my name is mwd

I’m just back from XDS 2007, the European X.org Developers Summit (there’s also an XDC, which is similar but held in the US). This was an introduction for me to the community – I’ve only recently started hacking on X.org stuff with the Nivo driver, so the opportunity to find out what’s going on and who’s doing what was most welcome.

XDS ran over three days, with a series of presentations, discussion sessions, and even some demos. There were presentations from a lot of the major corporate players, such as Red Hat, Tungsten Graphics, Intel, Nokia, Sun and AMD, with AMD opening their driver documentation at the workshop. All these companies gave at least an overview talk of what they’re working on and what they planned to look at, and there were no company egos, with it all being in a positive “making X.org better” spirit.

There were also a number of talks on smaller projects too, ranging from people just hacking on ideas in their spare time to PhD projects, including a talk from Peter Hutterer, the guy who did multi-touch for X. If you’ve not seen his demo video, you really should:

Peter also is responsible for me now having some TimTams, so I look forward to some slamming this weekend.

I gave a talk also, explaining the driver work I’ve done for ethernet and USB displays, seemed to go down quite well. I got a laugh and applause when I showed my new xorg.conf file subverts the graphics card busid identifier to contain an IP address :) You probably had to be there… I was very nervous beforehand, and I probably looked quite nervous during it. Usually I’m quite confident giving talks, but that’s when I generally know that I’m the expert in what I’m talking about. Here I know I was the newbie, so was waiting to make a fool of myself when explaining the technicalities of what I’ve been doing. But I got a good reaction from the audience and a wealth of helpful advice and comments, so thanks to everyone for that.

I also got to play with an XO laptop from the OLPC project. It was much smaller than I’d imagined, and is quite rugged (demonstrated when someone dropped one from about a height of a meter :). It’s a nice machine, and it was good to chat with Jim Gettys from the project, given the similarity in aims of Ndiyo and the OLPC project.

I have to confess that I found XDS one of the most useful and productive workshops I’ve been to. I learned something interesting in almost every talk, much more so than any academic talk I’ve been to. In addition the technical content, being able to put names to faces from the X.org mailing list and IRC channel was very useful too. Props to Daniel Stone for organising it all, and the X.org board for funding it.