We're back from CeBIT exhibition, taking place in Germany from Feb 23rd to Mar 1st. Several developers have met there and presented both Debian and Debian-related distributions. We've had a lot of fun and appreciated the contacts we were able to make. We're trying to summarize our experiences below.
Debian Several people from Debian were around presending Free Software and Debian: . Torsten Landschoff, mainly at the Linuxland/Debian booth; . Roland Bauerschmidt, Daniel Mester, Christian Loob, Henning Heinold and Torsten Landschoff providing support at the Stormix/Debian booth; . Henning Heinold, Andreas Schuldei and Rodger Etz-Brown helping at the LinuxTag booth; . myself at the Vogel-Verlag/CHIP booth Some other Debian developers have visited us at our respective booths. Among them were Christian Kurz, Michael Meskes, Michael Bramer and Carsten Leonhardt. We also met Jens Rühmkorf, one of the developers of the FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) for Debian. We already met one of his collegues, Thomas Lange, at Linux Kongress last year. S/390 On the fair I've met Richard Higson who is trying to aquire a mainframe to port Debian on. We spoke about that port and acknowledged that two architectures would be required to fulfil this goal. I've even seen Linux/390 booting on a S/390 emulator. Read his story (see link at the end) that covers it all. Stormix Stormix Technologies, creator of StormLinux, gave us the possibility to build up an entire booth for Debian and present the free world entirely. This was an exciting experience. The Stormix people are really cool. We've had lots of fun with them and really appreciated to work together. Some people from Stormix want to apply as maintainer so we should be able to work together more closely. They plan to release their installation routine under the GPL so we can reuse parts of if. The same applies to their package manager which is currently rewritten to use apt as backend. It is a lot more evolved then our current gnome-apt package. Innominate This is a German company that provides support for Free Software like Linux, FreeBSD and others. They borrowed us two pc's to for the Debian booth at the Stormix booth. They work distribution independent but also have based two products on Debian (some others on redhat and freebsd): Lingo and a rescue disk on a shaped disc in form of a business card. Corel The main Corel booth was next to a Win2k booth and they were demonstrating the installation of Corel Linux all the time on a big screen. They've also mentioned that it's based on Debian. (though I haven't seen that myself, I was said they did.) This year there was no Debian booth at Corel's. However one of the people we personally know from Corel told me that there should be one, it only should have been planned half a year ago. Thus, I'm asking for booth space for the next exhibitions. ID-Pro They fortunately paid for some of the passes we needed to staff the booths. ID-Pro was also hired to build a pool-installation for Corel Linux, thus for Debian. It will be free and I hope will be useable for plain Debian as well. LinuxTag LinuxTag is Europe's largest Linux exhibition and conference. Apart for a free conference program and free exhibition there is enough space for Free Software projects, including Debian. This year parts of organisation work is done by people affiliated to Debian. Torsten Landschoff Joey Links Richard Higson's report http://pax.gt.owl.de/~higson/hangover-fair-2000.html LinuxTag http://www.linuxtag.org/ FAI http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/ Stormix http://www.stormix.com/ Innominate http://www.innominate.de/ ID-Pro http://www.id-pro.de/ -- Life is too short to run proprietary software. -- Bdale Garbee Please always Cc to me when replying to me on the lists.
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