Solutions Linux 2004 Paris was held at the CNIT, Paris-La Défense from February, 3rd 2004 to February, 5th 2004.
I was responsible for the Debian booth this year. It has been quite a challenge, honestly, but I was prepared to do it and it's been quite a lot of fun too. Thanks to all the people who helped out to get everything done (see below). It rocked !
This report was written during the exhibition, so it relates most of the details :-)
Aurélien, a friend of mine, came along to help on the booth. We arrived at Paris Orly (airport) on time, so this was a pretty good start. We caugth a taxi to the hotel in a couple of minutes, and finally managed to be on the exhibition floor an hour earlier than I expected.
We arrived on our booth, where we found 4 chairs and 2 tables, when only half of that material was expected. We eventually had to give away the second table in the evening, but Sam and the guys from ECP (Ecole Centrale Paris) brought a table for us (and they managed to forget the chairs, ahem) and arrived at roughly the same time.
We headed up to the Linux Magazine booth to grab our material, but unfortunately they arrived only a couple of hours later. That means we had to borrow network and electrical cables to plug one machine and install it.
We stopped by the HP booth to get the machines HP kindly lent us; a big box was ready for us, but we couldn't meet Jean-Marie VERDUN, our contact at HP France. Too bad that we didn't really have the time later in the afternoon/evening to try to see him.
The machines were just great. 2.6 GHz Pentium 4, with 500 MB of RAM, 40 GB of disk, and 17 inches TFT monitors :-) So far so good, except the built-in network cards in the machines weren't recognized by debian-installer beta2 (Broadcom 5782). We had to borrow a network card to do the initial install, then build a 2.6 kernel (tg3 driver) and everything went fine afterwards.
We had no major troubles using d-i; I brought a Debian mirror on my laptop which was pretty convenient as you can imagine. People in the .Org Pavillion appreciated a full stable/testing/unstable mirror running on the 100 MBits network :-)
We realized a few minutes later that the 3 machines weren't identical. Two of them had Quadro4 graphic cards, which was, uh, kind of unexpected :-) Too bad I didn't bring the Quake III binaries :-P (I know, it's horribly non-free ;)
Eventually, Benj, Sam and the Linux Magazine guys popped up, so things finally got back in order. It took a couple of minutes to unpack the Debian posters and hang two of them. They rock :-)
We left the floor at 09pm, with only the base system installed on the machines.
We arrived on the floor at around 08am, and finished installing the machines. We got a VESA X Server running on all of them, and installed KDE and GNOME on two of them. The other one contained our mirror, and as it happens the mirror took all the space left on the disk (35 GB). Oh well, let's delete non-free and contrib :-P
Jean-Marie VERDUN of HP came on the booth in the morning, and was pleased with what he saw. It seems HP has lots of projects involving Debian in Europe, that looks pretty exciting.
Lots of questions from a lot of people, covering all kinds of subjects. Lots of people asking for the estimated release date for Sarge, as expected.
Gave a short interview to a french web radio, a few simple questions regarding Debian in general and the upcoming Sarge release. That was pretty nice.
Ayo stopped by our booth in the afternoon to say hello and have a look at the posters he drew. We offered him two of them :-)
Bill ALLOMBERT spent the day on the booth with us, and Arnaud QUETTE happened to be part of the exhibition to represent his employer, as was Igor GENIBEL. Quite a lot of french DDs were on the exhibition floor.
No pictures for this day, sorry. I took far less photos than I expected too, partly because a Debian booth with a lot of people around it is basically a booth with people around it, so there's no point in taking dozen of pictures...
I spent the morning in the conference room where I had to give a talk (see top of the page). Rémi PERROT gave a talk about CVS in the same conference session. That was nice.
In the afternoon I did a presentation of the Debian Project on the Linux Magazine France booth. Quite a lot of people attended.
Back on the Debian booth in the middle of a keysigning ; I'm pondering asking the organization for a "KEYSIGNING HERE" panel :-) We signed more keys already than we did last year.
Bill ALLOMBERT was here again to help on the booth, and Jean-Michel KELBERT came to help too. We had a lot of visitors, more than the previous day, so the help was really appreciated. It's always nice to meet other DDs.
We sold a lot of posters too, that's a great news. I was afraid I would have to bring some posters back.
Some (bad) photos taken from my talk. Oh well, as long as you can see the swirl on the slides I'm happy :-)
We arrived on the floor around 08am as the other days, with our luggage as we had to take a flight in the evening. We met Jean-Marie VERDUN on our way to our booth, and spent half an hour talking about Debian and Linux thingies. We had a look to some HP hardware too; pretty cool and well-engineered hardware, if you ask me.
I found the time to walk through the exhibition floor, but didn't take any photos. Nothing really special on that day, we sold all the 100 posters, I'm pretty happy.
Christophe Le BARS, Yann DIRSON, Christian PERRIER and Pierre MACHARD stopped by. It was really a great moment, with a lot of DDs on the booth.
The exhibition ended at 4:30pm and we had to give back the machines to HP at the same hour. It's amazing how fast a booth can be "unbuilt". Sad to see the end of the exhibition, but happy too because I was really tired and it's great to be back home.
A big THANK YOU to the guys at HP (especially Michael SCHULZ, HP Linux Marketing Germany, and Jean-Marie VERDUN, HP France) for lending us 3 great demo machines (d330uT units with 17" TFT monitors), and for bringing them along with their booth material to the CNIT. They were very nice, especially considering this all happened 3 weeks before the exhibition.
Sirius Technologies paid for our flyers. Thanks !
Thanks to Martin MICHLMAYR, our DPL, who helped with the demo machines and made it possible to print 200 Debian posters for the event.
Thanks to Loic BERNABLE, responsible of the .Org Pavillion, for the great booth he gave us and for all his work organising the event. It was just great, as usual. Hope you'll be there next year, Loic.
Thanks to Linux Magazine France and its editor Denis BODOR for shipping part of our material, this was really appreciated.
Thanks to the people who helped with the booth, and to all the visitors who stopped by to say hello or to get information about Debian.
Hope to see you all next year !