Rémi Cardona

Saturday morning started really quietly, so quietly in fact that I actually missed the opening keynotes... That'll teach me not to look at the schedule before the event starts.

Over the 2 days, I mostly stayed around the Xorg dev room. I had the chance to talk to a lot of really cool people: Frédéric Crozat, Dodji Seketeli, Marc-André Lureau, Daniel Stone, just to name of few.

Here are some random thoughts about what I saw over the weekend :

• Too many talks about driver updates, Gallium3D, radeon, radonhd, nouveau. Although the work they've done is extremely cool and awesome, their talks had too much overlapping content. Very insightful nonetheless.
• I almost fell off my chair when I saw Open Arena run on nouveau... I guess most of the audience was stumped too, considering glxgears barely worked at last year's FOSDEM
• Daniel Stone's talk about X's input support was very interesting, especially for my current work on Metisse and input redirection. In a nutshell, the input layer in 1.4.0.90 and even git master really sucks, MPX cleans up almost all this mess, the remaining bits are expected to be fixed over the coming months. I guess I'll be hacking on the MPX branch for Metisse.
• XAudio ... I wish Helge had more talked about why he thought putting audio in the X server was a good idea, rather than using an independent server like PulseAudio. Shame on me for not asking though.
• ProjectVGA, that's just plain awesome. Nuff said.
• I was a bit disappointed by the Gallium3D talk, I guess I was expecting a bit more detail about how it actually worked, not a 10,000 ft overview.
• Keith Packard's talk was just a blast. Basically, he summed up what everyone is currently doing in the Xorg community. My take on it: hell is breaking loose in the X ecosystem, almost all pieces are currently broken or barely working (X, the drivers, the new graphics subsystem in the kernel, Gallium3D, mesa, ...) but the improvements should be well worth the wait and the pain. I recommend his talk to anyone who doesn't regularly follows Planet FreeDesktop or the Xorg mailing lists.
• Off topic: the temperature in the dev room was waaay too hot. Try to imagine about a hundred geeks, with their laptops, in a room where it's 35°C, with only one door... Tough.

As for my talk, it went rather well. I kind of screwed up the bimanual interaction part of my demo, but apart from that, everything went OK. I hope I'll have another chance to present something at FOSDEM or other conferences, it's a great experience.

That's all for now. Back to work.