Chemnitz LinuxTag: My report

Last Weekend, We (JoergSimon, JensKühnel and I) were at Chemnitz Linuxtag. Chemnitz LinuxTag is the best organized linux event, I've ever seen. Booth Personals were well taken care of during the whole event by the organizers. Booth Personals could eat and drink from the canteen for free whenever they like.

JoergSimon has already said everything in his report, I'll recommend you to read it as well :) He explained everything what we did and what happened. I'll rather talked about who were our visitors at the Fedora Booth.

At the University of Chemnitz, the desktop computers are on Fedora Core 5 or 6, otherwise they are on Scientific Linux.

Fedora was being used at the
* Chemnitz LinuxTag Social Event Saturday night
* game-section
* administrative departments of the Chemnitz LinuxTag
* everywhere I could see a computer :)

Visitors were of different backgrounds (From professionals to linux amateurs). When I say professionals I don't mean Linux/programming professionals but professionals from other fields such as Biomedical, Optical, Music, Lecturers ...

These people fascinated me when they were at our booth. They know what they were looking for and expressed their desire to use Fedora to do professional work. That reminds me of my own personal project "Fedora Electronics" where I'm trying to make fedora provide electronic simulation tools for engineers :)

One visitor was part of the Linuxuse.de who wanted to do real time audio manipulation on normal desktop users. We showed him 2 articles of redhat magazine:
-Make way for music
-Professional audio with Fedora Core 6
I was unable to answer whether fedora kernels can be used to do real time audio manipulation without the need to install the CCRMA kernel. I promised him to send him a mail with the answer. He said that when other distributions provide this real time feature those distributions ship at the same time a broken acpi. The article Professional audio with Fedora Core 6 convinced him that he can carry out his work without spending hours fixing/preparing the box.

A KDE developer Alexander Neundorf wanted to check whether fedora's OOo open-dialog is under the KDE style or not. It wasn't. Instead on Fedora KDE the open-dialog of OOo is gtk based. The OOO booth staffs told me that during build time, we can choose either gtk based or kde based. The name "caolon @ RH" is known and respected by those guys at the OOo booth. However the OpenSuse guys told me that they got a better solution. I'll contact them to document myself and add that feature in our Fedora KDE spin.

A Swiss news site Symlink reporter decided to write an article about smolt after we told him what we are planning to do with Smolt and how it can be used to encourage various commercial companies to join forces with Fedora or Linux Communities. He welcomed the collaboration between fedora and OpenSuse on such hardware profiler project.

We had some package proposal in Fedora Repositories
- vym - view your mind
- infinity-plugin
- openttd
- pymol

On Sunday JoergSimon had to do some work for his company, and JensKühnel had his presentations, leaving me alone at the booth speaking in English while my visitors were germans :) And they liked it for some reason.

One sysadmin from university of Leipzig are using fedora for biomedical field. I'm encouraging you have a look at their webpage. He was a open source evangeliser himself and I can see in his eyes he was enjoying the fact that now Linux can be used for other production fields.

I had the chance to have a chat to LinuxTag Berlin's organizer, Wolfgang .. thanks to MirjamWaeckerlin. GeroldKassube is already in contact with him and his collegues for Fedora's presence at LinuxTag2007 Berlin in May 2007.

Another visitor was from Rodenstock, optical design (a new fedora user). We explained him the whole fedora world.

Another visitor worked for an automative company,he was interested in the Fedora Live Security CD proposed LukeMachen.

We also had a fair number of visitors looking for :
- an OLPC machine at our booth. We didn't have any.
- PPC DVDs for F7. All our PPC DVDs were gone during that weekend. MaxSpevack will be happy :)

JensKühnel and I discussed the Fedora European Leadership. We came to the name Fedora European Coordinator, because the one/group of people who will be in charge will only coordinate the budget. MirjamWaeckerlin and I converge to the "Executive" status and called it as Fedora European Infrastructure since in the future if the project is being successful, FEI can mentor and help local communities. Right now, we are thinking something small, if we succeed we can have more dreams :)

/td>

Some Request of Enhancement from our visitors:
- on pirut, pirut automatically selects latest version instead of all versions on the repositories
- a GUI to manage LDAP client to server. The reporter pointed that OpenSuse has it already and it would be nice fedora could have a GUI as well.
- FC DVD - avoid spaces in the naming. At one moment, we didn't have neither wifi nor wired internet connection, JensKühnel and I wanted to use the dvd as a repository, but because of the space in the DVD naming, despite our efforts, yum failed. I hope that F7 won't have this issue.

Below is a photo of the ChemnitzLinuxTag Social Event:

You can see on the floor there is a laptop, of course it's under FC6. Chemnitz Linuxtag organizers were using it to play music and their games to make people socialize :)

However, I was sad to see that MirjamWaeckerlin endured some unhappy situations where gender makes people behave differently. I've encouraged her to blog about the difficulties beautiful women encounter when they are at a linux booth. But seriously, reading those comments made by several individuals, it seems to be a fact that people don't care to improve!