LinuxTag was a blast. I went there
on Wednesday afternoon, quickly walked over the expo, noticed that no
GNOME desktop was being displayed at the
Novell/SuSE
booth and that the
Gentoo booth was sort of
at the end of
the world. I had the expression that the overall expo area had grown since
last year, it always took me quite some time to find my way back to the Debian
booth. Unfortunately, the
hacking area
this year was pretty, uhm, limited. On the other hand, the
Debian booth
was very nice this year. Highlight was a very slick 2m height
case where all
the merchandise was displayed. The whole booth was very well done as well and
looked more professional than last year. Time was quite advanced, so I
desperately tried to find somebody to watch the football game (Germany versus
Czech Republic) with. Most of the Debian crowd did not seem to be particulary
interested, so I decided to stick with the
Credativ guys like
Noel, Andreas
and Michael. However, we walked across half the town looking for some greek
restaurant, only to find out it was
the wrong one.
We finally settled for an
italian
restaurant just next to the LinuxTag area where I watched the first half of
the game. I could not watch the second half though, as I promised to fetch our
fearless
leader from the Ryanair airport. When we came to the
AKK (the
gym hall we all
slept at), we had a beer and I worked on my talk until around 3 AM. With some
guys snoring, I had a hard time falling asleep and I woke up again around 7 AM
when the first over-motivated people decided it was time to get ready for
another day LinuxTag, sigh.
My talk on Thursday about the Debian GNU/Hurd port went okayish. I delivered it
in german, which perhaps blocked me a bit as I had to translate a couple of
terms on the fly and had the feeling of repeating myself without need a couple
of times. However, interest was pretty high and there were quite a couple of
questions, which encouraged me. Unfortunately, magicpoint did not want to run
on my Debian GNU/Hurd installation this year and I did not have enough time to
debug it, so I had to give the talk on GNU/Linux. After my talk I relaxed a bit
and walked around the area. I missed the demonstration against software
patents, Martin and me had lunch and went shopping in the city center.
In the evening, the famous KaLUG party took place. I have to admit that
I liked the setup last year better, at some distance to the AKK, where
people sat down in the grass. Instead, the location was right next to
the AKK this year, in the same place we used to hang out each night and
morning. The people were quite cool though, I had some discussions with
Martin, Frank and some others about the general way Debian is heading. I
wisely drank a couple of beers this time, so I had less problems falling
asleep than the night before.
On Friday I first attended Wolfgang's talk about GNU/Hurd and later Ian
Murdock's keynote. I spent the rest of the day hanging
around at the front or behind the back of the Debian booth, checking how Huedi, Flo and the others were doing at the hacking contest walking
around LinuxTag with Martin and talking to Wolfgang at the FSFEurope booth. I also met Murray Cumming for the first time ever at the GNOME
booth (which was right next to the Gentoo booth, I overlooked it on
Wednesday) and had a nice conversation with him. He lives very close to
me in Munich, so I thought it was funny to meet him at Karlsruhe.
Luckily, I could convince Martin to take the Bus back to the airport, so
I could attend the social event, which rocked big time this year.
Dogi finally arrived while we were waiting for the bus to bring us to
the social event location, a lido just outside of Karlsruhe.
Apparently, we were lucky to be on one of the first buses, as we did not
have to queue up insane amounts of time to get food at the (wonderful)
buffet, compared to the people who arrived late. I hang around with the
tyrolian Debian section, including Peter, Dogi and Huedi. Later on, I
had a long discussion with Andreas about various topics including
Gnoppix, and I watched the game France versus Greece together with the
others (Funnily enough, I noted later on that the notebook which did the
TV presentation was powered by WindowsXP). Some time later on, I bumped
into Chris Halls, and we talked a bit about what he's doing in real life
and for Debian. I always found it very impressive that he and Rene seem
to manage the whole OpenOffice.org stuff in Debian mostly on their own.
When I came back to the AKK,
I found out that Dogi and the others were still outside, so we emptied
the bottle of Bacardi I brought with me, blended with Dogi's orange
juice. Florian Lohoff joined us, and told us a couple of hilarious
stories on his own, so this was a great night. I guess I was pretty
drunk at that point, because I even managed to sleep until close to 9 AM
the next morning.
On Saturday I mainly listened to the 'hacking OpenOffice.org' talk by Michael
Meeks and partly followed the talk by Georg Greve. I already listened to
him last year, so I decided to move on after a couple of minutes
(although he is a very inspiring speaker, much more so than RMS in my
opinion). In the afternoon, I spent a while talking with Dogi in the
beautiful park just outside of the expo area and then walked around the
expo for a last time, before I attended the keysigning party However, I have not signed the keys from last years' LinuxTag, but I hope to do better this year. Later on, I discovered very much by accident that Christoph
Lameter gave a talk about the performance of embedded systems and I took
the oppurtunity to talk to him afterwards and tried to get his opinion
on the situation of embedded systems in Debian. While I think that the
modularity of the new Debian-Installer and the mainstream advent of
Custom Debian Distributions should make for much easier handling of
embedded issues, Christoph was not very interested in embedded
systems inside of Debian. Rather, he seemed to believe in just sticking
a full blown Debian installation on an embedded system (if the resources
permit), or otherwise cross-compile something and copy it over. Anyway,
I had a nice talk with him and showed him around the Debian booth a bit.
As a summary, I can say LinuxTag was again a nice experience. I only
manned the booth for short while this year (as there was not enough
space to display and promote the Debian GNU/Hurd port, unfortunately) and
rather walked around and talked to people. I met a lot of old friends
again and a couple of fine new people, and it is a pity that some
others did not show up (mostly mako and Marcus). And of course Joey was
too busy for conversation again this year.
