grml on linuxdays vienna 2006

Some days ago I visited "Linuxwochen Wien". Of course I held a lecture about grml (including a presentation of the great Zsh): 'grml - Linux Live-CD für Sysadmins und Geeks', see the picture on the left (thanks go to Sven Guckes for the shot). On the second day of the event I had a talk about 'Erfolgreiche OpenSource Projekt-Maintenance'. I was pretty amazed that so many people attended my talks, even though I had the first slot in the morning for the grml-talk and the last slot in the evening for my opensource project maintenance talk. Some people even had to stand because they didn't get a seat. Nice. :-)

If you're interested in the slides of my talks you can get them now:

• grml (2.3MB, pdf)
• opensource project maintenance (358kb, pdf)

I also met several people for the first time in reallife, to name some of them: Klaus 'koki' Ita, Markus 'markus23' Raab, Pablo 'redtux' Hoertner, David 'DavidS' Schmitt, Fabian 'lefant' Linzberger, Christian 'Greek0' Aichinger. And of course I met Alfie (AKA Rhonda). I really enjoyed meeting all of you!

We had a grml-booth too. It was fun to share the booths of grml and debian. Usually the grml-booth had to answer debian related questions and people behind the debian-booth had to provide grml-support. ;-) I was *really* amazed how many people already use grml.

Because of the presence at the grml-booth I visited only few talks. Some interesting stuff:

• Versionskontrolle mit svk: nice to see how svk works, you can bypass some limitations of svn
• WIENUX - und was die Stadt Wien noch mit Linux und Open Source tut: very nice talk, very interesting to see how much open source software is being used in Vienna's government
• socat - Verkehr mit Sockets aller Art: socat is a multipurpose relay you might consider as netcat++, definitely worth a look!
• Bildbearbeitung per Shell: nothing new for me, but a nice presentation by Sven Guckes of all the tools available on grml (convert, identify of the imagemagick suite, iimage, jhead,...) :)

Stuff I learned at the event:

• sudoedit rocks (thanks, DavidS)
• xscreensaver has a nice 'switch user' feature for gdm-users (thanks, koki)
• Decr_Console and Incr_Console work out-of-the-box on Debian and grml: just press alt-cursor-left and alt-cursor-right to switch between plain consoles (thanks for the hint, Sepp)
• SubMaster rocks. Clifford showed me how it's used at RockLinux and I'm really impressed.
• ice-spray and grml can rescue harddisks (thanks to anonym, please contact me if you read this line)
• Maschu-maschu really has the 'best Falafel in town' (at least it tastes like that ;))

If you want to browse some pics, thank Sven Guckes for his online gallery of linuxdays vienna:

• first day (wednesday)
• second day (thursday)
• third day (friday)

I really enjoyed the event. The only bad news: I got ill in the night to friday, seems like a small burn-out hit me. :-(