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Impressions From LinuxTag
Winfried Trümper writes: "I have published a page with public
pictures
from the LinuxTag in Stuttgart. Although
"only" 90 pictures from all sort of developers were selected, the
page is still huge. " It's a good summary page -- check it out.
These should be submitted to the Linux Image Montage Project!
-API mean I used to support Linux and thought it was really cool; a rebel, upstart, underdog OS that really might give us a chance at something new and different!
Nice troll. Can I please translate the content for you? "Linux is just the flavor-of-the-day, soon, the small core of fanatics that actually use Linux will will switch to BSD or BEOS and Linux will disappear as a threat to Microsoft". "Oh, and by the way, can you guess who I work for".
OK, so *I* am one of those "uncool" people who jumped in in the last year. Does the fact that I just landed a job with one of the coolest companies in Europe, doing nothing but Linux, getting paid to do the things that I used to do for free mean anything? Ahh... I think it's kinda cool, don't you?
How about the concept of pinning those cute penguin pins onto the shirts of young pretty girls who know nothing about Linux, and thereby get drafted to the cause. You should see what happens after a few guys explain the meaning of the penguin to the girl, ok, she's going to be a self-appointed expert soon, and there is just no other advertising space that can compete. (By the way, any lonely geeks out there, this *works* - take note.)
The bottom line: You ain't seen nothing yet. This year is only the dawn of cool.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
The first day was reserved for suits - they had to pay pretty big bugs to attend the show. I wasn't there that day, but judging by the number of suits still poking around the second day it must have been pretty heavily attended. The show was superbly organized and paced. There were big after-closing parties on Thursday and Saturday, and a dress-up dinner on Friday, with lots of goodlooking girlfriends/wives/girlgeeks in attendance. The aisles were constantly packed, and *everybody* was getting good traffic. Some boothes were really packed - particularly Corel's, which should tell you something about the level of interest in a distro aimed strictly at desktops.
:-)
I don't know exactly what the attendance figures were, but they were expecting 20,000 and it looked to me like they beat that. This year's show was three times the size of last year's, and that has happened every year for the last 4 years. It's a safe bet that next year's show will be 3 times the size again.
The last day included a job fair - graduating students getting jobs in Linux companies. Cool.
There was a continuous multiplayer drop-in game of Parsec going on about 6 computers, totally cool. Looks like Wing Commander, except the graphics are better. And no crashes at all, according to the Worldforge guy on the other side of the room.
I got a cute sqeeking toy penguin from HP for my wife, and lots of cute penguin pins. (See previous comment on what the penguin pins are good for;-) And, oh yes, a job. Hacking Linux fulltime.
I really can't say enough good things about Linuxtag.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
NT tag was much more fun to play.
...or am I confusing that with freeze tag?...
Hm...
90 pics on a server in Germany? Not only that, but based on the response time, it's a 386 server, fronted by a z-80 powered firewall.
The only possible explanation is that Hemos is cackling with diabolical laughter and telling his new bride "Look honey, I just threw 400,000 DSL connected geeks at a box that's connected to the net with tin cans and string." I bet she gets off on that. I would.
--Shoeboy
well, LinuxTag has been around since 1996, so this event clearly was not just some "let's hop on the bandwagon" event.actually, LinuxTag was quite cool and I had a really good time there. :)
I used to support Linux and thought it was really cool; a rebel, upstart, underdog OS that really might give us a chance at something new and different!
I find myself yearning for a new "Unsung Hero" OS.
I totally groove with this. As soon as you find a new OS that's worthy, it'll just become mainstream like Linux is. Anything cool eventually gets picked up by the uncool and then urban hipsters like you and me find the whole scene ruined. Remember when we shopped thrift stores back in 96 for old atari shirts and crap? Now everyone is doing it. It's SOOOOOO cliche and bourgeois. What we need to do is find a trend they won't imitate and coopt. I say we resurect COBOL on the PRIME MiniComputer. That'll rock. We can say things to the Linux guys like 'PrimeOS never needs to worry about new hardware compatibility' and 'Linux won't succeed in the market due to all you "C" hackers refusing to support the COmmon Business Oriented Language.'
--Shoeboy
There are much more images from LinuxTag here.
And it's less biased -- I miss Photos from the huge KDE Booth on LinuxTag e.g. where they showed the incredible KDE2. Have a look here:
Kalle Dalheimer
Hans Meine showing aRts, the new multmedia-framework in KDE2.
Konqi + KDE-Developer
KDE-Developers (there seemed to be much more of them there)
Konqi And someone (Takkat?) sleeping ...
Thanks to those students who organized LinuxTag and made it a complete success. In opposition to other fairs LinuxTag is a completely non-commercial event where booths are being donated including equipment to non-profit-projects. Also you can visit it for free. And the whole event is being organized by people in their sparetime just in true opensource-spirit.