After 8 days of hacking, hours of hours filled with interesting talks, insightful discussions and a mix of Debian packaging with git, i'm finally sitting in one of the last talks of this years DebConf9. I would like to say a big "thank you" to the local team and other people involved.

You did a great job and it was (just as expected) a very inspiring event!

For me, the conference started with the "Welcome" talk DebConf at OpenDay. A couple of hours later, Florian Schießl held his world famous LiMux talk. Imho he did really well and we received some nice feedback afterwards. Thanks! The rest of the day mostly consisted on meeting various people, talking, drinking and getting comfortable with the spanish sun (36°). We were melting!

The DPL keynote on Saturday questioned "Where does Debian fit in?" . The audience mainly focused on the "Universal Operating System" slogan and as expected, expectations of universal are very different ;-) Wearing the "work hat", i think of Debian mostly as a (really convenient and stable) framework to deploy (LiMux) business applications to our end users. At home, Debian conviently fulfills my hacking needs and the desire to have control over the code my various systems are running.

DebConf9 will also be remembered as the conference, where Roert held his first (public) english talk. He and Joachim Breitner (nomeata) organized a BoF titled "Distributing virtually boxed applications". The LiMux project has developed a simple but efficient system to distribute virtual box images. The system images are shared by all users, immutable and updateable, and a small persistent virtual disk for the data is generated on the fly. The source is available at http://gitorious.org/vbox-sync and will be moved to OSOR at a later point in time.

Another interesting talk was held by Guido about using libvirt as Hypervisor independent virtual machine management solution. Libvirt provides a stable C API to different virtualization solutions. Bindings for several languages (e.g. Python, Ocaml, Ruby) are available. This approach makes it easy to write reusable tools to manage virtual machines running under KVM, Xen, QEMU, OpenVZ and others. I am glad i took the time to attend his talk and will definitely look into libvirt back at the office.

Of course we were prepared for "DebConf 11 in your city" and placed a bid for the City of Munich. Floschi has already written a longer article about it in his blog, so i can keep this short here.

Some other interesting talks were (incomplete):

• immunity: securing untrusted processes (i will blog about immunity soon)
• Upgrade-advisor, analysing system upgrade (this should be really useful!)
• QEMU for Debian Developers  (Imagine having access to half a dozen of architectures while working on a laptop in a plane!)
• Accessibility and Debian (an awesome reminder to think about how disabled people interact with computers in ways we don't even imagine)
• Introducing DebConf10 (New York, New York!)

Other than that, i have started to work on a couple of Debian packages and will once again try to get started as Debian Maintainer (and perhaps Debian Developer in the long run ;). Hopefully this will work out better than last year, when some tough family events needed all of my attention and energy.

Guido awaked my appetite for git (via git-buildpackage) and there is still so much to learn and try. I'm sure the cooperation between the "Federal Foreign Office" and the City of LiMux (Munich) will drop some nice (technical) results soon.

See you all next year in New York!

PS.: I loved the spanish cafe solo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espresso !