Trip Report
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The Debian project has been invited by New
Media Markets & Networks to attend this show. They ordered a booth larger than their own requirement and donated
one part of it (about 16 to 20 qm) to four free projects that used the space
to demonstrate theirself and get in touch with visitors. Some meters next to
this booth was the Leukefeld booth
which had a sponsored part for the fli4l
project.
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We organized our booth a while back, starting in December. Even though
there ought to be about 10 Debian developers from Hamburg, none of them was
reached and thus nobody showed up at the booth. However, a prospective
maintainer, who lives in Hamburg helped organizing the booth and invited the
other booth staff to stay at his place.
He provided two properly sized machines that were used to demo the Debian
distribution along with one machine from Falky together with a couple of
laptops we brought with us. This helped a lot since we were not able to get
other machines ready for the exhibition. However, the first day (Thursday)
began chaotic. Bluehorn met XSnack in the morning, in order to pick him up
together with the machines and to carry them to the exhibition, but decided to
drive to the Congress Center of Hamburg instead, while, unfortunately, the HCT
took place at the exhibition hall in Hamburg-Schnelsen.
While they were experiencing the situation, the first person from Hamburg
we ought to meet at the show, went to where he expected the booth and found
what? Nothing. Bummer. However, who expects a fully fledged booth five
minutes after the show has opened on the first day? Oh well, we just can't
prepare things on the day before due to our own time constraints and other
responsibilities.
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The booth was quite ok. It was built of a wall with shelves for monitors
and machines on the lower part and some tables and chairs. On the same side
of the entire booth, a German school whose machines run GNU/Linux, the Hamburg Linux User Group and the "German
Hacker Crew" got sponsored booths as well. The last group caused a lot of fun
for us, since their name implied evil guys in German. However, our people had
to teach them a lot of things. I guess they learned a lot during the show...
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Friday
This Friday started stressful since we had to do some hardware work on one
machine and configure X11 on another one before we could start bb and other interesting looking
applications on the demo boxes. This day, we also tried to package Vega Strike for Debian, an
Interactive Flight Simulator/Real Time Stratagy game. Preliminary packages
were created on Saturday by Bluehorn.
Later this day our booth was visited by somebody we didn't expect. Prof. Klaus
Brunnstein, a well-known expert for computer viruses who founded the Virus Test Center,
came along and discussed security issues of Windows and GNU/Linux. In the
recent past, a lot of security issues with regard to GNU/Linux have been made
public. Without looking at the details it seems that GNU/Linux has much more
problems than other systems, which is scary. Doesn't this revert the
advantages of Free Software?
Well, I don't believe so. The advantage of Free Software is that the
sourcecode is available, everybody has the right to fix it and is allowed to
redistribute these fixes. In the recent past more people got aware of
security problems and audit sourcecode which is good, of course. However, it
appears like there are a lot of problems, and indeed, there are. But one must
not forget that these problems are made public and fixes are prepared and
distributed.
There are a lot of problems hidden inside of proprietary software. Even
though it is more difficult to exploit them, this is possible, as several
reports and incidents have demonstrated. A lot of such problems are not
published and probably even rejected by the manufacturer, leaving the customer
with potential security problems which stay unfixed.
No system is 100% secure and the more sourcecode is involved, the more
likely are security problems inside of it. However, with Free Software, the
problems are found and fixed. With proprietary software only some problems
are found and published and only a small subset of them will be fixed later.
Even while there are a lot of problems found in Free Sofware recently, I feel
much better with evolving software that gets fixed which I can review than
with proprietary software, where I have to blindly trust the manufacturer to
deal with security properly.
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I arrived at the exhibition center some minutes before the show closed,
just in time to say hello to all important people and to help preparing the
booth for the night (i.e. removing all removable parts). After the tables
were emptied and all removable network cables were picked up, we left the show
and went to XSnack's place, where we only took time to dump our stuff and
walked through Hamburg-Harburg into a restaurant near by. After that the fun
part of the evening begun and we started improving the home network by hooking
another four machines to it. Five people,
five machines and an internet connection: sounds like fun, doesn't it?
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Saturday
On Saturday Roland and Bluehorn joined so there were seven Debian people
around at the booth. Several people were interested in GNU/Linux, however, a
few even knew about Debian. Many discussions with visitors explained
GNU/Linux in general and the Debian system as an example. All interested
visitors were handed an info sheet about Debian so they can go to our web page later. Hopefully some of them do
and start learning.
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On the main booth, visitors were able to purchase a special edition of Knoppix, a bootable CD that starts
a graphical GNU/Linux desktop without touching any harddisk. It uses a
compressed loopback module to mount the CD full of compressed applications and
makes use of hardware detection. It's really impressive, and it's even based
on Debian these days. Later on that day Klaus Knopper arrived and we took him
together with Nils Magnus, both from LinuxTag team, with us out for dinner.
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Sunday
On Sunday getting up became even more difficult than on Saturday. I guess
that's because of the joys of a working network in a flat with five Debian
people around. After we took amu to the train station we went to the show and
arrived there in time. Before the first talk took place I had to go to the
soundcheck for one of my talks, but everything went fine, hard to believe...
Later on that day Mr. Brunnstein gave a talk covering security on the
internet with a special focus on viruses and mails as carrier. He expects
that a lot of mail will carry viruses in the future, making it more and more
required to keep ones systems up-to-date and to keep an eye on security.
This day wasn't supposed to be successful, it seems. We promised to make a
regular woody installation on another exhibitor's machine so he has a properly
installed system which he can use as rescue system and knows how a regular
installation of Debian will look like. He's been working with Debian for
several years and uses it for his business as well. We tried to install a
plain Debian woody system on his machine. This should have worked just as
smooth as expected, but didn't.
We failed with the Malformed
release file error and even repeating it and applying a patch from the
debian-boot mailing list didn't work. It only went worse, after patching the
file manually, nano-tiny received a segmentation fault. After several hours
of playing, fetching and writing disk images and a crashed kernel from the
potato installation we eventually gave up. Very sad.
At the afternoon I gave two talks about Debian, first a general overview about the philosophy of Free Software, next an introduction into multimedia and games with Debian GNU/Linux. People who
know me, probably know that the second talk totally fits into my kind of work
- not. Using X11 only unfrequent, it was fun preparing the talk and it was
also fun watching people go away crying about me demonstrating multimedia
software. However, with more than 50 people listening to each talk, I guess
they were fine. Oh, and of course, I demonstrated mplayer on the console
(i.e. with aalib).
Joey
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