Fosscomm 2011 – Not just a review

Note: this was supposed to be a review for Fosscomm. After i started writing though it came a LOT bigger than I expected. So proceed at your own caution! You have been warned!

Two weeks ago at  7-8 of May me and some other friends from my college’s LinuxTeam attended FOSSCOMM. For those of you who don’t know Fosscomm is the annual conference on Free and Open Source Communities here in Greece. This year’s Fosscomm took place in Patra, as it was organised by the Patras Linux User Group and CEID ( Computer Engineering & Informatics Department) University of Patras.  Lulz and fun is ensured in this kind of events and with new things to learn about it’s obviously a pretty good combo to miss.

The trip and arrival in Patra:

We decided to travel for Patra on Friday a day before Fosscomm so we could have some free time and also be able to get to the University as soon as the first presentations were starting. (more time for beers is always good too).  So we took the 10am bus for Patra.  The openSUSE crew from Thessaloniki was on the same bus with us along with differentreality and her catering help guy (aka her boyfriend). The trip to Patra went quite well, having fun on the bus, talking about open source in general, or eating the delicious food differentreality had prepared for us. Yeah she is that awesome! With all this talking and eating we finally arrived at the city of Patra. We took a taxi and went straight to our hotel . We had decided to stay in a hotel near the university so we could have easier access to the event even on foot. So we chose Achaia Beach Hotel near Rio. It was surprisingly nice and absolutely worth the money spent. Me and tampakrap  were on the same room on the 4th floor. As we went down to leave our bags and check the view we were greeted by a pleasant surprise. The view from our balcony. The sea was no more that some meters away and on our right the Rio-Antirio bridge. The only thing that was missing was Magneto to pick up the bridge or something. Not much time to enjoy the view though since we had to meet with the other guys in order to find somewhere to eat.  After that we went back for a quick nap (or not so quick). I woke up around 22.00 and joined the others at the reception. All the geeks were there with their laptops preparing for their presentations the other day. Soon though it was beer time! Oh yeah we had stashed some beers in our rooms and now was the best time to drink them. We all met at the room ankso  warlordfff and diamond_gr were staying. Drinking beers while seeing the lighted bridge was something to be remembered.

It was getting late though so we decided to go to sleep since tomorrow was the big day.  Tampakrap and I went to our room and decided it was a good idea to download the latest ep of Big Bang Theory. We watched it and after that he went for a not so quick shower and I to sleep.

Saturday the first day of the event:

We decided to wake up around 7.00 on Saturday so we can have a nice breakfast (the meal of the champions!) so we could be at the university as soon as possible. I was already craving for coffee since the day before I had barely drunk two and this is way too low for a junkie like me. The actual breakfast with all the cakes etc was a pleasant change from my usual greek one ( if you are not aware of what a greek breakfast is go and check it). After that we went to our rooms, got prepared and left. We decided to go on foot since from what we were told it was not that far away. It was actually half an hour walk (thank Cthulhu for the gps). When we finally arrived at the uni we needed some more help to find the place where the fosscomm was actually taking place. The organizers could actually put some more posters so it could be easier for anyone to find it but that’s not a big deal .  Before we find the place though ansko had to go since he had a problem with his eye since yesterday and he had to go to the hospital. He actually missed the whole day . Ok I know I am mumbling a lot so let’s go to the interesting part.

From 9.00 there were already a lot of people there waiting for the first presentations to begin. Since me and some others of our team had registered online we went to pick our t-shirt, the programme  and all the other usual staff.  It didn’t take a lot of time since there were 4-5 people on the organizers’ booth. Good sign for what it was about to follow. The hard part for both days of fosscomm was actually to pick between 2 presentations taking place at the same time. So many promising presentations! The ones I actually attended were the following: