---------- Weitergeleitete Nachricht ---------- Subject: Report from LinuxTag 99 Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 19:12:11 +0200 (CEST) From: Martin Konold konold@alpha.tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de
Hi there,
After getting new brakes for my car we headed off for Kaiserlautern. The journey went via Stuttgart to Karlruhe on the autobahn A8. The last 25 km to KL took us an unexpected long time due to a very windling (sp?) street in this hilly area. As soon as we reached KL we were greeted by an impressive amnount of american military buildings and people (It looks like a major base for them.) KL itself was rather calm and well equipped with signs pointing us to the exihibtion ground (University of KL) quickly.
When we finally arrived we have been immediately greeted very friendly by some staff showing us parking space etc. We finally entered the halls around 0:30 and saw that several KDE developers already have been seeting up 3 Compaq machines for the booth (Reggie had his K6 notbeook with him). The machines were running COL 2.2 and SuSE 6.1.
Due to the stupid US export restrictions COL was missing very important stuff like ssh etc. :-(
I brought two rather big KDE posters (DIN A0) with me showing a lot of nice KDE related screenshots. The ink based DIN A0 plotter of our university did an excellent job with these posters. Torsten Rahn had put a lot of effort in making them VERY impressive.
Torsten: Are you considering to put the ps files on the ftp server?
When we went for sleeping there have been already more than 10 developers arrived and we slept close to our booth in the university.
Mirko Sucker told us about some really nice work on his basic dialog class and the sample dialog kaboutdialog which he showed later to several developers. Mirko put a lot of effort in nice layout management and tested this stuff for a lonk time within kab. While we tried to sleep Torsten kept talking about funny things till 4 oĊ½clock in the morning....
After all K-aiserlautern KLinuxTag started as a major success for Linux and KDE.
Saturday morning Stefanie Teufel gave an introduction to Linux. Because her speach (approx 500 people attended) was directed at Users she naturally emphasized the desktop of choice numerious times very favourably.
http://www.linuxtag.de/abstracts.html#Sa10-1
The other talk I attended was Torbens KOffice talk at 2 pm. People kept streaming into the big lecture hall (550 seats) until it was totally cramped (sp?). All aisles and the available floor space was filled with people. I think that finally about 850 people managed to listen to Torben during this talk. The organizers fortunately did not enforce fire hazard regulations and scheduled another talk for Torben at 6 pm.
Unfortunatly the network setup was broken at this time and so Torben was forced to use his slides instead of kpresenter to do this talk (Oh yes Kapps can print postscript by default ;-)).
The reason for the networking problems looked like some people playing games on the 100MBit switched network killed the poor machine on with the 10MBit with broadcast. This machine was supposed to drive the LCD projector.
During the whole first day the rather large KDE booth was cramped. The visiting people in general have been all very friendly and interested in KDE. Most asked for KOffice and Word input filters ;-) On the downside is that people seem to believe that KDE is responsible for everything including writing drivers for strange hw like winmodems ;-)
A lot of people also simply dropped to tell us that they very much appreciate our work.
The booth was manned by about 20 KDE developers and some KDE girls. Especially Claudia gave very professional and convincing KOffice presentations. (Some even ask her for the price tag of KSpread ....)
Another favourite of the show was Konqui. People simply love her and wanted to buy our mascot immediately. Unfortunately this little soft toy was only a prototype. On the other hand the T-Shirts did also not arrive in time. (A lot of people asked for them)
I had a look at the other booths later during the saturday afternoon. It looked like the organizers made shure that the main focus was on the free software people and their users and less on the paying suits. I personally do think that this was VERY good for Linux and free software. Sometimes organizers seem to forget who is doing all that Opensource work and even ask the free software authors for entry fees etc. Too often they emphasized too much on some leachers.
In general I can tell you that KDE is very popular in Europe. The approximately 7000-8000 visitors saw mainly KDE screens. The only exceptions have been those suits which team up with RH for their hardware.
When beeing asked about their choice of desktop they often had no idea about desktops at all (they are selling servers) and simply used the defaults.
When I dropped by at the RH booth RH was running KDE on both systems ;-) in order to show some utility which is capable to switch desktop environments. (Later they showed GNOME though)
GIMP (featuring presentations by the Kylanders!!) and nearly all other free software booths have been running KDE. The only noticable exception was the Debian booth. (I think they had wm and E/GNOME mostly)
The european media including the German TV stations seem to simply love KDE and reported several times about KDE.
At night we gathered for a social event dinner with good food and drinks. The KDE table was soon joined by Debian developers. These guys are all very reasonable and friendly neither bashing nor stupid discussions. My impression was very positive! We talked about possible inclusion of KDE in their main distribution. (Qt-2.0 will be definetely in the main section). It looks like nearly all Debian cdrom vendors add KDE to their CD sets due to popular customer demand anyways. Torben/Arnt/Matthias and a lot of other developers had a lot of fun together with the Debian guys. The RH people (with good looking lady ;-) next table later joined and we switched the language to English still having a lot of fun.
Later this day Mirko showed his dialog class and others compiled/installed KOffice on all machines at the booth.
I went to bed around 4:00 a.m. After getting up at around 8:30 I had to hurry to go to the gymnasium for having a refreshing shower. On this second day people haven been already piling up in front of the entrance long before 9:00.
Burkhard Lehner gave a well attended lecture (about 400 visitors) about KDE programming. From the questions asked I derived that most attendies have been experienced Windows programmers looking for alternatives (Linux Bandwaggon / cross platform Qt programming) or Java people.
http://www.linuxtag.de/abstracts.html#So12-1
Torben gave his _third_ talk about KOffice (still in the big lecture hall) and was this time able to use kpresenter during the talk. The following presentation of KWord, KSpread and KIllustrator incl. embedding, multiple views and corba communication lead to numerious ahhs and ohhs. There was definetely no doubt that the audience enjoyed the presentations very much.
(Lets hope that we can meet all the expectations people seem to come up with) Some people simply seem to be so much impressed that they believe that whatever KDE guys touch turns magically into gold while forgetting the incredible amount of work which has to be done in order to get a reliable and functional piece of sw done.
Finally Matthias Ettrich gave his talk on OpenSource software. I personally liked the speach very much. Matthias analyzed the success and failures of OpenSource Software projects like Mozilla and the GIMP.
I have been talking to a ERP company who is currently in the process of porting their commercial application to Qt/KDE. This reminded me of the need for a Kuiken program. Any ideas?
During the afternoon I got informed that I have to meet my boss in Tuebingen and therefore had to leave rather soon. Maybe someone else will summarize the rest of sunday.
Yours, -- martin
// Martin Konold, Herrenbergerstr. 14, 72070 Tuebingen, Germany // KDE: A stable GUI for a reliable OS.