Fosscomm is the annual conference of the Greek Free Software communities. This year the event took place on May 3 & 4 at the Technological Educational Institute(TEI) of Lamia. This time we organized the road trip with Pavlos Ratis (dastergon) from Thessaloniki.

openSUSE-el

Most of the greek community was recuperating from the long and tedious journey to Dubrovnik, Croatia for the Annual openSUSE conference where some had a series of presentations while the rest helped as volunteers there. That left me practically alone at Fosscomm to have a talk and man a booth which we co-hosted with dastergon as a multi-community booth (openSUSE/Gentoo).

The booth had a wide assortment of stickers, flyers, CDs and DVDs for both openSUSE and Gentoo. My talk, entitled “Enlightening Lizards: Getting the Enlightenment experience & Being part of the effort”, was about the effort we put for packaging the environment and associated libraries and the current status in recent openSUSE versions. I started the talk with a brief historical overview about the Enlightenment project, then moved on to an introduction of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) and the Enlightenment window manager to conclude with a briefing of the team members and plans for the future.

Finally, I talked about how we coordinate the work in distribution level and how to work with upstream so that we can provide a full and enjoyable environment for openSUSE users. opensuse-e

Gentoo-el

The Gentoo community had 2 presentations one by dastergon, entitled “Btrfs: A next generation filesystem”, in 35’ Pavlos managed to get us up to date with the current developments regarding btrfs, the ecosystem that has developed around it, its users the architecture and workings of the filesystem. dastergon

The second presentation was one that is more upstream in character and also one I personally consider far more important. This one Pavlos co-presented with Panayiotis Christopoulos (pchrist) they talked about package maintainership and the distinction between distribution and upstream level packaging. In quite an effective and coherent manner they switched places each talking about a specific environment and its tooling and packaging tactics.

Finally after having switched quite a few distros before they both ended up as Gentoo users (later Gentoo developers) they gave a handful of tips about packaging and working with upstreams gathered from their experience with said distros and packaging schemes. softare packages

The rest

I spent the rest of the conference at our booth helping people, answering questions and generally socializing and talking with old friends.

Congratulations to the people from the TEI of Lamia for the organization! :)

Here is their photostream on flickr

  • Update: Fixed Gentoo-el photos.