Thursday morning at 5am I woke up, had a quick breakfast and traveled via Nürnberg to Berlin for LinuxTag 2010. I arrived around 12:00 at the fair and was surprised to see it the back occupied by around 7 persons. We had a small booth, so it was full. They were taking part in the workshop “Build your own multi-distro package” held by Michal. The openSUSE boosters had organized these workshops as practical hands-on experience sessions.
Our booth had at the front two large touchscreens were we demoed the current state of openSUSE 11.3. As usual one run GNOME, the other KDE – and we shared our remaining DVD media and openSUSE stickers. Always a few people were standing around the touchscreens helping people and talking about openSUSE.
In the afternoon, a clown visited us and made geekos from balloons – and distributed them to visitors that eagerly waited for them. Thanks Eva for doing this!
Later in the evening I saw Vincent talking about how to preview GNOME 3.0 and the GNOME shell to a good group. His workshop went on for 90 minutes instead of the planned 60 ones.
The last workshop in the evening was called “Craft your own geeko pin”. The goal was to craft a pin and wear it at Linuxnacht, the party of LinuxTag. Since we only had limited numbers of plates to do this, not everybody could take part and create one – but those that participated had a lot of fun! A big thanks to Annika and Henne for this workshop!
I’ve been talking with many people visiting the booth and also talked visited a few other booths. I met Bernhard who does a great automated installation testing using KVM and records a film (details) and will upload now one of his Milestone 7 videos to the openSUSE youtube channel to make them available there as well.
LinuxNacht was a Beach Party – a really nice place and we had the perfect weather for it. Queuing for the food took ages – a clear fail – but the long time gave me the chance to get to know a few people and talk with them.
Friday morning RadioTux did an interview with Michael Löffler and myself about openSUSE. We talked about the openSUSE Conference, the Strategy finding process, openSUSE 11.3 and the benefits openSUSE Build Service will bring open source projects in building packages for multiple distributions. Thanks to Thomas for an interesting discussion and to Sirko for setting this and a few other interviews up.
I gave a couple of guys a demo of our Build Service and they were impressed of the nice new user interface and the possibilities in building packages and images.
Every time I came to our small booth, I saw one of the boosters doing one of our workshops. The two most successful ones from the day before have been repeated again and were held in addition to the already announced ones so that we had one workshop after the other. As on Thursday only up to 8 people fit into the back of our booth which resulted in a great atmosphere and the chance for good discussions.
In the afternoon I took part in the GPG Keysigning party, chatted a bit more with folks and then took the train home.
I haven’t visited any of the talks so I cannot judge how great that was but from the two days I spend around the openSUSE booth, I can only say: Great! Due to the workshops and the activities at the booth, we had a crowded booth with many interesting discussions.
I’d like to say a big thanks to Jan and Michl for organizing the booth, to the boosters for the workshops and talking with people, to Markus and Christian for joining us to show openSUSE 11.3 on the large touchscreens and answering many questions – and to everybody that showed up at our booth to talk!
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