Tobias Schlitt - a passion for php

I'm sad to say, that I won't be able to attend Linuxtag this year. :( I've been there for the past 2 years, maintaining the PEAR exhibition booth and giving several sessions. This year I'm much too packed with university to go there. Luckily Stefan Neufeind, a fellow PEAR developer, stepped in and took over my talk proposal "News from PEAR" for the Practical Linux forum, where Stefan will give a short introduction into the actual state of the PEAR project. Thanks, Stefan!

This is a sequel to my series "Linuxtag roundup".

On Thursday a hard day started extremely early in respect to the time we got to bed, finally. Aaron stayed until high noon, so I had some time to fix everything necessary for my talk and to take the first part of my LPI level 1 certification. Sure, I had expected to have problems with the beamers in cooperation with my notebook (as I had in Amsterdam), but I was still hoping that with X.org (remember, I switched to Gentoo a few weeks ago) everything would have turned to be fine... This was not the case. So in my last last-ditch attempt I went to the X.org booth and asked for support. As already mentioned in my blog, Matthias Hopf fixed all of my problems within minutes. I still plan to provide more detailed information here, when I find time.

After holding my talk on "News from PEAR" the official LAMP day ended with a very unusual talk by Rasmus, Monty and Zak, where Zak moderated a Q&A session with those 2 famous fathers of great open source applications. At this point: Thanks to you both and the fantastic community behind you for all the great work! We finished the day with an amazing birthday party for PHP and MySQL, in form of a booth party at the LAMP area, with free beer, cool music and 2 large birthday cakes.

During that party a very interesting guy told me about his plans to port parts of the Maven framework to PHP, which gave me some cool ideas for the PEAR QA team. But more on that later on this weblog...

As usual the day ended with lots of beer and interesting geek ranting, but I currently do not really remember the topics... If anyone remembers some interesting detail, please comment on this blog entry! :) I'd like to thank Jan Schneider (Horde) for the great photos of Linuxtag. I stole his photo of the birthday cake for this article.

This article shall become a series on Linuxtag 2005. I'll try to sum up the most interesting parts of it and possible I miss out important facts. But please forgive me, but the flood of information was in some cases to much. Sorry for that, if you feel missing in the list of interesting contacts/projects/ideas/..., please leave a comment at one of the blog entries!

On Saturday at about 9pm. I arrived in Duisburg, being back from Karlsruhe, where the Linxtag 2005 took play, the largest Linux event in Europe (or even the word...?). As last year, it's been an amazing event, with lot's of interesting, geeky stuff, but also a large portion of party. All in all it's been stress, but real fun. Those who did not attend because of the heat (or the great weather in general), listen: YOU REALLY MISSED SOMETHING! :)

First of all in my Linuxtag round up, I want to send some big "thank you!!!" to all who made it possible and especially to those who made it possible for us (the PEAR project and me). So, thanks a lot for the Linuxtag coordinators and especially Georg Richter (who was responsible for the LAMP Area and the LAMP Day. You were as usual doing great work (ok, see: it's an open source conference ;) ). The next big thank goes to the companies who sponsored our booths and and covered the nights for us as there are: 100 days, domain ) factory, itsystems, MySQL, papaya Software, thinkPHP. Those were it who allowed Apache + Apache Friends, Horde + PEAR, phpMyAdmin and some more open source project related to LAMP to have our booths there! Last I big thank to Jolt Cola, which helped me to manage all the party and the guy's from X.org who've offered me amazing support for an amazing open source application! :)

Wednesday

So, let's start officially with my report. I arrived at Linuxtag 2:30pm. and my first impression after having registered at the speakers office. I went through the fair hall and my first look was caught by a book with some pears on it at the Galileo Computing booth. At a first glance, the PEAR book they are offering (written my Carsten Möhrke) looks all in all good for getting started with using the project. Although the introductional part is a bit short in my eyes and it's still dealing with PEAR 1.3 (of course, the time was not that right for publishing the book), it's giving a round up of the project and can help you quite well to get started. Beside the basic use the book introduces a huge variety of packages which is in many parts an excellent completion of our documentation. Until now the book is only available in German language. I talked to the lady at the booth and asked for the possibility to publish the book in a few month as an “open book�, which is available for free on the web, to link that from our docs. Hopefully they will do so (this reminds me to get in touch with the author) and will although provide an English version of it.

During the LAMP area dinner this night in Bad Herrenalb Rassmus thanked the community in Germany for it's support with PHP. A beer rubbish discussion on GPL with Aaron, Eric and some other guys brought up some interesting questions we were not able to answer (maybe someone can help out?): “Does a PHP application which is using MySQL to be GPL licensed?� and “If it would be possible to automatic double license all PEAR packages under their current license and the GPL to empower GPL based projects to use them legally?�.

And after the obligatory Sauna session I got to bed at 3:30am.

To be continued...

I recently uploaded my slides from my presentation on Linuxtag 2005 yesterday. The talk was named "News from PEAR" and gives an overview on how PEAR evolved in the last couple of month. Beside the talk slides I also included the written 10 pages elaboration which is required for applying for a Linuxtag talk and some more examples I was not able to show during the talk.

The talk coverd the following topics:

• PEAR 1.4
• Channel_Server
• PEAR_Exception
• PHP5 only packages
• PHAR

I licensed that talk under the OpenContent License, so feel free to reuse the slides and information provided to tell other people about the new exciting features in PEAR! :)

I had much problems getting my X.org running with the native Nvidia driver in all distributions I tested... Now, that I got serious problems with the beamers at Linuxtag I went to the X.org booth here and asks the guys for help. Mathias Hopf directly offered to take a look at my xorg.conf and fixed all of my problems within minutes. I will put my experiences and the xorg.conf online, when I'm back from Karlsruhe. And to mention it explicitly again: THANK YOU VERY MUCH, MATTHIAS!

As some other community collegues already announced ^{1 2 3}: Linuxtag X will start on upcoming Wednesday.

The PEAR project will be present with an exhibition booth during the whole conference at the LAMP area. On Wednesday itself Aaron will mainly maintain the booth. On Thursday Stefan N. will also join. I will arrive on Wednesday noon/afternoon, will stay until Saturday evening and give a session on "PEAR and PHP5" on Thursday from 4 to 5 p.m where I will tell you something about the recent steps done in PEAR and what we do in connection to PHP5.

We would be happy to welcome all PEAR / PHP developers attending Linuxtag for a chat at our booth! Beside that we invite every PEAR user to come there to ask questions and give feedback!

I'm pretty much looking forward to one of the best community events in the year and to meeting all of you nice geeks (again)! :)

The Linuxtag e.V. recently announced that for this years Linuxtag a charge will be have to paid for entrance. One day will cost 15,- €, 2 days 25,- € and all 3 days 35,- €. Members of the open source community should be granted free entrance, in the way, that the exhibiting projects will receive a certain amount of free tickets. The organizers of Linuxtag explain their decision for an entrance charge inside an open letter (German) to the open source community.

Read the full arcticle on heise.de (German).

As usual, the Linuxtag in Karlsruhe, Germany, will take place in June next year (22nd - 25th). This time, it's the anniversary 10th Linuxtag. Since yesterday Linuxtag expects talk proposals from open source developers on topics around the free operating system and other open source projects. Until now the call-for-papers website is German ony, which will change in the near future, I guess.

Beside my talk proposal I hope to be able to maintain a PEAR exhibition booth again in the LAMP area.

Hope to be there and meet a lot of you geeks out there again.

Today I received my copy of the german Ct magazine (magazine for computer technic), which has a 1 page article on the Linuxtag (see page 48, issue 15/2004). The article is focused half onto Linuxtag itself and the other half is focused on our demonstration. Best thing: In the middle of the page there's a photo of the 10 jailed programmers, where I'm in the very middle! ;)

Nice to see that Heise (publisher of Ct and the famouse Heise newsticker) has brought up that issue, also they did not post any newsticker article on that. Hope the whole software patent discussion gets more and more to the center of public media (and hopefully beside the geek media).

I completed my gallery of the Linuxtag. They are structured per day and there are some amazing shots from talks, from the demonstration and from the social live of the LAMP Area people.

Some other people send me their photo links, yet:

• Photos by Damien Seguy
• Photos by Jan Wildeboer
• Photos by Sebastian Bergmann

Thanks to all of them! :)

I beg everyone again, if you have photos from the Linuxtag online, please give me the URL in a comment to this post.

As promised, Spiegel-Online published an article about our demonstration on thursday.

Read more...

P.S.: Yippieh! I'm famous! ;)

Sad but true, the last day of Linuxtag 2004 has arrived... Yesterday we've been with a few people to the Linuxtag social event. It took place in the local open-air bath, with a live band and free grill food. Pretty nice organized, especially that the Linuxtag wifi connection was available there.

Afterwards the usual po