Members of Phosh.mobi e.V. attended the MiniDebconf in Winterthur in August. The Debian project builds a universal operating system for desktops, laptops, servers and phones. As with almost everything in the Debian project, these conferences are completely self-organized by project members and, with more than 100 attendees, are not quite as “mini” as they might sound.

Four days of DebCamp (with hacking and Debian-related topics and socializing) were followed by two days of conference talks. The event was held in filasez, a recently founded, alternative school using Free Software for their school systems.

Four members of our association attended the event. We demoed Phosh and Debian based phones at a small booth during the conference days and gave a short talk on Phosh and BengalOS. The talk sparked quite a bit of interest which brought more people to the booth. It’s becoming a common pattern that people are surprised by how well things are working and how usable the demo phones appear - which was encouraging and motivates us to continue our work.

BengalOS wasn’t the only talk about immutable OS images so we decided to have an ad-hoc BoF on immutable images and established a matrix room to discuss immutable image related topics in the future.

We had a great time working on phone-related issues across Debian, Phosh, BengalOS, and the sdm845 kernel tree. We also enjoyed reconnecting with familiar faces, meeting new people, and discussing phone-related topics throughout the conference. Thanks a lot to the organizers and to Paco for providing us with great food throughout the event.

Thanks to everyone who supported our work through a donation at the booth or via the online form.