[Fsfe-uk] AFFS conference 2005

[MJ Ray]

The AFFS conference and AGM took place on Saturday just gone and was
quite an interesting day. A trip to north London for a change (the
last two have been in the west midlands) and a fairly large
exhibition hall and seminar room at the Resource Centre on Holloway
Road. The venue was pretty good and could have taken many more
people and a few more stands. Are so many people on summer hols?

Ciaran O'Riordan opened a bit later than announced by describing the
good work he's been doing with the FSF Europe in Brussels and
Strasbourg, including some mad antics around the software patent
directive voting. That's not the whole story though: IPRED is still
going on and there's probably going to be more in the next year, but
it's hard to predict exactly what.

Alex Hudson brought forward his talk on Hula to cover a no-show.
Hula is a modular agent-based mail/calendar/kitchen-sink server
which might be suitable for production some time next year. Alex
showed how quick it is to install and get running and the web
interface used for configuration.

After a break and talking to some friends old and new over
lunch (finger buffet of samosas, pizzas and sandwiches), Phil
Hands explained the plan for world domination by preseeding the
debian-installer. http://svn.hands.com/d-i/ sticks in the mind.
Tim Yamin gave an introduction to Gentoo Linux and with any luck,
I'll get the recording uploaded somewhere useful soon. Recording
was a bit difficult, with a noisy aircon (which only got noisier
the one time I flipped the switch to "off" - sorry all) and
strong light from the open windows behind.

There was another break in which I was part of a coffee search
party and then the AGM. Sadly, it was inquorate, but still some
intersting reports and discussion (which I think will be in
the next newsletter as RFCs?) before moving through the rain
to a nearby pub and onwards to the buggy tube notwork home.

Next up: www.fave.org.uk in Bristol next Saturday.

Regards,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef), K. Lynn, England, email see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/