[Wolves] Yesterdays LWCE in London

chris procter chris-procter at talk21.com
Fri Oct 7 17:54:10 BST 2005


> Did any of you chaps make it down to yesterdays (and
> the previous
> days) LinuxWorld Conference and Expo?
> 
> If so any reports or observations to make? Did
> anyone blog the event?


Dave & Kat were there, I also saw Jono looking lost
and The Bald One nattering nonchalantly with Novell,
and good ol' Jon Masters. I was wandering around
trying (and probably failing) to pass LPI exams with a
hangover and 3 hours sleep. Pretty much everybody from
Clockwork Software was there, the Openadvantage
people, and the normal scattering of famous faces
(Alan Cox, Klaus Knoppix, Wim Vandeputte from
openBSD). The best "spot" was a Dalek hiding in a
corner wearing Alan Cox's red fedora.

In terms of stands, a lot of corporate stuff the demo
of Sun's project looking glass was interesting (I'd
not seen it working before), and if you could find an
IBM guy (who were cunningly disguised as Suse people)
to talk about virtualisation that was good but apart
from that same old same old.

There were some good community stands, most of whom
seemed to be doing good business and had a "something
for everyone" kind of theme.

A noticable number of the dot org stands seemed to
rely on telepathic powers for people to know what they
were about (Drupal? OpenNMS? Karoshi?). If you ever
run a stand at a show please remember either a) a self
explanatory name, b) be so big everyone already knows
you (kde, gnome, debian, openBSD), or c) a poster with
an explanation (a couple of A4 sheets with "an open
source x" in 60pt courier will do)

The freebies were slightly disappointing, I got a
number of softtoy penguin keyrings from Novell, and
Solaris and Staroffice disks from Sun, but where are
the foam rubber penguins of yesteryear?? I'm not sure
these big corporations should be allowed in without at
least one ice flows worth to give away

Apart from those minor gripes I had a good time, got
to talk to some interesting people (MOST, hula, IBM, I
even got an apology from Sun because Solaris didn't
work on my machines!), the Lonix people arranged a big
pub night on Wednesday (thus the hangover) and I got
to meet some new friends so all in all I had a fun
time.

As an expo virgin I would say well worth going to, but
try and stay over and do the social side, its a big
part of the expo experiance.

chris



		
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