LinuxTag 2001 -- Report
At LinuxTag 2001 about thirty Debian developers and as many users met at the Debian booth and participated in the first Debian Day. This was a one-day conference organized by Debian developers who gave talks about various issues for other developers and users. The Debian Day was a great success and shall be repeated next year. At the end of the schedule we've had a keysigning session organized in order to improve everybody's web of trust.
At our booth we were able to demonstrate Debian running on half a dozen architectures. We have had the opportunity to use a loaned Alpha DS20 from Compaq and a multiprocessor UltraSparc 80 loaned by Sun. The Dreamcast box connected to a regular tv monitor, displaying X11, also attracted a lot of people at the booth.
Although the Debian booth was even larger than last years booth, it was still overcrowded most of the time. Through sponsors we have had the opportunity to produce special Debian CD-ROMs to give away to visitors who wanted to try out Debian GNU/Linux. In addition to that the LinuxTag-Crew has produced a conference CD with a Linux system which is running directly from CD-ROM without any installation to the hard disk, based on Debian GNU/Linux. About 17,000 people visited this year's LinuxTag, some 6,000 ended up with a Debian CD in their bag.
During the Debian Day Richard Higson gave a talk about Debian GNU/Linux on IBM S/390 machines. The porting on S/390 is going on well, a lot of packages (some 3000) have been compiled for this architecture, a brute force build daemon is running on a Multiprise 3000 hosted at Millenux. This suddenly lead into a notice of intention by some developers, some people working for IBM and the Stuttgart based company trustsec IT solutions GmbH, who plan to work on getting Debian GNU/Linux officially supported by IBM on the S/390 architecture, alongside with other distributions.
