This Friday I presented at FUDCon Boston about Eclipse in Fedora. My presentation was first thing in the morning, so I barely made it on time. Also the highest resolution I managed to get on the projector was 640 by 480, felt like I was back in ’92 or something. The presentation went pretty well I think, had a bunch of good question. And one person came over and told me about a particular problem he had with Webtools with our Eclipse, for which he apparently filed a bug, so now we have to look at that one 
. Unfortunately I didn’t get to do a demo, because at that resolution you could barely see anything in Eclipse. I also didn’t manage to make a screencast the night before, all the screencast tools died on me. Wink didn’t work with libstdc++.6.so. Istanbul took 100% CPU when recoding, which is something that’s reserved to Eclipse, so no go.
The conference itself was great. I got to meet a whole lot of people, some of whom I sort of met on IRC before. A lot of redhatters, a lot of other fedora-folk. It was very impressive to see so many people at once who are passionate about open source and about Fedora in particular. Very inspiring.
The presentations were interesting. One session with Jeremey Katz was about FC6. Everyone brainstormed about what should be included, the length of the development cycle, and when test releases should be. Cool. Another session talked about sound in Linux. Apparently Red Hat hired the speaker (whose name I can’t remember unfortunately) to make the situation with sound better. Frankly I didn’t know it was really bad, but I’m not a sound guy anyway. The guy seemed to be very knowledgeable and was a very entertaining presenter. Unfortunately I missed most of the presentation that Seth Vidal gave about Yum, but that got compensated by a great presentation by Ann Margulies, executive director of MIT’s OpenCourseware program. This presentation was really inspiring, not least because many universities from around the world are starting to join MIT in this program, opening up their lecture materials for everyone to see. I think this is a great initiative and I’m going to see if there’s any way we can start something like this at U of T. Why should we be the only ones that suck?
The last presentation was the State of Fedora adress by Max Spevack and Greg DeKoenigsberg. This wasn’t as much a presentation as a discussion with audience participation about the future of Fedora, and who are the people who are going to make it happen. There was some inevitable discussion of the Fedora Foundation Affair, but that went more smoothly than I thought it would. This was a pretty interesting session overall. I think the Fedora community is growing larger and stronger bit by bit, and it’s always a pleasant feeling to be part of something that’s growing, and that looks like it’s going the right way.
Go Fedora!