FUDcon Toronto 2009 Summary

First FUDcon I ever attended as Fedora contributor in Toronto. It was not only a fruitful experience but also seeing some familiar faces.

Adam Holt from OLPC gave me a prototype of XO-1.5 that I immediately run side by side with the regular XO. Only notable physical difference is the simplified touchpad much like regular laptop but more rugged to prevent water infiltration. For the Sugar interface, the boot process is much faster on XO-1.5 than its predecessor thanks to the updated specification and the storage has been increased to 4GB instead of 1GB. Another difference is Gnome is more responsive and Firefox is included by default instead of Midori. Perhaps Gnome desktop environment needs to be lighter but other alternate like XFCE and LXDE already fill the gap. XO-1.5 is promising and I am looking to explore more about the machine and the software as designer (already updated to latest build and downloading the new Sugar on Stick Bluebbery).

Having so much listed presentations on a single schedule made hard to attend due to some conflict i.e. Inkscape and OLPC presentation happening at the same time. Despite those issues, all of them were good.

On the hackfest part, I mostly focused on design parts (icons, creation of wiki for Fedora 13 Goddard theme), usability test and had some helps from Dave Malcolm for debugging Istanbul (it may turned out be python related which is beyond my coding skills).

What a way to finish 2009 with a first journey in three years and returning to Vancouver with an overwhelming positive experience. Also good to see AdamW in person.