Grazer LinuxTage 2012
I have to admit: I love to be an engineer, to dive into issues and forget the time and everything around me until a problem is solved. This is good for the people having the technical problems which I solve then.
Now I learned why this is not good for organizing booths for free software events - alone. Not getting around to order posters or rollups for a booth in time lead to a strange presence of Fedora on Grazer Linuxtage. :)
You most likely know the sticker I used to improve the Austrian Tux. I had just those small things like buttons, stickers and DVDs with me in Graz, so I had to be a bit more creative...
The booth, however, was small but fine and quite well visited. I didn't expect that much of visitors before. The stories I heard of the event did let me think this will be a small event, so it was an awesome experience to see that I didn't had any of the Fedora Media, Christoph sent me, around, already at the half of the day. The other half didn't get boring because of that though. There still were a lot of Fedora Fanboys taking stickers and buttons with them and visitors asking the "usual" questions about the relationships between Fedora and RedHat and when the next release will come up and so on. Not to forget the jokers, who were asking for the pretended confusion between the Fedora and Facebook logos, of course...
A tip for any other Fedora Ambassador who is going to supervise a booth on an event some time: I think one reason that I had that much visitors at the booth without having big posters and such stuff around was, that I actually was *standing* next to or before the booth without a notebook. It is important to show that you are there for answering questions, not for hacking.
It was a good decision to get into an airplane for the second time in my life, to travel Hamburg-Frankfurt-Graz-Munich-Hamburg on just one weekend, even if I'd expected that there are Austrian Fedora Ambassadors as well who maybe are interested in supporting a Fedora Booth in Graz.
The weather in Graz was just great! 27°C, blue sky and sunshine all around.I got riled about myself because I missed to ask for vacation for the Monday after. The Tuesday after was a holiday in Germany anyway, so this could have gotten a really long weekend in Graz.
Beneath a quite nice view to the Alps from above when getting there, it was also a pleasure to meet the free software family again after a long time as well as a lot of new free software contributors and interesting people on the event.
It also was interesting to learn about the Austrian organizations who care about political issues concerning free software and data retention stuff and so on. Now I understand a bit better what it means that a lot of these topics are European topics.
Since I already arrived there on Friday afternoon and was flying back on Sunday, there was a lot of time around the actual event on Saturday to get in touch with the people. On Friday I was helping out with preparations for the event and was lucky to see that the organizators had table cloth for *every*
project booth (thanks for your efforts anyway, gnokii ;) ).
Saturday morning when I went to the event I already met Michael, who was taking care of the LPI booth which was right between the boothes of Debian and Fedora. To the left of the Fedora booth there were the guys of Gentoo and one distribution I didn't knew of before: OpenArtist is intended to be used by musicians and graphic designers. Interesting that the whole distro is chiefly maintained by just one person.
On Saturday evening a social event took place where exhibitors and organizators where invited. You have to know that the creators of GRML are member of the organization team and Zsh
geeks as well. You can imagine this was a very nice evening if you're a bit nerdy. ;)
On the sunday morning after we met again for a brunch with the people who organized the event. The restaurant had a really big backyard, so we could enjoy the coffee out of the doors in the green with the nice weather. A bummer that I had to leave that early to get my flight back to Hamburg with
a longer stop in Munich because the captain pilot was in the cantine and forgot that he already should sit in an airplane...
P.S. For the same reason I was introducing this post with, this report actually took almost two more weeks to actually get written down. ;)
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