FOSDEM was great fun.  We shared a booth with MirBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD,
and quite a lot of people showed up asking questions.  Especially the Xen
showcase machine (kindly donated by Daniel Seuffert) was a real crowd
puller.  It was running a privileged NetBSD domain and for guest NetBSD
domains, all showing a KDE screen through a VNC server.  Two of the domains
were also running some web-app, backed by a PostgreSQL database running in
a different domain.  Although this was the first time I (really) used Xen
myself, I quickly got the hang of it (man, this Xen stuff really IS
great!), and was able to answer a lot of questions.  Some of those were
quite amusing:                      

> "Ok, Xen is all nice stuff, but it's such a mess to set up new guest
> domains.  I tried it with Linux, and I had to manually assemble a file
> system image, and in the end I didn't manage to get it booted."
> -- "Ah, but with NetBSD, you can simply boot an installer kernel in Xen,
> and do a regular install with sysinst.  After that, you just have to
> switch to a regular NetBSD/xen kernel and reboot." :-)

When one of the Xen developers popped up, it was my turn to ask him some
questions, and it seems Xen is only getting better with version 3.0!

I managed to go to the Plan 9 talk, which was really interesting (apart
from their usual UNIX bashing of course).  This guy was so enthusiastic he
just couldn't stop talking.  In the evening, he happened to wander by the
BSD booth, and we got into a pretty heated^Wanimated discussion, which was
more amusing the spectators than anything else. :-)

After the event, the FreeBSD folks wanted to go to Antwerp to have some
beers, and because I was stupid enough to mention I got four empty seats
(null pointers) in my car, heading to Antwerp, they of course dragged me
along.  We had real fun in the bar, they're very nice company.  

I would especially like to thank Daniel Seuffert for all his enthusiasm and
support of the *BSD community (both morally and materially), and the rest
of the FreeBSD guys (marius, philip, brueffer, and all the others of whom I
forgot the name) for the great company.  And of course the FOSDEM
organizers (Philip again), for the great organization (only bad point was
that we didn't get a network connection all day).  It was fun, and I will
surely go back next year!  

	Geert