By Sijmen J. Mulder.
On the Friday after an exciting trip to WHY2025, I was just about done unpacking when I learnt about FrOSCon, a Free Software conference. Thought "why not", booked a train, and was in Bonn by midnight!
Good first impressions! The venue, a school, is easy to get to by tram and well suited for the event. Good amount of sponsor and project stands, and catering at fair prices with plenty of vegan options (including the dinner served at the social event).
Talks I attended:
50 Years in Filesystems by Kristian Köhntopp. Love this sort of thing, very interesting. Started with the V7 UNIX filesystem, then seeing how that evolved with increasing demand and capacity. Should try implementing a simple filesystem sometime, seems like a good exercise.
Linux Treiber Workshop by Johannes Roith. Props to the him,
this was very well organised. Everyone got a pre-imaged Raspberry
Pi of some sort with an I2C board featuring an RGB LED and a button.
In three chapters, the workshop took us from printk("Hello,
World!") to a small but functional I2C device driver with sysfs
support. To be honest, it didn't feel all to different from regular
C programming, and perhaps I've been unnecessarily intimidated by
the subject.
Unfortunately, this made me miss both NetBSD - nicht nur für Toaster by Benny Siegert and AI slop attacks on the curl project by Daniel Stenberg.
Ich werde jetzt Embedded-Linux-Entwickler! by Andreas Mützel. A look at the nature and challenges of embedded software, the differences between how Linux is used between desktop and embedded context, and an overview of the ecosystem.
Früher war (nicht) alles besser! by Christian Stankowic. Fun look back through history but, in my opinion, it could have used some more seriousness. What can we learn from the past? Why is retrocomputing so popular? How come that our computers now, while being multiple orders of magnitude more powerful than what we had, still suffer from everyday performance issues? What are recurring trends and swings?
Schatz, wir müssen reden! by Martin Leyrer and Chrostph Stoettner. Lighthearted and sometimes serious talk about communication. Good chemistry!
I was originally going to go to Gentoo installation and configuration instead, but quickly realised that was bit too entry level.
Finally, Raus aus der Cloud by Benedikt Heine. I won't deny that I was in the mood for a good old old-man-yells-at-cloud, but it actually was a very informative overview of what it takes to colocate, the tradeoffs involved, some cost comparisons, and some practical considerations.
A good few of these talks were in German and I'm glad to have learnt enough now to follow along properly! Learning a new language draws back the curtain on a bit of the world previously closed to you.
The social event in the evening was gezellig, despite running out of food. I stuck around too long so I had to run a few km by the tram line to keep the running streak up. Great cycling path and street there.