Rob and I took a trip to Grenoble this week for the Embedded Linux Conference Europe meeting. All-in-all a very good couple of days for us. We showed off our research project (daily-catchup) in the demo room on Friday afternoon and got to attend some fantastic talks. Travelling wasn’t so much fun though. Somehow we managed to take 12 hours getting from Manchester to Grenoble. The two pervasive themes at the conference seemed to be boot-time reduction and android.

Rob and Jon have a natter
Rob and Jon have a natter

Jon Masters gave a very good Keynote on Porting Linux. Very interesting to me, Jon gave a great overview of some new things going on in kernel land.

Matt Porter debunks android myths.
Matt Porter debunks android myths.

The prize winning talk at the conference was entitled “Myth-busters: Android”. Matt Porter talked about his team’s experiences porting android to the Power and MIPS architectures.  It seems that android is not yet a mature technology. Much of the code is ARM specific. Having replaced nearly all of the user-land stack, there is a-lot of configurability and features missing from a more standard linux distribution. I shall endeavour to get hold of the slides so that you can all form your own opinion. For me it was an eye-opener as to just how different android is.

Rob's spin of android fail.
Rob's spin of android fail.

This is the lovely face Rob had immediately after the android talk. If I had to para-phrase the conversation it would be: “Look what they did to our beloved stack”. (Ignored it completely)

The android BOF later in the day helped us all to see some of the really good parts of android. It gave me the feeling that as the platform and community around it matures we will all be able to work with a really great open source product. Just expect a-lot of re-training and re-adjusting along the way.

Rob demonstrates daily-catchup.
Rob demonstrates daily-catchup.

We demonstrated our daily-catchup research over lunch. The demo table was well attended. Rob and I got to talk about the javascript, vala, tracker, clutter and MVC wizardry that goes into daily-catchup. Its a rich-gui social networking application intended for disconnected operation.

Codethink and the Monta-vista massive.
Codethink and the Monta-vista massive.

Tasty dinner on the final evening of the conference. Somehow Rob and I found ourselves out with the Monta-Vista massive. They are a great bunch and made for a wonderful last night in Grenoble.

For a more detailed overview of the conference itself see the free electrons blog.