[ILUG] Re: KDE Akademy to be held in Dublin

[Marcus Furlong]

Hi all,

Paul O'Malley wrote:
> The yearly KDE World Summit, Akademy, in 2006 will be held in Trinity
> College Dublin. It is a multi-day event for contributors to the KDE Free
> Desktop to meet up. Dates:September 23nd to 30th 2006. There will be no
> appalling vista just lots of dragons.

Yes, this year aKademy will come to Dublin! Anyone who is interested in
helping out in any way, please let me know, or post replies to this list. I
submitted the original proposal to host aKademy in Dublin and I'm trying to
put together a local organising team for the conference. There's still a
rake of things to be sorted out and if anyone is interested in the format
of the event, a rough guide can be found here:

http://ev.kde.org/akademy/requirements.php

We are looking for volunteers to be on-site during the event, to help people
find out what events are on in what venue, to help with system
administration and press releases, to make sure all equipment works as it
should and to organise social events for the evenings!

If you know of any potential sponsors out there, get in contact with them
and see if they would be interested! Hardware or cash donations would be
greatly appreciated, the KDE e.V. does not have a whole lot of cash, so
pretty much everything has to be donated, lent or sponsored. There will be
a sponsorship brochure coming soon, and that can be presented to potential
sponsors.

Examples of equipment that will be needed: servers, wireless access points,
routers/switches, network cables, gang sockets, wireless adaptors, video
cameras for live streaming of the conference. Cash will be used to pay for
premises, security, accommodation, travel for key developers who cannot
otherwise afford it themselves, posters, advertising, and to subsidise some
sort of one-day outing for the attendees. Other things like tea/coffee,
pens and paper, whiteboards would also be useful.

The CS department in Trinity has donated the use of several machines for
those that don't have laptops, and I was also wondering if anyone has
experience in creating live CDs? All the machines run Windows, and have two
NTFS partitions. The Windows installation cannot be touched and linux
cannot be installed, but we are permitted to change the boot sequence and
boot to a live CD. So my solution would be to create a live CD, that uses
and fixed size NTFS file on the D: partition (a la turbolinux) as a
temporary working area. Write support in NTFS is dodgy, but you can loop
mount a file on an NTFS partition, and write support works fine as long as
you don't change the file size. The machines could also serve as nodes in
the compile cluster, so the live CD would need to contain a working copy of
ice-cream http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=icecream
If anyone is interested in helping out with this, please let me know too!
The CD can be based on any distro, as long as all development tools and
headers are included.

Also, does anyone have experience with live video streaming? I've never done
it before so I have no clue on that...

For accommodation, I got a deal for 16.50 per night per person plus a light
breakfast in one of the city centre hostels, for around 100 people.. Does
anyone know if it would be possible to get a better deal?

Finally, it's my first time trying to organise something like this, so if
anyone has any advice or ideas, please post them here too! All feedback
I've got so far has been very helpful.

Anyway here's to dragons and drakes and hopefully we can give all KDE
contributors a great experience in Dublin! Take care all,

Marcus.