[gentoo-dev] LWE/Boston 2006 summary

[Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org>]

here's a big old brain dump of all the fun stuff that went down this year

- the dual core amd64 demo machine was running XGL and some movies like FF7 
Advent Children (due later this month in the US btw!) ... this was such a 
pimp demo, it caught everyone's attention ... and the best part was, opensuse 
was across from us with nothing to show but free hats ... so bad when we 
snipe their tech demos and get the credit ;x

- quad g5 ppc64 running e17 and burning livecds for people on the fly (by far 
the i686/installer was the most popular but amd64 was pretty strong too ... 
we gave away prob like 8 ppc and 4 ppc64 cds)

- laptop hooked up to a projector showing off the graphical installer (props 
by the way to the guys who write this thing ... the 2006.0 version is really 
quite damn mature)

- lots of interest in kickstart-like features in our installer ... people want 
to throw install media into a fresh box, boot it, and come back later and 
have it be done/usuable

- x86/amd64 usage was quite common

- bunch of ppc/laptop guys that JoseJX was fixing bugs for :)

- people were interested in expanding our Gentoo/binary package support ... 
basically, more up-to-date and more expanded GRP stuff

- i got one guy with a room of ia64 workstations

- chatted with another about s390/s390x

- bunch of interest in Gentoo on arm based PDA's

- random cross-compiling stuff with mips targets (embedded and SGI)

- people wanted to buy shirts/hats ... they werent so interested in going 
online, they wanted to buy from us right then and there ... we had to explain 
that our NFP status is still in the air and we cant take the chance of 
screwing up

- unisys' sound system caught on fire on the first day, it was pretty cool

- amd64 marketting guys love us long time ... first they gave us amd lanyards 
to replace the intel ones, then they were redirecting people who had 
questions about gaming on linux and such to our booth :)

- the i-hydra guys had this sick ass machine that they wanted us to install 
Gentoo on for demoing at LWE (chris can fill in these details cause he did it 
with the graphical installer)

- people like Gentoo stickers

- the information cards that cshields sent us were friggin awesome

- devs need to make personal Gentoo business cards cause when people ask for 
*your* card, you look retarded when you say you have none (i know i felt 
retarded ;x) ... some just want a generic Gentoo business card and the ones 
we had were great, but when you get into real conversations, the guy wants to 
follow up later with *you*

- in general, we had a pretty strong showing; in devs (i lub you all), in 
users, and in people who had heard of us but were interested in learing more 
or why we were "better" than say Ubuntu/Fedora/etc... (their words ... it's 
best imo if you take the approach of how our distro *differs* rather than 
falling into how we're "better" than others ... it's up to the user to figure 
out which distro is better *for them*)

- the Debian booth was missing, quite sad :(

- the KDE booth had a friggin Jacksons Chameleon ... he was so cool looking

- we were invited to a convention O'Reilly hosts (forgot the name)

- we were invited to a convention mysql hosts (forgot the name)

- same general feeling as we've seen over time ... people mention they use 
Gentoo in corporate envs, but more hidden in the background and no real 
public acknowledgment that they do it ... mostly because we cant offer any 
sort of corporate support like RedHat/SuSE can

- LWE this year had more business suite types that just "dont get" 
opensource ... so devs should be prepared to meet people and try to explain 
that we give away everything ... real open source does not involve free 
crippleware (like the cruel joke Oracle plays with their "express" version), 
we do this for fun, and we dont actually get paid to do this stuff ... but 
dont feel bad if you cant get the message through, some suits will never "get 
it"

that's all i got, i'm sure the other guys that were there can chime in with 
their experiences (i almost got rajiv to ride piggy back ... maybe next year)
-mike
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