FOSDEM 2010: Marketplace for Distros

Feb 09, 2010

At FOSDEM 2010 in Brussels, software that was declared dead was resurrected (Hurd), known combatants sat down at the same table (openSUSE, Fedora and Debian) and almost forgotten entities raised their hands again (openSUSE for PowerPC).

In contrast to last year's FOSDEM, visitors searched in vain for a lecture series by the major distros. Instead, organizers set things on a common track: "It was exciting to find out how other projects maintain their servers," said Klaas Freitag of openSUSE. "We run our Open Build Service from a central computing center, while other distros spread their computers across the entire world." Other talks concerned themselves with the need for, and relationship with, upstream maintainers or with issues surrounding community management. In one talk, former head of Fedora Max Spevack explained to those present at "Fedora Governance" what held the project together internally.

But not only the mainstream got heard. A few visitors were amazed about an operating system making a recurrence, when Olaf Buddenhagen asserted that "The Hurd lives." The Berliner worked on Hurd for his master's thesis while still in school. Likewise, KVM kernel developer and Novell worker Alexander Graf wants to reanimate openSUSE for PowerPC. Because he's employed to port the KVM Linux virtualization technology, he'd be happy to offer the distro with the Gecko to the Power platform, he told Linux Magazine Online: "If I can find a few comrades-in-arms to help me, it can be done by openSUSE 11.3. The KVM extensions for it are already completed."

Related content

  • FOSDEM Video: Micro Distro Summit

    Nils Magnus of Linux Magazine Online pulled together the heads of three Linux distros for an interview and put them in a video: openSUSE's Joe Brockmeier, Debian's Steve McIntyre and Red Hat's Max Spevack.

    more »
  • Fosdem 2010

    A friendly atmosphere during a geek interpretation of square dance; a free exchange of technical ideas; praise from veterans: Fosdem, the volunteer-organized conference in the heart of Europe, has many faces.

    more »
  • FOSDEM 2009

    More than 5,000 people gathered in Brussels for FOSDEM 2009. Attendees learned to guard their in-demand netbooks, and representatives from major open source projects explained the agendas for upcoming releases.

    more »
  • KDE OBS Generator Builds KDE Packages for Various Distros

    Building distro-specific packages is not one of the strengths of most developers. The KDE OBS Generator should solve this problem with the help of openSUSE Build Services.

    more »
  • FOSDEM 2007

    On February 24 and 25, around 4,000 geeks gathered in Brussels, Belgium, for the Free and Open source Software Developers European Meeting (FOSDEM).

    more »
comments powered by Disqus

Issue 236/2020

Buy this issue as a PDF

Digital Issue: Price $12.99
(incl. VAT)

News

Tag Cloud

Administration Community Desktop Events Hardware Linux Linux Pro Magazine Mobile Programming Software Ubuntu Web Development Windows free software open source