gravityboy (gravityboy) wrote,
gravityboy
gravityboy

LinuxWorld - Day 1

So I was at LinuxWorld all day today along with Jaldahar and Ari. This was my first real Linux conference, and I knew it was commercial but I don't think I was quite prepared for it. We got plenty of people who were Debian users and fans who came by and said hi, which was great. We also got a ton of people who had vaguely heard of us or had no clue who or what we were. I'm kind of stunned that anyone could pay a lot of money to be at a Linux conference and not know the Debian Project, but that's life. Easily, the #1 question of the day was "So how do you guys compare to, say, Fedora?" It was personally hard because I've never used Fedora and I had to compare us with what I'd heard from Fedora users. Still, I tried to stick to easy things (no corporation behind us, totally open for years, lots of packages, dpkg instead of rpm, etc) to give people a feel for where Debian is coming from in the span of a 30 second soundbite. I can't believe how much salesmanship I had to do, and it wore me out. I spent the last hour or two trying to track down other hackers or just chat with our users.

We got put right next to the Gnome booth, which was cool. They had a stack of Ubuntu CD's, so when people came by asking for LiveCD's, I just sent them next door. The Gnome guys are pretty nice, and I saw like half of Planet Gnome there, which was a kick and a half. I got a very quick demo of Beagle from Nat Friedman, and I'm going to run around and pester him about Hula tomorrow if I get a chance, specifically with respect to Debian.

Sun very kindly donated a SunBlade box to us, and Ari spent most of the morning trying to get it running so we could demo Debian a bit. He finally got it installed and booting, but it turned out that there is no X driver for that particular video card at all. Fortunately, one the X.org guys were in the booth right behind us, so we went and asked Alan Coopersmith about it. We wound up getting help from a bunch of people, and hopefully a Radeon card from Sun to throw in the box, complete with an X.org contributer (Roland Mainz I believe) to help us get it running. Very, very kind of them, and the X.org guys in general are really awesome.

A big highlight of the day was that we got a ton of great feedback on the new installer. People are very positive about it, and most of those comments came from people who had never used the boot-floppies installer, so new users are liking d-i. That makes me very happy, as I personally put in a lot of time in to d-i in the past and I know everyone on the d-i team has worked incredibly hard to get it in good shape for release. A guy from Ziff-Davis interviewed me about it and took a sarge RC2 CD to review, so hopefully we'll get some good press about our installer finally! I think it's well deserved this time around. We handed out a lot of woody CD's though, almost all x86, and people were willing to donate a couple of bucks for them, which was very nice. I tried to stress that sarge would have a new installer to these people though, so hopefully they won't judge us based on boot-floppies.

That's been the bulk of the conference. Two people from NM showed up and hung out, a Debian-Women contributer too. Bdale and Bruce Perens made it to the booth at the end of the day and said hi. Overall, it was a great day and I'm looking forward to tomorrow. I've put the few pics I have up here and I'll try to post more tomorrow. Tomorrow night is a big party hosted by Google for lots of Free Software types, so that should be fun. I'll try and get some pics of that too.
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