Reviews from PI Giessen, LIT Dresden, LWE Frankfurt (Sorry, I'm late)
Good morning,
attached you'll find the reviews from some events in october - sorry
for the delay, I have been quite busy since then.
Alfie: I'll send you translations to german as fast as possible,
including the one I promissed your for the DebConf review.
Yours sincerly,
Alexander
#use wml::debian::template title="LWE 2003 -- Report"
# $Id$
<h1>Linux World Conference and Expo, Frankfurt, Germany -- Report</h1>
<p>Like last <a
href="http://www.debian.org/events/2002/1029-lwe-report";>year</a>, we got a
booth in the .Org-Pavilion on the <a
href="http://www.linuxworldexpo.de/";>Linux World Conference and and
Expo</a> in Frankfurt. Unfortunately we got a smaller booth. But luckily Ralf Nolden,
who organised the KDE-Booth, and Michael Meskes (from PostgreSQL and
Debian) had the idea to remove the walls between our boothes, so we
hoped to have an open, friendly and inviting boothes.</p>
<p>And they were right! This year we had a very nice booth, and since the
KDE-project didn't used all of their space, we had some kind of
"hacking area" or "lounge". Well, to others it might have
looked like we assimilated the half KDE-booth ;)</p>
<p>Noèl Koethe brought some of the discs Sven Hoexter mastered for LinuxTag, and
Flyers and pins, too. We had around 300 (pressed) discs, and on the
first day, we just let them lay around for the visitors. We gave them
away for free, until I saw one man, grabbing nearly all discs, laying
around on a table. I was pretty sure, that he was just one of those
"Oh? It's free? I like to have as much as possible, I need something
to fill my dustbin!"-grabber. So we decided, that we would give away
our discs and pins for a small donation, and printed some signs at the Oki-Booth.
(BTW: All though it was a Linux exhibition, they used Windows to print, so
I left them a <a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/";>Knoppix</a>
disc.)</p>
<p>Of course it was mainly a semi-psychological barrier for those grabbers;
If visitors talked a little bit and we thought, they are interested and
won't throw them away, we gave them discs for free. Or at least didn't
demanded a donation, but you can truly say, that most enforced us to take their
donation. And our visitors were quite freehanded! We got 50 or
even 100 Euro from single persons!</p>
<p>Jörg Jaspert brought really good <a href="http://people.debian.org/~seppy/foilstuckers/guidance/";>swirl- and Debian-stickers</a>. Not
such cheap, printed ones, but professional ones, which are cut out of a
plastic foil and should hang on your notebook some years. They sold very
well, covering his expenses and giving us a good part of the donations.</p>
<p>Last, not least: Andreas 'Amu' Müller brought some nice T-Shirts
with a swirl, not a printed one, but a with an embroidered swirl!</p>
<p>All in all we got more than 500 Euro donation, while got just 8 Euro last year.</p>
<p>Most visitors of the LinuxWorldExpo wear suites and ties, which
results in a slightly different atmosphere, than on most other events I
visited. But on Tuesday IBM paid train and entry for students on nearly
all German universities. None of them arrived with a tie, so the
atmosphere was better on Tuesday. Gladly many of those students visited
our booth. Of course is it nice to talk to businessman, who accept our work, but
I prefer to talk to students, who love our work :)</p>
<p>On Tuesday evening was the social event. Last year AMD sponsored the
social event, chartered our city halls basement, engaged a live band
and a very good catering service. Last year it was a nice social event,
which ended after midnight.</p>
<p>This year AMD wasn't an exhibitor, they had problems finding another
sponsor for the social event, and therefore the social event was in the hall, where the
keynotes where held, only small snacks was served, and the event had to
be ended before 10 pm.</p>
<p>Of course you go to a social event, not to eat, but to talk to other
projects. But since no interesting one was there (and even we got hungry
after being on duty for 10 hours), we left shortly after we entered, and went to a
american-styled burger-diner-restaurant-whatever. You could say, that we
had some kind of .Org-social event there, since people from PostgreSQL,
KDE, Debian, OpenOffice.org, OpenGroupware.org were there and some more arrived
later. All though we later left for another restaurant with more deserts,
the atmosphere was quite nice, and many of those important
inter-projectual stuff was discussed.</p>
<p>But back to our visitors: I'd like to mention two more of them. One
was very interested in a 'Java solution for Debian'. Since I never used
Java, I pointed him to Chris Halls, who is member of Debians
Openoffice.org Team. They had some problems with OOo build-dependency on
Java (that was the reason, why OOo didn't moved to main till 1.1-4 or so).
Unfortunately even he couldn't satisfy this Debian fan. Sorry, I don't
know the exact problem, but he (the visitor, not Chris) advertised 5000
Euro for a 'satisfying Java solution under Debian' and left his
business-card (which is made of plastic, not paper). If you are
interested (and know more about Java than me) drop me a mail, and I'll
tell you contact informations.</p>
<p>An other interesting visitor asked for a
company, who could provide support for Debian. They were using Debian
in some parts of their company, and are quite sufficient. Now they would
like to use it on 'much other computers'. We introduced him to the
Credativ people on the PostgreSQL booth, but that didn't work, since he
came from Siemens and defined 'much' as more than 10'000. But he promised
to recommend Credativ and Debian to the Department for the smaller
projects. Sigh.</p>
<p>This is one example, which shows how much progress Debian has made in the last year. If you
like you can say, that the people in the 'real world out there' start to
accept us. An other hint are better possibilities to organise stuff for
Debian. Last year it was nearly impossible to get Hardware (especially a
beamer) for the Debian booth. This year I got many hardware offers - including one from HP,
who offered computers and a Notebook (which was gratefully accepted). It
was no problem to get the same beamer as last year from Network
Appliance, and we had much offers for sleeping places from the <a
href="http://www.lugfrankfurt.de/";>LUG Frankfurt</a> (and even some
train tickets). And on some day we had an visitor from an CD press work,
who offered us special prices, if we press our next discs.</p>
<p>Last not least I like to mention the part Daniel 'codebreaker' Priem played in this
game. See, I just filled some forms and used my private address for it,
became therefore contact person for some people outside, and got many
thanks for doing this small job (which could have been done by any other
person, capable of reading and writing). But he saw the hardware
problems we had last year, and bought four or five (if I hadn't told you
about the Siemens guy, I would say 'much') computers, switches,
TFTs and all those stuff, tested them carefully, and brought them to
Frankfurt. And then apologised many times, that the beamer, he ordered for
us, didn't arrived in time.</p>
<p>Daniel 'codebreaker' Priem offers this Hardware for other exhibitions and conferences inside
Germany, too. If you need something, contact him.</p>
<p>BTW: He is a really modest man - he suggested the following passage for
this review (and I promised to use it): "Some Hardware have been sponsored
by Daniel Priem, if somebody inside Germany needs the Hardware for events
like a 'Messe' feel free to contact him".</p>
<p>I took some pictures, which you can find <a
href="http://www.schmehl.info/gallery/lwe2003";>in my gallery</a>. Peter
Eisentraut from PostgreSQL took <a
href="http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/lwe2003-pictures/";>some
pictures</a>, too.</p>
<div align="right">Alexander Schmehl</div>
#use wml::debian::template title="PracticalLinux 2003 -- Report"
# $Id: $
<h1>Practical Linux, Giessen</h1>
<p>Last year I started <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-events-eu/2002/debian-events-eu-200210/msg00019.html";>my
report</a> with the sentence: 'well, this event was - uhh - very chaotic.'
This leads to two Problems:</p>
<ol>
<li>People, who didn't read the second sentence (in which I stated, that it
was my fault), thought that the event was chaotic.</li>
<li>People, who googled for 'Practical Linux' found my review on the
first ten results, and Google showed just the first sentence.</li>
</ol>
<p>So I will start my report from this years <a
href="http://www.practical-linux.de/";>Practical Linux</a> this way: Well,
this event was - uhh - quite chaotic, but it wasn't the fault of the
orga-team.</p>
<p>My chauffeur had overslept, so I arrived very late. I went to the Debian
booth, said a fast 'hello' to the guy who volunteered to man the both,
picked up a soft-drink and went back to the lecture-hall, where I should
have started my talk about Debian Installation <!-- todo: Add link to foils
--> five minutes ago.</p>
<p>No problem, the official greeting hadn't ended, yet, so I had to wait a
few minutes, before I could start my talk. Normally I delete all partitions
on my notebook and run a live installation on it, after I talked a little
bit about prejudices and advantages of Debian. Since I didn't had the
opportunity to back up my data (I had several system crashes the week
before), I bite the bullet and installed in Debian vmware instead.
All though the textual output was quite slow, it worked very well.</p>
<p>When I finished my talk, I went to the workshop room, where I should
lead a workshop about different apt-tools. Since I lost the prepared foils
and examples I decided to do make it like a Birth-of-the-Feather-session
instead. I had asked all attendees by E-Mail, what they know, want to know
and expect, and came to the conclusion, that they could answer most
questions for them self.</p>
<p>What I didn't took in account was the workshop room. Communication was
very difficult, too, since it was very noisy. No excuses: I didn't did a
good job there. I later prepared a script <!-- todo: add link --> and send
it so the attendees. All though it didn't worked very well, we used the room
more than two and a half hour (nobody tried to remove us from the room, so
we used the lunch break, too [when I say "we" I mean the first three rows
and me]).</p>
<p>So much for that, I returned to the Debian booth, cleaned a little bit
up (the other volunteer just hanged some posters I brought, put out his
notebook, and started chatting - in irc, not to visitors) - and started to
answer visitors questions.</p>
<p>IIRC the orga-team told me, they counted about 500 visitors. The Debian
booth was very crowded, but I must confess, that it was just the crowd of
the <a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix";>Knoppix</a>-Booth nearby, which stood before our booth. Klaus Knopper himself
found his way to Giessen, and signed Knoppix CDs (and of course answered
questions, too).</p>
<p>Of course we had some visitors, too, but I think there were more
last year.</p>
<p>Nevertheless: Coming to Giessen was worth the trip, specially when I saw,
what Klaus Knopper won in the <a
href="http://www.schmehl.info/gallery/pl2003/aah";>tombola: A SuSE 9
professional box :-)</a></p>
<p>After 4pm the exhibition hall emptied very fast. Perhaps because Star
Trek is shown at this time in Germany and geeks went to their TVs. I don't
know.</p>
<p>After the show ended, we went to a nearby rester aunt for an get together,
and thats it.</p>
<p>I made some pictures at this event. You can view them at <a
href="http://www.schmehl.info/gallery/pl2003";>http://www.schmehl.info/gallery/pl2003</p>.
<h1><a name="LIT"><a href="http://www.linux-dresden.de";>Linux-Info-Tage
Dresden</a></a></h1>
<p>One week later, on the 18th of October, there was an other Linux-Event
in Germany, on which I maned a booth for the Debian Project. Since I forget
to add an entry in the events page, I'll write my small review here:</p>
<p>Joey suggested once, that I shouldn't write so much personal in my
reports. I think I filled the quota of allowed personal stuff in the last
part, so I only tell you the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>I remember, that the guys in Dresden offered me accommodation and to pick me up.</li>
<li>I remember, that I send them a mail, when I'm going to arrive.</li>
<li>I remember, that I asked in this mail for their phone numbers - just in
case.</li>
<li>And just when I left the station I remembered, that I neither got a
confirmation of the shuttle-service to my accommodation nor any phone
numbers.</li>
</ul>
<p>And to Joey's convenience I won't tell you, what I did between 0:06, when
I arrived in Dresden, and 10am, when this event started ;)</p>
<p>I'll leave this for those, who will write my biography.</p>
<p>All though it was the first time the LUG Dresden organised this event,
they did a very good job!</p>
<p>They organised some good talks - including talks about shell-tools,
Knoppix-remastering and 64-Bit programming - and workshops (including one
about LaTeX). They even organised a small barbecue and small snacks.</p>
<p>They did a very good promotion job, too. I guess that more than 650
people visited this event, and most of them come to our booth at least one
time. I took a box (~125 each) of the CDs, we gave away at <a
href="http://www.linuxtag.org/";>LinuxTag</a>, and around 100 flyers.
Additionally I got some Debian pins and stickers from <a
href="http://www.credativ.de";>Credativ</a>.</p>
<p>Well, we run out of pins, before the first visitor arrived - they have much
Debian fans in the orga-team and on the other project boothes. We run out
of CDs at noon, and we hadn't one single flyer left till 4pm: Two hours
before this event closed.</p>
<p>You see: We had much visitors and were quite busy.</p>
<p>I think the visitors were a little bit different from those of other
events. Normally many visitors know Debian quite well, and have some kind of
trouble, while the rest know Linux, and like to know what Debian is. This
time, there where many people who didn't even know what Linux is (and
therefore hadn't heard of Debian as well). So we had often to explain what
Linux and free software in general is, what Debian in special is, and ...
well ... what they could try, if they fail to install it.</p>
<p>I think the explanation for this is, that they promoted the LinuxInfoTag
very good at the university - I heard in every lecture they invited the
students at least one time.</p>
<p>There was even a student, who had a problem to install Debian on his
Computer, which had some kind of onboard raid system. IIRC we got in
finally done, when he brought his Computer and we googled a little bit.</p>
<p>Sometimes we run in some troubles when showing some things on my
notebook (which runs a sarge/sid mix), because I completely forgot that I
had a woody-chroot environment prepared.</p>
<p>Of course we had a good time in a student pub after the event, and the
morning we had a guided tour through Dresden, too. All in all it was a very
nice event, and I'm looking forward to travel there next year, too.</p>
<p>Last not least I would like to thank Erik Tews, who volunteered to man
the Debian booth in Dresden. He did a good job, brought his Computer as
well as some other useful equipment (including breakfast and thermos of
coffee).</p>
<div align="right">Alexander Schmehl</div>
Reply to: