All of this week Ian Jackson and myself have been have been attending DebConf12 in Managua, Nicaragua. This is the annual conference of the Debian Project, hosted this year by Universidad Centroamericana.
There have already been several days of talks, including the traditional “Bits from… ” talks from the release teams, project leader, DSA team etc and interesting talks on UEFI, ARM, multiarch and cross building. In particular it was very interesting from my point of view (due to my involvement with the new Xen port to ARMv7 with hardware extensions) to see the talk on the new “aarch64” 64 bit ARM architecture. Not to mention the traditional Cheese & Wine party and the day trip. Sadly our attempt to climb Cerro Negro, the youngest volcano in Central America, was scuppered by a landslide on the road leading to the foot of the volcano.
Debian for the Cloud Track
As I write this I have just finished my Debian & Xen: Past Present and Future talk as part of the Debian for the Cloud Track. Also on this track there have been or will be talks on XCP, Ganeti, advanced Linux networking and a discussion of upstream compatiblity concerns.
All the DebConf talks are being streamed live from the venue but if you’ve missed one then they will eventually be made available for offline viewing.
Hacklab
As always there has been a hacklab. When I’ve not been listening to talks I’ve been doing some triage of the Xen bugs in the Debian BTS. There was quite a large number of bugs which had either already been fixed or which had become somehow irrelevant.
Unrelated to Xen I’ve also managed while I was here to implement support for the DreamPlug plug computer in the Debian Installer.
Impressions of Nicaragua
In my experience Nicaragua is an excellent place to visit, I wish I’d thought to extend my stay a bit so I could see more. Everyone I’ve met here is extremely welcoming and friendly. It’s also not nearly as hot I was expecting, although don’t get me wrong — it’s really very hot indeed. It hasn’t rained as much as I might have expected at this time of year, but when it has rained it really has taken no prisoners.