We're back from CeBIT exhibition, taking place in Germany from Feb
23rd to Mar 1st. Several developers have met there and presented both
Debian and Debian-related distributions. We've had a lot of fun and
appreciated the contacts we were able to make. We're trying to
summarize our experiences below.
Debian
Several people from Debian were around presending Free Software and
Debian:
. Torsten Landschoff, mainly at the Linuxland/Debian booth;
. Roland Bauerschmidt, Daniel Mester, Christian Loob, Henning
Heinold and Torsten Landschoff providing support at the
Stormix/Debian booth;
. Henning Heinold, Andreas Schuldei and Rodger Etz-Brown helping at
the LinuxTag booth;
. myself at the Vogel-Verlag/CHIP booth
Some other Debian developers have visited us at our respective
booths. Among them were Christian Kurz, Michael Meskes, Michael
Bramer and Carsten Leonhardt.
We also met Jens Rühmkorf, one of the developers of the FAI (Fully
Automatic Installation) for Debian. We already met one of his
collegues, Thomas Lange, at Linux Kongress last year.
S/390
On the fair I've met Richard Higson who is trying to aquire a
mainframe to port Debian on. We spoke about that port and
acknowledged that two architectures would be required to fulfil this
goal. I've even seen Linux/390 booting on a S/390 emulator. Read
his story (see link at the end) that covers it all.
Stormix
Stormix Technologies, creator of StormLinux, gave us the possibility
to build up an entire booth for Debian and present the free world
entirely. This was an exciting experience. The Stormix people are
really cool. We've had lots of fun with them and really appreciated
to work together.
Some people from Stormix want to apply as maintainer so we should be
able to work together more closely. They plan to release their
installation routine under the GPL so we can reuse parts of if. The
same applies to their package manager which is currently rewritten
to use apt as backend. It is a lot more evolved then our current
gnome-apt package.
Innominate
This is a German company that provides support for Free Software
like Linux, FreeBSD and others. They borrowed us two pc's to for
the Debian booth at the Stormix booth. They work distribution
independent but also have based two products on Debian (some others
on redhat and freebsd): Lingo and a rescue disk on a shaped disc in
form of a business card.
Corel
The main Corel booth was next to a Win2k booth and they were
demonstrating the installation of Corel Linux all the time on a big
screen. They've also mentioned that it's based on Debian. (though
I haven't seen that myself, I was said they did.)
This year there was no Debian booth at Corel's. However one of the
people we personally know from Corel told me that there should be
one, it only should have been planned half a year ago. Thus, I'm
asking for booth space for the next exhibitions.
ID-Pro
They fortunately paid for some of the passes we needed to staff the
booths. ID-Pro was also hired to build a pool-installation for
Corel Linux, thus for Debian. It will be free and I hope will be
useable for plain Debian as well.
LinuxTag
LinuxTag is Europe's largest Linux exhibition and conference. Apart
for a free conference program and free exhibition there is enough
space for Free Software projects, including Debian. This year parts
of organisation work is done by people affiliated to Debian.
Torsten Landschoff
Joey
Links
Richard Higson's report
http://pax.gt.owl.de/~higson/hangover-fair-2000.html
LinuxTag
http://www.linuxtag.org/
FAI
http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/
Stormix
http://www.stormix.com/
Innominate
http://www.innominate.de/
ID-Pro
http://www.id-pro.de/
--
Life is too short to run proprietary software. -- Bdale Garbee
Please always Cc to me when replying to me on the lists.
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