Sperrobjekt Weblog

Just in case you always wanted to know how geeks became what they are today, click on the above image

This is supposed to be more like a reminder to myself, should I ever need to install gitosis on a server again. I carefully followed all the steps described here and here (German) on my Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server. But when it came to pushing my first project to the repository, git failed with ERROR:gitosis.serve.main:Repository read access denied

Turned out that none of the hooks in repositories/gitosis-admin.git/hooks/ was executable. A simple $ sudo chmod +x * solved the problem for me. Now, everything seems to be working fine.

As I said before, I attended FrOSCon, the Free and Open Source Software Conference, in Sankt Augustin on Saturday. It was my first time at FrOSCon, and I must say I instantly felt very much at home there. Great talks, friendly people, and a relaxed atmosphere: What more can you expect from a nerd conference?

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h3>The Talks I Attended

Having to choose from about six to ten parallel talks was no easy task, but I found something interesting most of the time. The first session was held by Lorna Jane Mitchell. She told us how Open Source changed her career. She is actively participating in PHP projects, organizing PHP events, and generally trying to help where she can. Because of this she was presented with interesting career options in the past and will probably in the future, too. Well done!

Then I switched tracks and found myself in a talk about MySQL command line tools. We could have skipped the general shell introduction and should have moved fast forward to the various possibilities the mysql CLI offers. But still, I learned about some great commands like pager, if only in the last ten minutes of the presentation.

The award for most inspirational talk of the day goes to Jon "Maddog" Hall. He gave some great examples of how useful Open Source Software can be in developing countries. Access to information is the pivotal point in many cases, and OSS is a great, cheap and lasting way to achieve this. But you have to be careful if you wanted to achieve sustained success, because the local conditions may differ from what you know or expect. Let's see how Maddog's latest venture in Brazil, Project Cauã, evolves.

Later on, Michael Prokop talked about his experience managing OSS projects. If you want your software to be successful, it's not enough to write good code. Clever marketing, involvement of the community, distributed version control, bug reports, and even the name of the project play major roles on the road to success.

I spent more or less the second half of the day in the PHP room. The PHP track had been organized by the fine people of the PHPUG Dortmund. Manuel Pichler talked about software metrics and PHP Depend, Christian Weiske gave an introduction on the Semantic Web, especially on Microformats and RDFa, and Kore Nordmann introduced us to the Arbit project tracking tool and some of the features that are planned for future releases. Maybe, hopefully, we can have one of them at our local PHPUG in Mainz later this year, we'll see.

The Event In General

First of all, the location is perfect for an event this size. The modern lecture rooms had just the right size and all were equipped with projectors. A lot of software projects and companies, from KDE to Python to FreeWRT to Openstreetmap, set up their booths and presented their work there. I took a long look at KDE 4.5, for example, but still don't like it On the other hand, I will certainly take a closer look at the Skolelinux distribution because I'm currently installing software for an educational project.

The was plenty of coffee and Club Mate, of course, and the food in the refectory was okay, at least the vegetarian meal. I also bumped into quite a lot of people I know from earlier conferences, meet-ups, or Barcamps. The whole community aspect of FrOSCon is one of its major assets, I guess. Feels like a natural habitat to me - that's why I'll probably return next year. Well, in fact, I will return because I did not find Fachhochschule Sankt Augustin this time - must have been really, really blind.

So, thanks to all the people who helped to make FrOSCon a great event!

FrOSCon, the Free and Open Software Conference, will be held in the Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin this weekend. It's already the 5th edition of this conference, but it will be my premiere as visitor. There are going to be many lectures and workshop revolving around open software. And there is a track especially for PHP that I'm particularly looking forward to.

One of the great things about FrOSCon is that it's not just a conference, but a lot more: A number of OSS project (Django, Arch Linux, OpenOffice, heck, even Perl) have there own rooms, and there is a superb program for kids of different ages. The youngsters can go geocaching and (open street) mapping, learn how to code games in Python, or make cool stop motion animations. If I was (or had) a kid, this would be so cool

Anyway, I will be at FrOSCon on Saturday, and maybe Sunday too. I haven't decided yet on which sessions to attend. But if you want to chat or have a cup of coffee, just say Hi or send a tweet to @mattsches. I'm really looking forward to meeting lots of interesting people and to learning wicked new stuff.

Back in the days when I was still a Windows user, portable apps where a good way of carrying current versions of my favorite tools with me on a USB stick. Now, this is also possible on most Linux variants with Portable Linux Apps.

There are already more than 50 apps you can put on your USB stick, just remember to make them executable. This is not only great if you want to run the application on any desktop, but it also comes in handy if you want to test out a nightly build without really installing it on your system. The latter remains stable, while the former hast got everything it needs to run contained in itself.

If you run into trouble there's a forum, too, where you can ask for help or request a new package - however there's not much happening there yet. But since everything is so dead easy, it should just work. At least on Ubuntu 10.04, OpenSUSE 11.2, and Fedora 12. You might want to use a LiveCD of one of these distributions if you're on a different system.