Attending DebConf11 Remotely

I was unable to make the trip to DebConf11 in Banja Luka, Bosnia & Herzegovina, this year, but I will be attending remotely as much as possible. I will update this post throughout the conference with the links to the resources I am using, as well as other notes of interest. I hope that others find this useful.

The Banja Luka timezone is UTC +0200. For me, this is a 7 hour difference from my local time (UTC -0500), so I’ll be spending the next few days attempting to adjust my sleep schedule to try to hit some early talks during the conference 🙂 The local Banja Luka time is listed on the auto-refreshing What’s up! talk schedule page.

Schedule:
What’s up!
Full DebConf11 Talk Schedule on Penta

The DebConf Video Team provides real-time talk feeds that makes remote DebConf attendance possible. Without their amazing work, people that cannot make it to the conference would simply not be able to get much of what the DebConf experience provides. The videos are also archived by the team for viewing after the conference.

Video Feeds:
http://debconf11.debconf.org/watch.xhtml – mash-up of video feeds, schedule, etc.
http://video.debconf.org:8000/Auditorium.ogv – main conference room direct feed
http://video.debconf.org:8000/Roundroom.ogv – secondary conference room direct feed
Video Archives:
http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/

IRC is probably one of the best ways to supplement Debconf talks and provides a way to remotely ask questions during Q&A – someone in the talk audience will usually pick up questions from the room channels and ask on your behalf. The DebConf11 talk room IRC channels are #debconf-auditorium and #debconf-roundroom.

The general DebConf IRC channel is #debconf – there is typically some conference talk discussion here, as well as a helpful schedule announcement bot, DCschedule, but much of the discussion on #debconf will revolve around casual conversation, the search for people, power adapters, games of Mao, and the best local food and pubs 😉

IRC:
server: irc://irc.oftc.net
channels: #debconf – #debconf-auditorium – #debconf-roundroom

The DebConf mailing lists may also provide some interesting conversations that can help the remote attendance experience. The debconf-announce list is very low traffic and debconf-discuss will be where most conversations will take place.

Mailing Lists:
DebConf Mailing Lists (subscribe, etc.)
debconf-announce Archives
debconf-discuss Archives

Other Links:
DebConf identi.ca group

I’m Going to Debconf(12)

I’m going to Debconf! (Debconf12 in Managua, Nicaragua..)

Debconf12 Logo

Today is the official deadline to reconfirm attendance at Debconf11 in Banja Luka, Republic of Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina and I have, sadly, decided not to attend this year. I had rescheduled my university summer classes around Debconf, did a trial run of a week’s travel in California with only my laptop backpack (complete success), and was generally excited for the last 3 months about the upcoming Debian work and camaraderie. I was graciously offered a provisional travel sponsorship by Debian, and I greatly appreciate the recognition of my contribution. I was one of the provisional “maybe, if we get additional funds” group of 12 people, and due to the high cost of travel to Banja Luka from the US, I just couldn’t justify risking that amount of money out of pocket. I do hope that some additional funds are located for the rest of the folks waiting for possible sponsorship, and that the money intended for my travel costs can be found and used by another person (or two) to attend.

I look forward to Debconf12 and will most certainly be there!

PS – I will be attending Debconf11, remotely, as much as I possibly can, via IRC (mshuler on irc.oftc.net) and the awesome Debconf Video Team 🙂

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dash upgrade problem in squeeze

I’m not the only person affected by upgrade issues with dash /bin/sh diversion, but I thought I would document the behavior and quick fix for upgrading, since I just got bitten (again) by this on armel upgrading my sheevaplug this morning. See http://bugs.debian.org/538822 for lots of detail.

mshuler@sheeva:~$ sudo apt-get upgrade -V
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
   dash (0.5.5.1-6 => 0.5.5.1-7.2)
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/101 kB of archives.
After this operation, 4,096 B of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? 
Preconfiguring packages ...
(Reading database ... 19484 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace dash 0.5.5.1-6 (using .../dash_0.5.5.1-7.2_armel.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement dash ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/dash_0.5.5.1-7.2_armel.deb (--unpack):
 trying to overwrite '/bin/sh', which is also in package bash 4.1-3
configured to not write apport reports
                                      Processing triggers for man-db ...
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/dash_0.5.5.1-7.2_armel.deb
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/locale: 0 KiB
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/man: 0 KiB

Total disk space freed by localepurge: 0 KiB

E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

mshuler@sheeva:~$ dpkg-divert --list /bin/sh
local diversion of /bin/sh to /bin/sh.distrib
mshuler@sheeva:~$ readlink -f /bin/sh
/bin/dash
mshuler@sheeva:~$ ls -l /bin/sh.distrib
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Sep 29 17:37 /bin/sh.distrib -> bash

remove the /bin/sh diversion and upgrade goes smoothly:

dpkg-divert --remove /bin/sh

mshuler@sheeva:~$ sudo dpkg-divert --remove /bin/sh
Removing 'local diversion of /bin/sh to /bin/sh.distrib'
mshuler@sheeva:~$ dpkg-divert --list /bin/sh
mshuler@sheeva:~$ readlink -f /bin/sh
/bin/dash
mshuler@sheeva:~$ sudo apt-get upgrade -V
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
   dash (0.5.5.1-6 => 0.5.5.1-7.2)
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/101 kB of archives.
After this operation, 4,096 B of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? 
Preconfiguring packages ...
(Reading database ... 19483 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace dash 0.5.5.1-6 (using .../dash_0.5.5.1-7.2_armel.deb) ...
Adding 'diversion of /bin/sh to /bin/sh.distrib by dash'
Unpacking replacement dash ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up dash (0.5.5.1-7.2) ...
Removing 'diversion of /bin/sh to /bin/sh.distrib by dash'
Adding 'diversion of /bin/sh to /bin/sh.distrib by bash'
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/locale: 0 KiB
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/man: 0 KiB

Total disk space freed by localepurge: 0 KiB

mshuler@sheeva:~$