La Salle Debain

When I first saw the floor plan for Linuxworld and saw they had put the .orgs in front instead of a ghetto at the back as usual, I thought "uh-oh, the Linux industry must really be in the toilet." Attendence had been dropping the past two years and to me this was just one more sign of impending doom. (Of course Debian itself is immune to the vagaries of the market but developers have to eat.) However my cynicism was misplaced. Attendence was good and the show itself seemed bigger than ever. I was surprised that the crowds were so thick in the daytime and practically non-existant during after-work hours. I think this shows that Linux is becoming less of a "hobby" and more important to businesses. Or perhaps only business types attend shows like Linuxworld.

It turns out that a Sunblade 100 actually doesn't run Linux that well. So we spent most of today displaying Solaris 9 or a Boot PROM prompt. A real great advertisement for Debian eh? Anthony Awtrey and Clint Adams made valiant efforts and by the end of the day we did get Debian installed. (It turned out the video card was to blame. Go figure.)

Also at the booth were Matt Taggart and Brian Nelson. During the day, Roger So, Anthony Wong, Andres Salomon and Susan Kleinmann stopped by. Sue even signed my key! I also met new maintainer applicants Joe Nahmias and Yaegashi Takeshi. "Celebrities" visiting the booth included Bruce Perens and Ian Murdock who somehow I pictured to be much older.

An innovation in the Debian booth this year was free stuff (the flyers I had talked about a few days ago .) Which no doubt explained the extra traffic we got. No matter how little they actually need any of it, trade show attendees are drawn like moths to the flame of free junk. We also sold CDs (for the nominal price of $1 just to discourage the people looking for free stuff.) and t-shirts for $15. The slogan for the t-shirts this year is "And you thought space was big" No it doesn't refer to the size of the average Debian developers belly.