Julien Blache: Solutions Linux 2007
I am running through my post-SL TODO list, and I’m down to the item which reads “Write a report”.
We’ve had a very good time meeting users, prospective users and fellow DDs, as always. There were 21 people planned to man the booth, which is an all time record so far, and 18 out of those 21 showed up, which is really quite good :-)
I’m not going to list everybody here, first because the list has grown quite long now, and because all in all it’s the usual French team that has been at it for the past few years already. We had a couple of firsttimers though, including Pierre Habouzit and Yves-Alexis Perez. Everybody did great, thanks for helping out, guys!
Day 0: unpacking sl2007-booth… setting up sl2007-booth…
We had less hardware this year than we had the previous years, for a variety of reasons, so the booth setup actually went quite fast. There were no separations between the booths in the .Org Pavilion this year, so we put a bit of thought into that and figured that, oh well, it’d do anyway.
Pierre arrived at 7:30pm on the booth with some hardware from Sven and 1500 Debian flyers paid for by Linbox. We went for dinner, then Pierre and I spent the night hacking on the Babelbox scripts to get the damn thing to work with the current debian-installer. At 3:30am, we got to the point where the Babelbox would pretty much work, and couldn’t figure out what was going wrong at that point.
Day 1: Fixing the Babelbox, frying a graphics card
We ended up fixing the last bit of the Babelbox on the booth in the morning, and preparing the demo system (Pierre’s shuttle) at the same time. It all went fine and we ended up with a dual-head demo system and a beamer-equiped Babelbox in the afternoon after Niv brought a beamer. We used the back of Fr d ric’s Debian banner as the screen for the beamer.
We had a nice chat with the Linux+ magazine team in the afternoon, discussing the upcoming Debian release and a dedicated Linux+ issue. We’ll be helping them out tracking the Etch release in the next few weeks until the release.
Back at Pierre’s place, we found out that his shuttle apparently wouldn’t boot. Turns out that only the graphics card died, good news.
Day 2: Business as usual, Debian France meeting
The second day was really business as usual. We saw more people than the previous day, but still there were less visitors than the previous years. The exhibition was smaller than the previous years too, I just hope it’s only a temporary thing and that it’ll be bigger again next year.
This also was the “dinosaurs day”, the day all the old-timers pop by and discuss around the Debian booth. This is becoming a tradition or something :-) As Christian wrote already, we met HP people and talked about Linux support from HP on HP hardware.
In the evening, we had the first formal Debian France meeting. Julien Cristau and Christian Perrier got elected to the board of directors, replacing C dric Delfosse and Laurent Fousse. The board got reelected, so I’m still the President, Pierre is still the Secretary and Aur lien G r me is still the Treasurer. Thanks to Tarsus for lending us a room for the meeting!
Day 3: Packing up
Small day… Quite a few visitors in the afternoon, we talked about Debian France a bit more than we did on the previous day, mainly with other people from the .Org Pavilion.
Conclusion
Overall, a very productive edition this year, we talked about Debian France a lot, about Etch, about quite a few projects involving Debian too. Now we have a lot of work to do to release Etch and develop Debian France to the point were it will actually be really useful for Debian. Hopefully we’ll have things to show in a couple of weeks.