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here's a big old brain dump of all the fun stuff that went down this year |
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|
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- the dual core amd64 demo machine was running XGL and some movies like FF7 |
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Advent Children (due later this month in the US btw!) ... this was such a |
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pimp demo, it caught everyone's attention ... and the best part was, opensuse |
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was across from us with nothing to show but free hats ... so bad when we |
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snipe their tech demos and get the credit ;x |
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|
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- quad g5 ppc64 running e17 and burning livecds for people on the fly (by far |
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the i686/installer was the most popular but amd64 was pretty strong too ... |
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we gave away prob like 8 ppc and 4 ppc64 cds) |
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|
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- laptop hooked up to a projector showing off the graphical installer (props |
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by the way to the guys who write this thing ... the 2006.0 version is really |
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quite damn mature) |
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|
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- lots of interest in kickstart-like features in our installer ... people want |
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to throw install media into a fresh box, boot it, and come back later and |
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have it be done/usuable |
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|
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- x86/amd64 usage was quite common |
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|
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- bunch of ppc/laptop guys that JoseJX was fixing bugs for :) |
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|
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- people were interested in expanding our Gentoo/binary package support ... |
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basically, more up-to-date and more expanded GRP stuff |
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|
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- i got one guy with a room of ia64 workstations |
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|
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- chatted with another about s390/s390x |
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|
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- bunch of interest in Gentoo on arm based PDA's |
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|
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- random cross-compiling stuff with mips targets (embedded and SGI) |
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|
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- people wanted to buy shirts/hats ... they werent so interested in going |
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online, they wanted to buy from us right then and there ... we had to explain |
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that our NFP status is still in the air and we cant take the chance of |
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screwing up |
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|
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- unisys' sound system caught on fire on the first day, it was pretty cool |
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|
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- amd64 marketting guys love us long time ... first they gave us amd lanyards |
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to replace the intel ones, then they were redirecting people who had |
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questions about gaming on linux and such to our booth :) |
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|
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- the i-hydra guys had this sick ass machine that they wanted us to install |
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Gentoo on for demoing at LWE (chris can fill in these details cause he did it |
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with the graphical installer) |
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|
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- people like Gentoo stickers |
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|
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- the information cards that cshields sent us were friggin awesome |
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|
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- devs need to make personal Gentoo business cards cause when people ask for |
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*your* card, you look retarded when you say you have none (i know i felt |
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retarded ;x) ... some just want a generic Gentoo business card and the ones |
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we had were great, but when you get into real conversations, the guy wants to |
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follow up later with *you* |
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|
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- in general, we had a pretty strong showing; in devs (i lub you all), in |
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users, and in people who had heard of us but were interested in learing more |
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or why we were "better" than say Ubuntu/Fedora/etc... (their words ... it's |
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best imo if you take the approach of how our distro *differs* rather than |
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falling into how we're "better" than others ... it's up to the user to figure |
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out which distro is better *for them*) |
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|
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- the Debian booth was missing, quite sad :( |
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|
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- the KDE booth had a friggin Jacksons Chameleon ... he was so cool looking |
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|
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- we were invited to a convention O'Reilly hosts (forgot the name) |
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|
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- we were invited to a convention mysql hosts (forgot the name) |
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|
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- same general feeling as we've seen over time ... people mention they use |
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Gentoo in corporate envs, but more hidden in the background and no real |
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public acknowledgment that they do it ... mostly because we cant offer any |
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sort of corporate support like RedHat/SuSE can |
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|
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- LWE this year had more business suite types that just "dont get" |
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opensource ... so devs should be prepared to meet people and try to explain |
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that we give away everything ... real open source does not involve free |
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crippleware (like the cruel joke Oracle plays with their "express" version), |
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we do this for fun, and we dont actually get paid to do this stuff ... but |
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dont feel bad if you cant get the message through, some suits will never "get |
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it" |
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|
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that's all i got, i'm sure the other guys that were there can chime in with |
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their experiences (i almost got rajiv to ride piggy back ... maybe next year) |
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-mike |
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-- |
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