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Tue, 15 Nov 2005

[LWE] First day...

We had some troubles with a broken computer, slow internet connection, no available storage room and some smaller problems.

Interesting visitors, ranging from "I'm using SuSE why should I change to Debian?", some "I'm using Debian and would like to thank you!" and some really hard technical questions. Quite mixed visitors...

In the afternoon the Linux New Media award was given away. For those who aren't familiar with it: It's the only free software related award I know of in Germany. It's given away yearly in several changing categories by a jury of over 200 people of the Free Software community and industry. A small history: 2002 one category was "best distribution" - Debian won it. 2003 one category was "distributions" - Debian won it. Bored by that, in 2004 Debian one no award itself - but in the category "best newcomer distribution" 4 out of 5 nominees were Debian based - Skolelinux / DebianEdu won it.

2005 we didn't won any award again - but is was again a success for Debian for two reasons:

  1. One category was "best Debian derivate" - it's so boring to give awards to Debian, that they made a "who's doing as good as Debian" award ;) (Not surprisingly Ubuntu won it.)
  2. In all but one of the six laudations for the winners in this years categories Debian was mentioned :))

This year they had one special award for "Outstanding contribution to Linux / Open Source". It was hard to decide, so many nominees... The City of Munich, the BBC, several country or state governments... it ended in a tie! This years winners are Mark Shuttleworth and the anonymous developer!

Yes, everyone of you out there, who ever submitted one line of code, submitted one useful bug report, wrote one line of documentation.. all you got an award! Congratulations!

Personal note: Somehow managed to hurt my knee... I'm too old for this...

Personal note 2: Special greetings to Meike who can't be here with us :(

postet at 23:39 into [Debian/events] permanent link


Mon, 14 Nov 2005

[LWE] Sending live and in colour...

... directly from this years LinuxWorld Expo in Frankfurt / Germany.

First news... uhm... no, let's say it in an other way: One of my favourite movie quotes is "I'm too old for this shit!". Would fit very well, if I would say it right now ;)

Update: I should have mentioned, that it was just the "build the booth and get things running"-day. Visitors won't come before tomorrow. I'll keep you informed, but somehow I think I'm too old...

postet at 22:52 into [Debian/events] permanent link


Mon, 31 Oct 2005

Coming home from Linux-Info-Tag Dresden...

... and I must say: It was again worth the effort.

Pretty good organized (especially when compared to the Berlinux) and a good mixture of fun, knowledge and nice people.

Again we had a nice booth, with a good computer sponsored by AMD (I think...). Of course we needed to improvise a bit as usual: Since we had no white poster wall, but only a brown wooden one, we used our beamer with the big wall quite far behind our booth. Worked good, but some kind of colourless, since the wall wasn't white but some kind of greenish gray. And since we had no poster for the wooden poster wall (the mail service seem to have lost them again!) we used my sweat shirt with the big swirl on the back, to "mark our territory".

Although we had some problems with the network (luckily we had several Debian mirrors on our notebooks...) we managed to solve some quite tricky problems and answer some interesting questions.

One visitor even asked us, if he could bring his computer, because he had a quite interesting problem with some error messages while booting. After I while we found out, what was wrong: He installed the wrong kernel, had DMA-problems with his DVD-drive, and never ever installed any security update (beside a fourth small problem, we can't remember, but we solved it). He used synaptic and just clicked on the "update package list" button (how it is called in the English locale?)... uh... I can't remember what he did exactly... he did the synaptic equivalent of just running aptitude update without running aptitude upgrade after that. Carsten, who is more familiar with synaptic, explained him how to use synaptic, and I put "take a look at synaptic (especially if translations are misleading)" on my todo-list.

We had two copies of the Debian Anwenderhandbuch by Frank Ronneburg left from last weeks Berlinux, and alphascorpii came up with an idea to find new owners for them... I won't say more; I'm sure she will tell you more about that soon.

After we had finished our talks, and teared down the booth, we joined the social event. The organizers made a nice BBQ in front of the lecture hall and showed some funny movies of the "local hero" of their university: A mathematician with PhD who left the university to became a cabaret artist but is still doing some nice lectures for special events. If you read this blog entry during a boring lecture imagine that: There exists at least one lecturer, where you need to book tickets in advance, or you won't even get into his lecture!

Today, on Sunday, they organized again a small round trip to the beautifully city of Dresden. Since the Frauenkirchen was consecrated on that day, it was kept short, the city was just to crowded. Instead we visited the Hygiene Museum, where they had an exhibition about games (don't ask me, why there). They did not only showed some really old games in a glass cubicle, but even much stuff where you could try and play a lot of different games. Quite funny.

Last part: We went to a good Italian restaurant, and spend a nice evening chatting and telling stories. Although we are using different distributions, desktop environments and editors: After all we are a big family, scattered to the four winds, enjoying the time, we are together!

But all good things have to come to an end, so alphascorpii and I left the party (friendly escorted by a local who showed us the way around Dresden's construction sites) to get to our train back to Leipzig and Frankfurt. Last highlight of the day: We had a conductor, who knew Debian, and where we came from! When we showed us quite impressed, he said: "Not all of us conductors are that stupid." (How ironic: Although using his pocket communicator to take a look at the schedule, he told us a wrong information about it.)

Nice. These are the moments, where you feel, that you are doing something useful. For such moments (I had a visitor who has been at our booth last year, and whom I helped to solve a problem. He just came by to thank us.) I travel 400 Kilometers through europe.

Very last thing to mention: A personal note. You know, that you really love your girlfriend, when she get's much more attendees (factor 5-6) for her talk than you, and you don't mind but are just happy for her ;)

postet at 02:16 into [Debian/events] permanent link


Mon, 24 Oct 2005

Coming back from Berlinux 2005...

... and noticed that Joey already blogged about it a bit earlier.

Interesting: Someone came back from a Linux event, and the best he can say is "nice building..."

Well... I'll try to find a polite, positive way to word my opinion on this years event: After the exhibition closes, they send someone around to collect notes, critics, opinions. what went wrong, how to improve, etc. That was a really good idea, but he should have brought a full charged battery for his notebook, since it took so long...

postet at 11:52 into [Debian/events] permanent link


Wed, 20 Jul 2005

[ApacheCon] MIKE IS BACK!

Oh god, what a surprise! I arrived this morning at our preliminary booth at ApacheCon, to find, that alphascorpii left a nice surprise for us there, when she picked our exhibitor passes up yesterday:

Notice the
mike poster on the wall!

Yes, there is a Mike poster to be seen in the background. No, it is not the one, that got stolen with all the other hardware all the other hardware stuff from last CeBIT. No, alphascorpii made a brand new one, just from the bad quality jpg on Joeys infodrom... Thanks very much!

Uhm... after reading what she was getting through to bring it here, I love her more, than I did ;)

postet at 12:43 into [Debian/events/ApacheCon-2005] permanent link


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About

Alexander Tolimar Reichle-Schmehl lives in Tuttlingen / Germany. He works as IT manager (specialized on Unix and SAN/Storage) for an international automotive supplier.

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