As I recover from my flu, I write this post on my FOSDEM 2009 experience a couple of weeks back. I attended the conference as a Fedora Electronic Laboratory Team Consultant (thats what the team devel time-line says 
) from Feb 6th to Feb 9th 2009.
Day 0:
After going around Brussels the whole day, it was time to meet Chitlesh Goorah, the man behind Fedora Electronics Laboratory at the Brussels Station – Central for dinner. We were joined by Joerg Simon and Robert later on. Over dinner we discussed a lot on current status of Fedora Electronic Lab to Java to Ruby to Life.. Then it was time to head to the Delirium Cafe where the Beer event was taking place. As I entered into the pub, I was stunned to see not a “menu” but a big “book” being given for me to choose. I picked up 3 different makes and did have a nice time. Belgian Beers are the best! At around midnight I realized, I have spoken to lot of unknown people and also figured out that I have lost the folks with whom I came there. So, took a walk back to the hotel to end Day 0 peacefully.
 Day 1:
 
Headed to the ULB campus at around 10 AM. Reaching the place was pretty straight forward. Right away got into the job of photography and networking. Got myself a cool FOSDEM tee and started to do some booth hopping. Every free software project under the sky had its presence here. The hallways were a lot crowded than I expected. I met the KDE folks who were with the KDE Handbook (designed, developed and exported from India – Pradeepto, do I need to tell more or are you going to blog about it? 
) Met Ade and a whole bunch of KDE folks before heading to the fedora devroom where the Fedora Activity Day was about to begin. Christoph’s RPM packaging talk covered most basics but I wished he actually did some live packaging and showed. Then came the most awaited talk of FOSDEM (atleast for me). Chitlesh’s FEL talk. A good number of audience and the talk went well. One can clearly see the clarity in his vision and mission that he for FEL. Complete focus.After some roaming around, decided to hack on some Hardware design stuff and got into the hack room. Spent most of the afternoon there and came out exhausted. Headed to the hotel and later joined the Fedora Team get together in the evening near the Grand Place. Nice Day 1.
Day 2:
Mostly spent in the Embedded devroom listening to talks relating to the research work I am doing and in the Fedora booth helping the folks down there. Met Chitlesh late in the afternoon and we decided to go for a “Closed door” meeting 
of the FEL team. We discussed our next steps and my To Do list became longer and longer. Some important next steps discussed were getting the documentation in proper shape on the wiki + exploring how better we can provide support in the embedded area. After that it was time for the group Fedora photo and the usual hugs and bye byes. Next day i took the flight out back to Lausanne, Switzerland.
So whats the title all about…
I have mixed feelings leaving FOSDEM 2009. I was happy that I met quite a few folks with whom I have *only* had on-line communication especially Chitlesh. I felt somehow not at home a few times (which of-course is true.. but you know..) and also i got lot more things done at foss.in. May be the atmosphere of FOSDEM is not ideal for hacking or development work but more towards networking, planning etc. It was a mixed feeling with which I left Brussels and FOSDEM.
In fact I did some live packaging and I really would have liked to show more stuff, but as I told at the beginning of my talk I could not use my own laptop and had to use Felix’ instead. On his laptop I could not install the required packages because the wireless was not yet up.
It also was really hard to work on the laptop because of it’s strange dual head mode: I had no mouse cursor on the display but only on the beamer.
I had to improvise a lot and I’m glad at least that worked.
Nice report. Happy hacking
Christoph,
I have got myself into the habit of carrying a complete copy of Fedora repos + updates in my hard disk and it has helped me quite a bit on random occasions like these.