We had a very nice booth, large and at a nice place. We had the chance to tell lots of people about openSUSE and where it is heading to. I heard much good feedback, about the distribution on the one hand, but also for the project and how it evolves. Slowly we seem to get a good message out and users and peers from the FOSS community get and appreciate it. Very good to experience that.

Of course we also had good fun at the booth andgave some interesting workshops in pipe cleaner arts and grafity for example.

Some other specific things that stick to my mind:

I went to a talk about Icinga, a system for open source monitoring. A very good talk about an obviously great system with a very awake community. Good to see the hands on approach of them. Interestingly enough, after the talk somebody asked why they did choose PHP as programming language instead of something cool like rails. I could not resist to tell about that at least I often thought about if it hadn’t been better to do the OBS in PHP instead of Rails simply because more people know it. Not appreciated

Another talk I liked was the fly over Qt and its recent past and future, delivered by Daniel Molkentin. Thoughts about Qt 5 were published a few weeks ago and Danimo outlined these again, also showing some nice demos of the upcoming Qt Quick and more.

From Vincent I saw a very good talk about collaboration between distros where he came up with an impressive list of activities where we’re already collaborate and proposals for more. Sad to see only few people in the audience. I missed Vincents other one about GNOME 3, but there is a nice Interview with him done at LT about that topic.

Apart from talks I saw KDE Active the first time real on a kind of Weetab on the KDE booth. Definetely cool, hopefully applications will catch up and being ported to this kind of platform. I am sure users will seek out for more than weather forecast apps sooner or later.

On saturday a collegue from the Gentoo Project approached me and told me that his team is actively working on a Smolt feature to also track the list of installed software of a system. We also use Smolt in openSUSE and we also have Feature #305877 asking for that kind of functionality, so I think we should jump on that train to support that effort. Nice idea, volunteers welcome!

Yes, and there also was some sports on Linuxtag: The Sportsfreunde der Sperrtechnik had a booth and were giving workshops on lock picking. I attended, but was not successful so far, need more practising

Apart from that I have to say that I was a bit disappointed by this years LinuxTag. I had the feeling that the number of visitors did not meet the expectations of the most exibitors and presenters. The hallways were really relaxed most of the time. Furthermore, the number of not so impressive talks I saw was comparably high. The official numbers however do not support my feeling, so maybe I am wrong.

Anyway it was big fun again. I like to thank you all for your share which made Linuxtag 2011 a great success for openSUSE.

We again ran the pun talk “Wine” (not) the Emulator vs “Wine” the beverage, with Christian talking about life and work at a vineyard and his wine grower community at Deutsches Weintor.

Included in this talk was a Wine tasting of 4 different kinds of Wine, as grown in the area were Christian lives.

His stories on Vineyard activities and the processing from grape to wine interluded with myself talking about Wine the Emulator, its historical and statistical parts, game support and futures.

Around 70 people  enjoyed our light hearted wrap up talk of this Linux Tag conference.

Images: by hueck2342 at flickr.com, licensed as Creative Commons  – Share Alike, Attribute, Non Commercial http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/

* Joe Zonker Brockmeier – openSUSE Community, SUSE Community Week, SUSE Summit
* Cornelius Schuhmacher – SUSE Studio
* Brent McDonnell – iFolder
* Jan Weber-SUSE Education.

If you have any Questions, you can submit the Questions to: live@radiotux.de. Then we’re using your Questions Live at LinuxTag.

We had again a mixed count at the talks … I’m not sure which talk was visited the most, probably the Laptop 2.0 talk from Timo, Holger and Helmut (yes, i got your papers …), or the Talk from Marcus about Wine. Very close follower was Henne with his Freevo talk. I taped all the talks, but to be honest i’m not sure if the recordings are that good … quite hard for me to tune the picture on a tiny display. We will see it on Monday …

At the booth we gave away approx. 1700 openSUSE 10.3 PromoDVDs if i counted correctly, there was just one box with 60 DVDs left, because it was hidden somewhere. We also gave away a lot of our new openSUSE Laptop stickers. The kind you can put over the one with the four color window/flag

So thanks again to all who helped: Moenk and his friends from Linux-club.de, Christian, Jan-Simon, the SUSE and Novell guys who helped also at the booth and of course the Linuxtag team! (sorry if i forgot somebody, i need sleep).

There will be more verbose mail on opensuse-project next week, stay tuned …

btw: no new photos today, my cam died … i managed somehow to break the display in my pocket. If you made photos at the Linuxtag, please add a link in the comments, thanks!

btw2: i hope everbody who drove home by train is home now. We heard there was a big problem with the trains in germany.