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The Debian Project http://www.debian.org/
DebConf11 ends as another success for the Debian Project press@debian.org
July 29th, 2011 http://www.debian.org/News/2011/20110730
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DebConf11 ends as another success for the Debian Project
The annual Debian Conference ended today after being held for the
previous week in Banja Luka, Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
It has been a great success for the Debian Project.
"DebConf is a vital event for Debian, both as a Free Software
distribution and as a project. To the distribution, DebConf offers 'high
bandwidth' time that volunteers use to have socialise while hacking on
Debian. To the project, DebConf offers long lasting enthusiasm and the
ability to smooth the grudges which can be accumulated while
communicating over the Internet." Stefano Zacchiroli, Debian Project
Leader explains the importance of the conference: "DebConf11 in Banja
Luka has been great on both sides and has also shown to many of us a
culture and a part of the world we were not familiar with. We will be
back!"
DebConf was preceded by DebCamp, an opportunity for contributors,
developers and teams to meet and work on specific issues and discuss face
to face. As an example, the development team of Debian's installation
system met, and amongst other changes [1] integrated the recently
released Linux Kernel 3.0, improved the ports to the kFreeBSD and Hurd
architectures, fixed issues when using braille displays, and started the
first integration steps of the "CUT/rolling" release.
1: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Debconf11Summary
Other improvements done during DebCamp include the development of RSS
feeds [2] about the actual content of the FTP archive, which will
significantly ease the development of services using this information.
2: http://dde.debian.net/debchanges/
A hot topic during DebCamp and DebConf was Multiarch [3] (see also the
separate announcement [4]) which makes make programs and libraries of
different hardware architectures easily usable in parallel on the same
system. For instance, the Embedded GNU C library eglibc [5] has seen
some development to support multiarch. Other highlights of the conference
program include "Delivering Multi-Platform Applications" [6] by Bdale
Garbee or the ARM BoF session [7] which showed interesting details about
the coming "armhf<" port.
3: http://penta.debconf.org/dc11_schedule/events/747.en.html
4: http://www.debian.org/News/2011/20110726b
5: http://packages.debian.org/glibc
6: http://penta.debconf.org/dc11_schedule/events/705.en.html
7: http://penta.debconf.org/dc11_schedule/events/795.en.html
During DebConf the video team consisting of about 50 volunteers managed
to provide live streams for over 70 of the sessions, while recording 65
hours of video resulting in 800GB of data to be reviewed. After post
processing the videos will be made available on our meetings archive [8].
Users may also thank the video team via a dedicated wiki page [9].
8: http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2011/debconf11/
9: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf11/Videoteam/Thanks
The Debian Conference was attended by over 400 contributors from over 70
countries ranging as far as New Zealand, Taiwan and Brazil. Beside the
original scheduled 78 sessions, about 30 additional sessions where
scheduled during the conference.
The next annual Debian Conference will be held next year in Managua,
Nicaragua [10].
10: http://penta.debconf.org/dc11_schedule/events/719.en.html
Again the Debian Project would like to thank the sponsors without whom the
entire conference wouldn't have been possible:
The Government of the Republika Srpska [10]
m:tel [11]
Google [12]
Canonical [13]
HP [14]
Linaro [15]
Matanel
ProfitBricks [16]
Credativ [17]
ARM [18]
Renesas [19]
Thomas Krenn AG [20]
Wavecon [21]
Gestman
Univention [22]
Brandorr [23]