OpenExpo 2008 - 01

The long first day of OpenExpo 2008 at Berne is over and the XO is still a good way to make the visitors stop at our booth. In Switzerland a lot of people have heard about the XO but never seen one and/or never had the possibility to play with. Most of them would like to pay for two and get one because it would be a very cool gift. To enter the fair ground 90 min before the official opening time to setup the booth is definitely to early. We were a bit lonely. Our "booth" has a small table, four chairs and a wall for Mo's poster. We also reuse some banners that Joerg has produced for FOSDEM. We splited our group because we had to handle the booth and the install zone. red decided to start at the install zone (he stayed the whole day there at the end) and Joerg, Timea und I managed the booth. My feeling were that there are more people around from beginning than in autumn 2007 at Zurich. It was a very good idea to have some flyers because often visitors only wanted some information about Fedora. Frederik Bijlsma arrived after a long train passage, unpacked the Fedora install DVDs, overlaid a "I am Fedora" t-shirt, and started to help us at the booth. Alan arrived before lunch time, too. OpenExpo provided snacks and drinks for free for all attendees for lunch, as always. Power plugs are different. You can build every interesting constructions to bring a UK plug in a swiss plug. And of course there aren't never enough places free for all those European laptop power adapters and it's good to have a "modified" version of a power distribution unit somewhere (unfortunately this device was 10 min away by foot). I have already learned my lessons during past events...I met a lot of people during the afternoon who are very happy with their system and Fedora. Amazingly one guy told me that he is using Fedora on a lot of web servers in a productive environment and that he still have two machines with Fedora Core 1 (he didn't express any details about the usage of this systems). One big issue are still the codecs. 5 to 6 people asked me how they can configure their systems to play DVDs or mp3. Why never ask anybody something about the synchronization of a mobile phone with Linux or something like that? I guess that there is no need for such things...DVD playback cares everyone. The operator of a well known search engine sponsored the social event. There were some lightning talks and some Freebeer. We sat together around a table and chatted a lit bit. Slowly I was getting tired and we went along with Joerg because he didn't know exactly where his hotel was. Tomorrow will be a new day and don't forget: Fedora always leads, never follows...