La Salle Debain

Also unlike the last couple of Linuxworlds, this year the attendence did not drop off after the first day. All the .orgs had a tremendous amount of activity throughout the show and I think people were asking more sophisticated and knowledgeable questions than previous years.

We were joined at the booth by Adam DiCarlo and Matt Zimmerman. Josh Narins of debian-user fame also helped out.

If all you know the Linux community is what you read in the likes of Slashdot, you might think all the distros are hyper-competitive but this isn't true. Take Gentoo for instance. This distribution is often perceived as being a direct competitor to Debian (there was a huge thread on debian-devel last year asking if we were losing users to Gentoo) but the people at the Gentoo booth were really nice. I talked to a person there and he cheerfully admitted they used many patches developed by Debian (not to mention ideas like a social contract.) while I applauded them for some of the innovative work they are doing. We also got a bunch of Mandrake users who were concerned about their favorite distro possibly folding and considering Debian as a replacement. I found this surprising as I thought Red Hat or SUSE etc. would have been a better fit for that type of person.

Where were Lindows, Xandros, and Libranet? A lot of people seemed to be interested in "Debian with the rough edges filed off" but the only distro of that ilk available was Knoppix which a couple of people were giving out.

Our own CD supply depended on Matt Taggarts laptop with CD burner. We really need to get, say, 500-600 CD sets made up for next time as many people don't have broadband and can't burn them themselves.

Some people brought their laptops so we could help them install Debian. We tried but with varying degrees of success i'm afraid. As we all know Debian installation sucks. This didn't stop people from reminding us of the fact anyway.

All in all it was a great experience. We made $1600 to support the project and made a lot of new friends at least some of whom I am happy to say are now Debian users.