DebConf11 ends as another success for the Debian Project

July 30th, 2011

The annual Debian Conference ended today after being held for the previous week in Banja Luka, Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina. It has been a great success for the Debian Project.

DebConf is a vital event for Debian, both as a Free Software distribution and as a project. To the distribution, DebConf offers "high bandwidth" time that volunteers use to have socialise while hacking on Debian. To the project, DebConf offers long lasting enthusiasm and the ability to smooth the grudges which can be accumulated while communicating over the Internet. Stefano Zacchiroli, Debian Project Leader explains the importance of the conference: DebConf11 in Banja Luka has been great on both sides and has also shown to many of us a culture and a part of the world we were not familiar with. We will be back!

DebConf was preceded by DebCamp, an opportunity for contributors, developers and teams to meet and work on specific issues and discuss face to face. As an example, the development team of Debian's installation system met, and amongst other changes integrated the recently released Linux Kernel 3.0, improved the ports to the kFreeBSD and Hurd architectures, fixed issues when using braille displays, and started the first integration steps of the CUT/rolling release.

Other improvements done during DebCamp include the development of RSS feeds about the actual content of the FTP archive, which will significantly ease the development of services using this information.

A hot topic during DebCamp and DebConf was Multiarch (see also the separate announcement) which makes programs and libraries of different hardware architectures easily usable in parallel on the same system. For instance, the Embedded GNU C library eglibc has seen some development to support multiarch. Other highlights of the conference program include Delivering Multi-Platform Applications by Bdale Garbee or the ARM BoF session which showed interesting details about the coming armhf port.

During DebConf the video team consisting of about 50 volunteers managed to provide live streams for over 70 of the sessions, while recording 65 hours of video resulting in 800GB of data to be reviewed. After post processing the videos will be made available on our meetings archive. Users may also thank the video team via a dedicated wiki page.

The Debian Conference was attended by over 400 contributors from over 70 countries ranging as far as New Zealand, Taiwan and Brazil. Beside the original scheduled 78 sessions, about 30 additional sessions where scheduled during the conference.

The next annual Debian Conference will be held next year in Managua, Nicaragua.

Again the Debian Project would like to thank the sponsors without whom the entire conference wouldn't have been possible:

About Debian

The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system.

About DebConf

DebConf is the Debian Project's developer conference. In addition to a full schedule of technical, social and policy talks, DebConf provides an opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to meet in person and work together more closely. It has taken place annually since 2000 in locations as varied as Canada, Finland, and Mexico. More information about DebConf is available from https://debconf.org/.

Contact Information

For further information, please visit the Debian web pages at https://www.debian.org/ or send mail to <press@debian.org>.