hennevogel » FOSS

It’s live. A Shout from FOSDEM

Henne — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 14:00:33 +0000

We arrived, very relaxed, yesterday at 21:00 thanks to our awesome openSUSE Bus. Its a nice to fall out of the Office, into the bus and then crawl out of it again in front of the Hotel. It’s more comfy than any plane I have ever been on and we used the time well. Lot’s of socializing, Beer and Pavol even ran a pretzel-stick eating contest (guess who won! yours truly). I think this will be our mode of travel for the next FOSDEMs to come. After everybody checked in we went to the FOSDEM beer event which was packed, as every year but quite a blast. I met up with Michael Meeks, Greg, Pascal and all the other openSUSE people.

And now the talks are underway and the hallway is more and more empty. So I thought its time for a short recap. The first hours today went great. We arrived at the venue at 9 and were setup by 9:30 thanks to our new and shiny TouchSmart desktops. Thank you HP! Apparently people love to touch stuff so the booth is always visited and people play around. We also give out free T-Shirts to everyone participating in our newest survey. So all in all everything is going smoothly.

Talk is Expensive

Henne — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:23:49 +0000

This week there will be once again LinuxTag. It will be strange for me because this will be the first show in a long time for me without Martin. I think the last one without Martin was LinuxTag back in 2002 in Karlsruhe, so we will all miss him terribly. As a consequence Michl and me have to run the booth and keep the flock together this time. Lets see how that goes…

Because everything changes, we thought it might be a good time to try something different for the booth. Usually we ran the LinuxTag booth as pure info booth. So you put out a GNOME and a KDE installation on display and wait for people to come look at it. If you are lucky they ask questions and you are drawn into a conversation. We of course think that conversation is what an exhibition is all about. But this was getting harder and harder every year. The reason for this is very positive one: Everybody knows Linux. There are nearly no people anymore on exhibitions that do not use it already. So instead of trying to inform people in general about the openSUSE distribution we will focus on communication and adapting openSUSE to your own needs this year.

To foster communication we will try to make hanging out at the booth as pleasantly as possible. For that we reserved space for some beanbags, a table, a whiteboard and other fun stuff. So an area where you can hang out and talk. We hope this will set a tone for the booth and makes everyone hang a bit loose!

To help people adapting the openSUSE distribution we have a suse studio counter and a openSUSE buildservice counter and a table with some Laptops to try out the image or package people have build. Of course we also bring some Moblin/Goblin netbooks, can show you Linux in general and openSUSE Linux in particular, tell you all about the openSUSE project, answer all your support questions and so on and so on and so on….

Critical Mass

Henne — Thu, 31 May 2007 10:59:12 +0000

Live from LinuxTag. Just slipped away from the booth for 10 minutes for coffee and cigs. So i share a thought with you. The question is: Where did all the people new to Linux go? I did not talk to a single person on our booth that wanted some general introduction. I did not talk to a single person that asked general questions about Linux. I can see the Fedora as well as the Ubuntu booth and talked to them and they don’t get these questions either anymore. So where are all these people that used to come to fairs like this one, stand in lines in front of your booth waiting patiently to let you show them was Linux is. I mean we are in Berlin. There are 3.3 million people living here. The fair is packed with people and still no single new Linux user? Its the second LinuxTag where it is like this. Is it this particular fair or is it Linux in general? Is it because everything works so well that nobody needs to come to a fair anymore to get help. I don’t know. Scared?

From the roof of the incomplete second Death Star

Henne — Sat, 05 May 2007 21:34:01 +0000

I keep wondering, being an imperialist and stuff…. I do i keep getting the feeling that the rebels are a bunch of senseless, blended, thankless bunch of Hippocratic morons. Are they really here to free and protect the universe from the dark side of the force? Are their intentions still clear? Or is fear the driving force of their actions. Fear of changes. I heard that one of their leaders once said: “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” Might be that the rebels want to follow that advice more closely. But what do I know. I’m just fixing this roof…

FOSDEM – Full Of Stinkin’ Dudes Exhaust Muffler

Henne — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 02:02:02 +0000

Just came back from FOSDEM, man it was crowded! It’s usually full there because it’s a nice conference that kept it non-commercial focus but this year there where at least thirteen people in your personal space most of the time. It’s held in Brussels/Belgium at the Universita©Libre. The talks are in the lecture rooms and the booths of the projects are on the hallways. Which means you have to fit 27 gazillion people in a 2,5 by 20 meter tube. Like IKEA on a Saturday afternoon: chaos, it stinks and people breathe down your neck all the time. Ever read about the experiment of John Calhoun in 68? I was feeling like being part of a rollback of it.

Brussels is a nice city. The architecture reminds me of a little bit of Barcelona. Very Mediterranean for a City that is round about a hundred kilometers away from the north sea. Of course i only saw stuff trough the windows of the bus that took me to the university or by walking around to find a place to eat/drink. The night life seems nice. From what you can get at a night or two.

Our DevRoom was okay. We might want to try a better mixture of technical hands-on talks and things that are more in the project space which tend to be a little bit abstract. I hope that many people will watch the video recordings of the project related talks so they spark interest. Because they didn’t at the conference :-/ My pictures from the conference are online. AJ has also some online already and the videos of the Talks should be on the wiki in the next days.

A cool thing happened on our arrival at Brussels international airport on Friday. After we left the Airplane and got our luggage we wanted to leave the airport so we walked in the direction of the exit. After we made it half there, security guards were coming up and pointed us friendly and without any explanation back into the direction where we came from. We are good people so we of course followed their suggestion, walked back and followed some other exit signs. This lead us in a circle back to the security guards. They were still doing the same. Pointing people to walk in circles. We asked them what the matter was and why we couldn’t leave the friggn airport. They still didn’t give any explanation. Something smelled fishy. We walked back to the point we started from. Now some other security guards said we have to go downstairs. We ended up in the hall where the security check for the departure flights is. As far away from the exits as you can be. By the time we arrived it was already very crowded. So we sat around there for another 20 minutes until they announced something in French/Flemish and everybody started moving back in the direction of the exit. Still having absolutely no clue what exactly happened, we exited the airport. Later we found out that there was a bomb threat and apparently we were evacuated. It was kind of cool because telling us nothing worked well, everything was pretty relaxed and there was no panic at all.