... and I must say: It was again worth the effort.
Pretty good organized (especially when compared to the
Berlinux) and a
good mixture of fun, knowledge and nice people.
Again we had a nice booth, with a good computer sponsored by AMD (I
think...). Of course we needed to improvise a bit as usual: Since we had no white
poster wall, but only a brown wooden one, we used our beamer with the big wall
quite far behind our booth. Worked good, but some kind of colourless, since
the wall wasn't white but some kind of greenish gray. And since we had no poster
for the wooden poster wall (the mail service seem to have lost them again!) we
used my sweat shirt with the big swirl on the back, to "mark our
territory".
Although we had some problems with the network (luckily we had several
Debian mirrors on our notebooks...) we managed to solve some quite tricky
problems and answer some interesting questions.
One visitor even asked us, if he could bring his computer, because he had a
quite interesting problem with some error messages while booting. After I
while we found out, what was wrong: He installed the wrong kernel, had
DMA-problems with his DVD-drive, and never ever installed any security update
(beside a fourth small problem, we can't remember, but we solved it). He used
synaptic and just clicked on
the "update package list" button (how it is called in the English
locale?)... uh... I can't remember what he did exactly... he did the synaptic
equivalent of just running
aptitude update without running
aptitude upgrade after that. Carsten, who is more familiar with
synaptic, explained him how to use synaptic, and I put "take a look at
synaptic (especially if translations are misleading)" on my todo-list.
We had two copies of the
Debian Anwenderhandbuch by
Frank Ronneburg left from last weeks Berlinux, and
alphascorpii came up with an
idea to find new owners for them... I won't say more; I'm sure she will tell
you more about that soon.
After we had finished our talks, and teared down the booth, we joined the social
event. The organizers made a nice BBQ in front of the lecture hall and
showed some funny movies of the "local hero" of their university: A mathematician
with PhD who left the university to became a cabaret artist but is still
doing some nice lectures for special events. If you read this blog entry
during a boring lecture imagine that: There exists at least one lecturer,
where you need to book tickets in advance, or you won't even get into his
lecture!
Today, on Sunday, they organized again a small round trip to the beautifully
city of Dresden. Since the Frauenkirchen was consecrated on that day, it was
kept short, the city was just to crowded. Instead we visited the
Hygiene Museum, where they had an exhibition
about games (don't ask me, why there). They did not only showed some really
old games in a glass cubicle, but even much stuff where you could try and play
a lot of different games. Quite funny.
Last part: We went to a good Italian restaurant, and spend a nice evening
chatting and telling stories. Although we are using different distributions,
desktop environments and editors: After all we are a big family, scattered to
the four winds, enjoying the time, we are together!
But all good things have to come to an end, so
alphascorpii and I left the
party (friendly escorted by a local who showed us the way around Dresden's
construction sites) to get to our train back to Leipzig and Frankfurt. Last
highlight of the day: We had a conductor, who knew Debian, and where we came
from! When we showed us quite impressed, he said: "Not all of us
conductors are that stupid." (How ironic: Although using his pocket
communicator to take a look at the schedule, he told us a wrong information
about it.)
Nice. These are the moments, where you feel, that you are doing something
useful. For such moments (I had a visitor who has been at our booth last year,
and whom I helped to solve a problem. He just came by to thank us.) I travel
400 Kilometers through europe.
Very last thing to mention: A personal note. You know, that you really love
your girlfriend, when she get's much more attendees (factor 5-6) for her talk
than you, and you don't mind but are just happy for her ;)
Here my unsed desktop's mouse and keyboard are plugged into the USB
dongle, which through the magic of the kernel 2.6 input layer Just Works
without any action at all.
When I want to use the desktop -- a monthly event generally -- I can just
whip the USB adaptor from the laptop and plug it into the desktop. Then I
can watch Windows XP fail miserably to handle hardware changing between
reboots. It appears that although Windows managed to handle the keyboard
moving from PS/2 to USB, it refused to acknowledge that the mouse wasn't
plugged into the PS/2 port still.. I had to figure out the keyboard
navigation for the login screen and then remove/insert the mouse again.
Not a great pain, but I bet that will catch out some normal users.
Anyway, the iCurve totally rocks and is a great example of design via
simplicity: it's just a curved piece of plastic but the laptop sits firmly
on it. I recommend it to everyone who uses a laptop all day.