LinuxTag 2008 in Berlin is over. 11,600 people from 31 countries attended it - more than the year before. The concurrent International Aeronautic Exhibition (Internationale Luftfahrtausstellung, ILA) was a strong competitor, as was the weather. At 30°C many people opted for the lakes rather than the air-conditioned halls.
The following chronological account shows the Linuxtag from the perspective of Kubuntu. We can only mention a small selection of the exhibitors, lectures and workshops. But we will tell you about the evenings after the exposition closed, which we spent mostly with Amarok and KDE.
Tuesday, day 0, setup: At noon we started construction work at our booth on the exposition site. Around 3 p.m. we got the keys for our rental vacation apartment and filled the fridge with beverages. One by one everybody arrived. A few of us went back to the exposition site to meet the Amarok team and Stephan (\sh) to do some more setup work at the booth we shared. All the needed material was there, like switches, cables, kubuntu-de.org business cards and flyers, posters, blue table cloths and so on. But no Kubuntu CDs! Paul Sladen called Canonical or rather the company responsible for sending the CDs and was promised they would be sent by express. Later, Kubuntu, Amarok and KDE met in the Brauhaus Lemke, a restaurant at the Hackische Markt, where Sebastian Kügler (sebas) and Aaron Seigo (aseigo) were already waiting. During eating and drinking we got to know each other and into the mood for the next days.
Wednesday, day 1: A long time before the exhibition began at 9 a.m., Kubuntu and Amarok were at the booth to give it the last touch. After having finished all the cabling and wiring, all the notebooks were connected. The most important thing is to have internet, after all ;-) . Then the exposition started slowly, it was fairly calm and there was not overly much to do. But that was also because we had a lot of people staffing the booth. Highlight of the day was the keynote by Aaron Seigo, which gave its listeners appetite for more and should enable everybody to compile KDE 4.1. The rush to see KDE 4 was so big that our installations were not enough and some of our notebooks were booted from live CDs.
During the day, the CDs finally arrived! Only one box for 32-bit and 64-bit each, both with KDE 3.5, and a hand full of KDE 4 (32-bit only) CDs, but better than nothing. However, not enough to spread them out and have every bypasser grab one, we "hid" them and only gave them to people who asked for one. Otherwise there would not have been left any on day 2, from last year's experience.
Marc (serenity), member of the Kubuntu-de.org team, interviewed Sebastian Kügler of KDE e.V. together with RadioTux. Because the time was too short, Marc asked some more questions afterwards. The evening was spent at an Indian restaurant.
Thursday, day 2: Everything continued to run smoothly at our booth. We were also able to collect some donations. We had a couple of interesting visitors like teachers and people responsible for the IT in their company. There were interesting talks about ODF, a series about OpenOffice, and Till Adam from KDE gave one about Kontact ("Best for both worlds"). The highlight of the day was the Social Event. Like last year it took part in the former electric power transformation station in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Besides the large buffet there was also barbecue outside. Unfortunately the queue for the food was extremely long, but luckily not the one for the drinks. During the evening we had a nice conversation with Aaron Seigo and we also got into contact with other projects. We all spent a very nice evening and at 3:30 a.m. the last of us were politely asked to go home.
Friday, day 3: The sun burned down, but thanks to the air conditining we could enjoy this special day, because one of the lecture rooms was reserved to KDE on this day. From 10 a.m. to exhibition close at 7 p.m. there were many talks about KDE. It started with Sebastian Kügler (sebas), who was followed by Aaron Seigo (aseigo) and introduced the development of KDE as well as explosive new features. Then came Till Adam, who showed us the advantages of Akonadi. After the lunch break Ellen Reitmayr from KDE and OpenUsability.org followed. She explained what Usability means and what improvements KDE4 brought about regarding this matter. Then Franz Keferböck presented KOffice2 with some of its extremely great new features. In his talk the usability theme was clearly noticeable as well. Finally, Lydia Pintscher (Nightrose) and Harald Sitter (apachelogger) held their talk about KDE Multimedia. It became clear that KDE can deal perfectly with multimedia content.
The evening was great, too. Trolltech invited us and some other KDE-related projects for dinner (Trolltech and friends) into the Restaurant of the 12 Apostles in the city center of Berlin. The food was great and there were a lot of interesting conversations. Afterwards Kubuntu, Amarok and KDE went to a nearby Karaoke bar, as Harald had wished for. It was directly below the famous Berlin TV tower at the Alex (Alexanderplatz). The bar was named Alex, too, but not because it is at the Alex - it's a national chain of bars. Aaron Seigo was the first singer, and he sings great! But Scotti from FrOSCon wasn't bad at all, either! One of the highlights was Stephan (\sh - Kubuntu), Thomas (Trolltech), Daniel (danimo - KDE), Aaron (aseigo - KDE) and Jono (Ubuntu Community Manger) singing together.
Saturday, day 4: The last day began and again the LinuxTag had to fight against the ILA and the beautiful weather. The first highlight of the day was the talk by Lydia (Nightrose) und Sven Krohlas (sven423) about Amarok 2.0, during which services, widgets and more were shown. Other interesting talks were those by Daniel Holbach (dholbach) about the topic "Master of the Universe: Ubuntu development and having fun" and Jono Bacon with "Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants: The Coming Of The Linux Desktop".
But everything has to come to its end and punctually at 6 p.m. the booth started to be taken down. The Ubuntu barbecue was a nice closure. It took place at the c-base, a U.F.O. that crashed some time ago in the middle of Berlin, and was organized by Ubuntu Berlin. They did a really good job and created a really nice evening for us, which we will all remember. Thanks to Canonical, who, like last year, paid for the meat. Aaron Seigo and some others from KDE were not there. But we had a chance to get to know Thomas Zander (Trolltech) and the Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon more closely. There were also nice conversations between the Kubuntu community and the Amarok people. The atmosphere was absolutely fantastic. Shortly after 2 a.m. the first people started to leave.
Conclusion: The main problem was that there were no CDs delivered and that there wasn't even information that there would be no CDs. Only thanks to Paul Sladen we still got a couple by express delivery. Paul, lots of thanks for that! The main interest of the visitors was definitely KDE4 and we could show how good KDE 4.0 runs on Kubuntu. Besides a lot of good talks, nice booths and booth staff, and interesting projects, we had lots of fun within the Kubuntu community. The language differences with our Swiss colleagues caused problems now and then, but these could be solved. There was a very congenial atmosphere within Kubuntu(-de.org), Amarok, KDE and Trolltech. New contacts were made and existing ones were deepened so that some of us will stay in regular contact. In the end everybody had collected new impulses, ideas and a lot of motivation.
Lots of thanks to everybody who participated and gave support.
