LinuxTag 2004 Report by Michael Banck
LinuxTag 2004
A report by Michael Banck <mbanck@debian.org>
Wednesday, June 23rd 2004
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.
Thurday, June 24th 2004
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.
Friday, June 25th 2004
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.
Saturday, June 26th 2004
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.
Summary
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.