place, e.g. which kernel to consider? During the talk, 2.6.24 seems to be agreed upon with a fallback plan of using 2.6.22, which I’m happy about. One raised the need to patch module-assistant for compatibility on latest kernel. And lots of testing is needed to ensure it doesn’t break various modules, including X!

The biggest question are, when will it be shipped and for which architectures?

Nothing much came out from the talk, except the “let’s do it” attitude, which is most important.

Mozilla Mobile by Christian Sejersen
It’s only natural that Mozilla gets into the mobile space. If not, Safari and Opera will be crowding the space.

So, Christian Sejersen introduced the plans for Mozilla Mobile and how they will be undertaking the project. They’ll be sharing the same code-base of Mozilla Firefox, and are still pondering upon which components can be left out for Mobile. Some people like full blown website browsing experience, while some don’t, and some just don’t care. He assured us that ARM these days are powerful enough to render a full web page, but the main problem is usually issues in HTML/CSS for small screens. I tend to agree, because my iPhone works great! Except some sites where their HTML/CSS is not compatible.

Relating to performance issues, some have raised concerns in the lack of code optimisations for performance and memory footprints. It’s unfortunate to learn from Christian Sejersen that Mozilla has no plans, or maybe the resources, to optimise the code. With improving technologies, on faster CPU and more RAM, it’s quite understanable that Mozilla neglected this area.

So far, Mozilla has done well. I just hope they don’t take for granted that everyone can afford new PCs to solve performance issues. Much like Microsoft’s attitude.

Finale for 2008
With the way open source is moving, it’ll only get better and more free software for everyone.

One thing has been lingering in my head while I was there in those two days, “FOSS will one day break”. Scary thought. Let’s just hope FOSS will continue to be around for the benefit of the masses. Until next year!

Update: For those who couldn’t attend the event, you can find the videos of each talk here. They will also have presentation slides on the main website soon!