LinuxTag Part II

Published 2005-06-24 in sections English, Digital World.

Time to tell you about my second day of LinuxTag. I took the LPI 102 exam, which went ok, had to guess a few times, some questions were strange, but considering that I did not prepare at all, I think I did ok, and I was done after 30 minutes, instead of 90.

I attended the talks about females in Free Software (I must admit that the talk by Meike yesterday was much more interesting - today's talk by Fernanda Weiden sounded too Brazil-specific, although it probably is not), followed by a talk about bluez, the Bluetooth stack.

Later I heard mbank's talk on Ubuntu. I think, Ubuntu is a good thing for Debian, as long as improvements flow back to debian where possible, Ubuntu attrackts users that Debian just can't and Ubuntu users that are heading for poweruser will consider debian, both as a user and as a developer. Which reminds me to subscribe to Ubuntu's bugzilla for my packages.

I met Werner Koch (the main gnupg author), and we had a interesting discussion about the OpenPGP smartcard they made and about the pam_poldi module for that. Have a look at gnupg-agent! It can replace your ssh-agent for both your current ssh keys, but also enables you to use your real, regular OpenGPG-key as the ssh-key, and you can combine that with your OpenPGP-smartcard if you happen to have one (e.g. because you are an FSF fellow).

At the GNOME-Booth, I played around with dasher, a fun yet fast way of entering text with the mouse only. I could type to the gnome-terminal with that. That would be great on the Nokia 770 (I already blogged about that).

I asked the guy at the heise-booth, if they mind my satire news page, and got a contact of someone who might know.

After the Conference, I attended the "Social Event", where we get a food buffett and drinks. Spend most of the time with Tolimar, Meike and youam, playing typespeed-schnecken, a neat game where you compete in fast-typing via telnet and your score is represented by Snails heading for the finish line. But then, it was probably only fun since the mini-network we created there consisted of a interesting solution of Wire-WLAN-Wire and some static routes.

I added today's pictures.

Comments

have you tried one of these openPGP smartcards? I am very curious how well they work and would like to hear from someone who has used one. I notice you say that you get one for becoming a FSF fellow, but I didn't see that on their website... the german site that sells them seems to sell them for only 16 euros a piece! That seems like a great price.

#1 micah am 2005-06-25

I have one of these, yes. The actually work very well, for signing, encrypting, decrypting and even authentication. I should have said FSF Europe though, they hand out these to their fellows.

#2 nomeata (Homepage) am 2005-06-25

I am the guy in charge of the LPI Level 1 exams, I'd really like to hear in an email what you thought about the test. Here is your chance to fix the issues you had with it. Please do this by private email so we do not reveal any information about the tests. I will also invite anyone out there to give their feedback to info@lpi.org. LPI has a community based test development system and good feedback is always appreciated. Thanks

#3 Mark Miller am 2005-06-25

Have something to say? You can post a comment by sending an e-Mail to me at <mail@joachim-breitner.de>, and I will include it here.

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