Sessions at FOSDEM 2011 on Sunday 6th February

After a brief presentation of configuration management (CM) basics, we'll start with an ill-fated tale from the recent past about disaster recovery (also known as a case study, if you must): how our CM saved us, how it didn't, and what could have been done better. This could lead to a discussion about best practices around beers after the session.

We use Cfengine 3, and will introduce the software, overview the main differences with other open source CM tools before explaining why we like this choice. But Cfengine is not all: what enables us to manage our configuration completely are the practices and tools we've built around it. We will describe these in detail, probably offering a live demo (if Murphy permits).

Apache Wicket is a component oriented Java web framework. With proper mark-up/logic separation, a POJO data model, and a refreshing lack of XML, Wicket makes developing web-apps simple and enjoyable again.

This talk provides a short introduction to the framework's concepts: components, behaviors and models. We'll take a short look at integrating with Spring and integrating with JQuery. For the test infected we'll cover testing your web pages with Wicket's internal test framework. But most importantly we'll take a look at the new Wicket release 1.5 and see what has changed for the better and worse.

Parrot is a virtual machine for dynamic languages, including Rakudo Perl 6. PostgreSQL is the world's most powerful open source database management system. Find out how we brought them together, and what you can do, now that we have.

LibreOffice is the most powerful and viable Free Softare office suite, available cross-platform. As well as a few demos showing its joys, we'll understand the history, and rational behind the LibreOffice project and its relation to OpenOffice.org.

We will survey the threat to the Free Software ecosystem that poorly managed, corporate dominated, copyright assignment based projects can cause. Then we'll get stuck into new features, our development roadmap, and how to get involved develping with it - even if you are not (yet) a super-star hacker. Come and get involved with something exciting, and help make tens of millions of user's first experience of Free Software something to be proud of.

The Linux kernel is at the core of any Linux system; the performance and capabilities of the kernel will, in the end, place an upper bound on what the system as a whole can do.

This talk will review recent events in the kernel development community, discuss the current state of the kernel and the challenges it faces, and look forward to how the kernel may address those challenges. Attendees of any technical ability should gain a better understanding of how the kernel got to its current state and what can be expected in the near future.