LIVE! from the Ottawa Linux Symposium!

Well, it would be live if my wireless cards worked better with Linux. I might be able to fix that. My primary wireless card is an Atheros and I hate it with a passion. It has sucked more useful life from my body than anything else in my standard operating environment (other key examples were early uses of apt-get upgrade on debian, and being an early adopter of Fedora 7).

Anyway, the opening/greeting/mingling location was at a bar called Vineyards in the Byward Market area and, whileonly a small percentage of the registered crowd showed up, the place was
very busy and the number of actual code developers and contributors was quite high. One of the concens going into this year is that the move of the Linux Kernel Summit to September in Cambridge UK would pull a lot of the core developers away and reduce the quality of the
networking opportunities at OLS.

However, the "newer" model of holding key mini-summits has substantially mitigated that issue, if, indeed it would have been an issue. There was a virtualization mini-summit, a power management mini-summit and, I believe, a third mini-summit that were all held prior to OLS. Those mini-summits pulled in deep experts in those areas, and several other development areas were well represented, including ext4 developers, various architecture maintainers & core developers, dm/md developers, storage folks, container folks,

Word from the organizers is that in excess of 660-670 people had registered for OLS this year, with a few stragglers still signing up at the last minute. There seemed to be a larger international component, with more people from Japen that previously, as well as a strong
European contingent.

There appeared to be a large amount of beer and a fair bit of wine consumed at the bar that evening, which seemed to enable a free flow of information and plenty of mingling. I had a chance to talk to people about everything from power management, containers & networking (Dave Miller hates container namespaces!), device mapper and support for EMC multipath hardware, a rework of the Linux sound subsystem, and a number of debates in several of those spaces, just to name a few The night ended a bit early for some when the bar started closing down a full 45 minutes before Ottawa's otherwise early 1 AM bar closure. However, all for the better since a 10 AM start was in the works for Wednesday morning.

Late note: these blogs may be more "as it happens" tomorrow since I think I figure out how to get the latest MadWifi and linux-2.6.22-rc6 to work just a bit ago!