Frankly, I don't know where to start. There have already been countless posts/updates/write-ups on FOSS.in/2005 that I don't think mine will add any value to the existing ones. Anyway, here's my perspective :D


The weekend leading up to the event is a blur of sorts :D We (Devdas and myself) had tons of things to do and the ones that helped us get through most of that were tejasd (on Friday), twostupidogs & kaustubhhere (over the weekend). Thanks folks, for everything.


Monday morning was fun. louiswu & me were supposed to pick up Seemant from the Airport. The BA flight was supposed to land at 0500 IST, which it did. And well, we were at the airport at about 0615 and couldn't find Seemant anywhere. Spent the next 45 mins or so looking all over the place, calling up his wife in Boston to confirm that he indeed left and then finally heading over to the good BA staff for help. They confirmed that a Mr. Kulleen, Seemant was indeed on the flight and had landed in Bangalore. Crud. So we decide to go take a look again at the Arrivals lounge and there he was...he'd been there all this while and we hadn't looked carefully enough. Yay!


The rest of Monday was spent moving stuff across to the venue (we were under the command of Captain AfC for this Ops), setting up boxen (as Devdas would call them) and the 3 Dual Xeon 3 GHz with 4 GB of RAM (still wiping drool off) servers. Airtel had terminated the Fibre link at the venue and there was much joy all around, which was of course short lived. It took us over 2-3 hours to get power to the NOC which meant most of the plans went slightly haywire. Meanwhile, Seemant who had been chipping in from time to time and playing FIFA 2003 otherwise (as he didn't want to sleep during the day) just couldn't take it anymore and crashed inside my car. I decided to call in both louiswu (after office) and ti22 (after vacation) which was a smart thing to do. After dinner, while Partha and kaustubhhere attacked the hall boxen, louiswu and me went on a Network Cable survey to see quite a few un-crimped cables between the halls. Damn. It was around 0200 when we headed to Exocore to pick up some stuff and then over 0300 when Seemant and myself headed home and Arun went back to the venue to fix stuff. I caught up on some sleep (as did Devdas at the venue for a short period, Seemant at home) and had like 3 hours of sleep with about 8 phone calls in between. Came back at 0900 and the network was falling apart, did n other things to end day 1.

Day 2 had a few more network issues which were sorted out and then the Gentoo Track, which was good. More people were interested than we'd ever expected and that was an awesome sign in itself. Thanks for all the support!! The Gentoo stall came up sometime before the talks started at 1430 and we (Seemant and me) also managed to grab a LinuxChix tee by helping out swatisani :D and that tee was in demand and the source of assburn for a lot of people ;) Seeing the response at the Stall we decided to burn CDs for people interested in Gentoo and gave away over 100 (universal + package).

Day 3 & 4 were quite relaxed, spent most of the time around the Gentoo Stall, talking to people, solving few minor issues that cropped
up, catching up on previous years/old times :p etc.

From the Gentoo perspective as well, things were a blast. Seemant is an awesome person IRL and so totally unlike his IRC self :p Let's say Seemant in RL is what Chris White is on IRC :p Thanks go out to aivalli and Ananth for writing CDs and manning the Stall respectively. And to all our users + fans + curious visitors who spent time trying to figure out what Gentoo is about :)


I'm sure everyone will agree that when we sat down in August, the one thing we all wanted was active participation. I am really, extremely happy that the idea of the BoFs+A specific area for them worked very well. Yes, it needed some pushing and shoving that happened only after Day 2, but it worked. People met, People talked. Unlike the previous years, the venue this time facilitated such discussions.

A round of special thanks to Devdas, Arun/louiswu, Ashish/ti22, Kaustubh/kaustubhhere, Shreyas/say_yes04 and Partha for spending sleepless nights and making sure things were working. You guys are awesome. Arun, Ashish & Partha -- thanks for stepping up when you were needed the most.

Lastly, to the Volunteers of FOSS.in/2005. Great job guys, you can happily pat yourselves on the back for a job well done (apart from forgetting to turn on a few switches ;) but then, we're all human aren't we? :p).

Things were quite hectic, so very few snaps were taken. I'll put them up later tonight.