Linux Kongress -- Report
The Debian booth was mainly organized by members of the university's Unix user group (thanks Arne!). The congress organizers were so kind to provide free access to the conference for all Debian staff members (thanks go to Uli Weis and Martin Schulte). Joey sent us posters, we very much liked the A0 version of this.
We started setting up the booth on Tuesday, when the congress tutorials took place. The Max Planck Institute provided us with two Dual-Pentiums and one very strange x86 box from SGI. Debian was quickly installed on the former two, but the SGI refused to boot from anything that did not look like an SGI install CD. We've got network access through WLAN on a laptop running sid. The Debian booth also provided net access to the neighboring NetBSD booth. As most visitors were busy with the tutorials, there wasn't much activity around our booth.
The main congress programme started on Wednesday. Thomas Lange and Constantin Hellweg demonstrated the FAI installer on two machines. Many people came around and asked us about FAI and Debian in general. We didn't have CDROMs to hand out, but burned some woody images on request.
The evening began with a key signing party which, unfortunately, ended quite early, so people coming 5min late had to ask for signatures themselves. The following social event took place in a café on the campus, and was much fun to be there. The catering was excellent. Some people later joined a table football session in a student's residence nearby, which went far into the night.
The closing day, Thursday, went along with further FAI demonstrations and people visiting the booth.
Overall, I must say that it was definitely worth the effort of running the Debian booth at the Linux Kongress, as Debian was mentioned by several speakers during their talks and people could come by to get in touch with Debian people.
