events - 2

We will have a grml developer meeting on 17th of may in Realraum Graz (Sporgasse 16) starting at 2 o'clock pm ("14 uhr" local time ;-)). Alexander 'formorer' Wirt is visiting Graz for a few days and will be at the develmeeting too. We will do some further bughunting and if everything goes fine we will finalize the stable release. If you want to help us on getting out the new stable releases you're invited to join us!

Chemnitz Linuxdays 2007 were great. Several grml developers (including myself) have been there, we even had our own grml booth:

We had two Efika boards at the grml booth (one from formorer and the other one from myself). Formorer and me did some further work on the ppc-port of grml:

The grml-team had the chance to test one server of the Linux cluster in chemnitz [Chemnitzer Hochleistungs-Linux-Cluster (CHIC)] with grml. The server is a IBM System x3455 featuring Dual-Core AMD Opteron Processor, DDR2-RAM and AMD's virtualization technology 'Secure Virtual Machine' (SVM). The cluster machine running grml:

Output of /proc/cpuinfo running grml:

The server at the grml booth:

Oh, and as you can see in the last picture we had CDs of a special grml release (0.9-5) at the grml-booth!

grml will be present at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2007 (in germany) which take place on 3rd and 4th of march 2007. Several grml developers will be there and have a develmeeting. We plan to provide a special release available on the event exclusive. You can meet us at the grml-booth, hope to see you there!

Today (2006-09-03) grml will be part of the german Ulmer CCC /dev/radio. Listen to the live-stream/podcast or grab the mp3/ogg from the archive afterwards!

I've been in Bremen at Robocup 2006 for the last 8 days as member of the ROBOCUP 'Mostly Harmless' team (Graz University of Technology, Austria). I was responsible for all the IT-stuff. Of course our roboters were powered by grml. Take a look at the webgallery to see our grml-powered roboters in action.

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. :-(

Grazer Linuxday on 20th of may was fun. I was giving two talks, one about 'successful opensource project maintenance' and the other one about grml of course.

Someone showed me his really small and cute gadget where he successfully installed grml. I really enjoyed playing with it. :-)

We had a grml booth too (Jimmy on the left, Rebekka in the middle and my girlfriend on the right side):

I met several "grml-related" people like Maximilian 'maxs' Attems, Thomas 'thomerz' Ulz, Michael 'memorial' Taschner and Bernhard 'skywire' Hoedl for the first time in reallife. Nice to meet you! :-)

And as mentioned in the the Gentoo Linux Newsletter we had a tricky setup of the booths:

From left to the right: amne, grully, roger jimmy, mika, maks

More pics available in the GLT06 webgallery.

A special release of grml named Bootenschnitzl@LU is shipped with the german LinuxUser magazine. You will also find an article about grml inside the magazine, so get your own copy!

If you need more than one grml-CD for a computerlab, your Linux User Group or $INSERT_ANOTHER_GOOD_REASON please let us know so we can send you some!

Update: the article is available online as well. Enjoy.

As written in my personal blog I've got some grml-CDs:

The grml-CDs will be available with the upcoming german LinuxUser magazine 06/2006. If you join the linuxday graz on 20th of may you can get one of them!

If you are holding a lecture or workshop using grml on the computers or plan to do so please let me know so I can ship you grml-CDs!

A special edition of grml-small (0.2c) is available on the Debian Sarge DVD by Linux New Media AG presented at Cebit 2006. Thanks to Alexander 'formorer' Wirt for sending me 4 DVDs and a Debian-keyring!