Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 20:57:30 -0600
From: Sean Reifschneider <jafo@tummy.com>
To: lwn@lwn.net
Subject: Linux Fest 2000 Report, Day 2

Pictures are available in the online version at
http://www.tummy.com/conferencereports/LinuxFest-2000/LinuxFest-20000621.html
Feel free to mirror the pictures, or link to them on our site if you wish.

Sean

===================================
Linux Fest 2000, Kansas City
Tuesday 2000-06-21
Sean Reifschneider, tummy.com, ltd.
===================================

To quote Evelyn, "Today was great, and awful".  Great because we've
pretty much achieved all our goals for attendance.  We've spoken to
all the folks we wanted to, and gotten some fairly nice deals in the
works.

Any day that starts out with firing fully automatic weapons can't be
all bad.  A local guy who does training for the police came out with
a Mac-5, a Mini-Uzi, and a Tommy gun.  What a blast (no pun intended).
Eric is a fan of .45s, and had a great time again with Kevin's
"Grizzly" .45 magnum.  What a beast...

So what was awful about it?  Well, RedHat dismantled their booth
last night during Larry Augustin's keynote.  Informix dismantled
their booth in mid-afternoon today (leaving only Atipa and Linux
Mall with big booth setups).  Two or three other smaller vendors have
also pulled out, 3 vendors never even set up their booths today.

Unfortunately, the show seems to just be very disorganized.  Of course,
rumors today were flying about *WHY* RedHat pulled out, and the event
organizer didn't do anything about working to keep them in control.
It seems like the event hasn't been publicized very well, to the local
LUGs, let alone the business community.

The unfortunate thing is how this reflects on the Linux community.
We had a discussion about whether we should leave, but we've decided
to stick it out.  Part of it is that it would be a dis-service to
the Linux community to pull out of the show.  Imagine -- you've heard
all the buzz about this thing called Linux, so you go to the show
and find all these booths have been dismantled.

We didn't make it to much in the way of presentations today.  The only
thing I saw was Eric Raymond's keynote, where he spoke about advocacy
techniques.  A great talk, check out http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/ for
more information.  Someone in the audience asked what Linux distribution
he ran, and he gave quite a nice recommendation for KRUD.  Our booth
is right next to where ESR was speaking, and Kevin got a nice round
of applause.

The exhibit floor was *EMPTY* this afternoon, with one exception...
Our aisle...  :-)  See the pictures -- it wasn't staged...  Our booth
is on the back row, and when I first saw it I didn't think the
positioning was very good.  Then I noticed it was right next to the
local LUGs, and felt right at home.

We had a fairly steady flow of people in our booth today.  It wasn't
until late afternoon that I actually had a chance to go over and
try out the Happy Hacking keyboards.  I was fairly impressed.  I had
wondered how I'd like them.  They're a rather small keyboard, but
one thing I've found on my sub-notebook is that I actually like
a small keyboard.  Instead of feeling "cramped", I feel like
everything is right at my fingertips -- I don't have to go searching
for keys.  I had a similar feeling with the Happy Hacking keyboard.
I didn't buy one though because I've completely switched to using
my laptop.

I made some time to wander the show floor this afternoon.  I stopped
by the Linux Mall booth and perused the shelf of games which I have no
time to play.  Linux Funds was pushing their credit cards -- a portion
of your purchases goes back to the Linux community.  Max Speed had a box
called the "+One Station" a little bigger than a deck of playing cards
which allows you to put your keyboard, mouse, and video up to 50 feet
away using standard cat-5 cabling (using their own signaling -- sorry,
it's not IP-based Ethernet).

We've volunteered to give some extra presentations -- Kevin will be
speaking about IP filtering and firewalling Friday, and I'll be
giving my introduction to Python on Thursday.  During the course of
volunteering to give these extra presentations, we were asked if we
knew what was wrong with the show network.  I explained that we didn't,
but with some router passwords and contacts at the up-stream ISP, we
could find out.

Apparently, the LUGs are working on getting machines for setting up a
Quake arena.  Slashdot has set up an impromptu booth in our area and
will be rather surprised when we bring out the heavy artillery tomorrow
-- Nerf guns.  Life is what you make of it -- we're going to make this
show fun.   :-)
-- 
 Problem with Closed Source Software #101: "We have found 46 ways to
 remotely crash NT by sending authentication packets."
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo@tummy.com>
tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python