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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Report from LinuxTag 99
From:       Martin Konold <konold () alpha ! tat ! physik ! uni-tuebingen ! de>
Date:       1999-06-28 17:12:11
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Hi there,

After getting new brakes for my car we headed off for Kaiserlautern. The
journey went via Stuttgart to Karlruhe on the autobahn A8. The last 25 km
to KL took us an unexpected long time due to a very windling (sp?) street
in this hilly area. As soon as we reached KL we were greeted by an
impressive amnount of american military buildings and people (It looks
like a major base for them.) KL itself was rather calm and well equipped
with signs pointing us to the exihibtion ground (University of KL)
quickly. 
 
When we finally arrived we have been immediately greeted very friendly by
some staff showing us parking space etc. We finally entered the halls
around 0:30 and saw that several KDE developers already have been seeting
up 3 Compaq machines for the booth (Reggie had his K6 notbeook with him). 
The machines were running COL 2.2 and SuSE 6.1. 

Due to the stupid US export restrictions COL was missing very important
stuff like ssh etc. :-(

I brought two rather big KDE posters (DIN A0) with me showing a lot of
nice KDE related screenshots. The ink based DIN A0 plotter of our
university did an excellent job with these posters. Torsten Rahn had put a
lot of effort in making them VERY impressive.

Torsten: Are you considering to put the ps files on the ftp server?

When we went for sleeping there have been already more than 10 developers
arrived and we slept close to our booth in the university.

Mirko Sucker told us about some really nice work on his basic dialog class
and the sample dialog kaboutdialog which he showed later to several
developers. Mirko put a lot of effort in nice layout management and tested
this stuff for a lonk time within kab. While we tried to sleep Torsten
kept talking about funny things till 4 o´clock in the morning....

After all K-aiserlautern KLinuxTag started as a major success for Linux
and KDE. 

Saturday morning Stefanie Teufel gave an introduction to Linux. Because
her speach (approx 500 people attended) was directed at Users she
naturally emphasized the desktop of choice numerious times very
favourably.

http://www.linuxtag.de/abstracts.html#Sa10-1

The other talk I attended was Torbens KOffice talk at 2 pm. People kept
streaming into the big lecture hall (550 seats) until it was totally
cramped (sp?). All aisles and the available floor space was filled with
people. I think that finally about 850 people managed to listen to Torben
during this talk.  The organizers fortunately did not enforce fire hazard
regulations and scheduled another talk for Torben at 6 pm. 

Unfortunatly the network setup was broken at this time and so Torben was
forced to use his slides instead of kpresenter to do this talk (Oh yes
Kapps can print postscript by default ;-)).

The reason for the networking problems looked like some people
playing games on the 100MBit switched network killed the poor machine on
with the 10MBit with broadcast. This machine was
supposed to drive the LCD projector.

During the whole first day the rather large KDE booth was cramped. The
visiting people in general have been all very friendly and interested in
KDE. Most asked for KOffice and Word input filters ;-) On the downside is
that people seem to believe that KDE is responsible for everything
including writing drivers for strange hw like winmodems ;-) 

A lot of people also simply dropped to tell us that they very much
appreciate our work. 

The booth was manned by about 20 KDE developers and some KDE girls. 
Especially Claudia gave very professional and convincing KOffice
presentations. (Some even ask her for the price tag of KSpread ....) 

Another favourite of the show was Konqui. People simply love her and
wanted to buy our mascot immediately. Unfortunately this little soft toy
was only a prototype. On the other hand the T-Shirts did also not arrive
in time. (A lot of people asked for them)

I had a look at the other booths later during the saturday afternoon. It
looked like the organizers made shure that the main focus was on the free
software people and their users and less on the paying suits. I personally
do think that this was VERY good for Linux and free software. Sometimes
organizers seem to forget who is doing all that Opensource work and even
ask the free software authors for entry fees etc. Too often they
emphasized too much on some leachers.

In general I can tell you that KDE is very popular in Europe. The
approximately 7000-8000 visitors saw mainly KDE screens. The only
exceptions have been those suits which team up with RH for their hardware.

When beeing asked about their choice of desktop they often had no idea
about desktops at all (they are selling servers) and simply used the
defaults. 

When I dropped by at the RH booth RH was running KDE on both systems ;-)
in order to show some utility which is capable to switch desktop
environments. (Later they showed GNOME though)

GIMP (featuring presentations by the Kylanders!!) and nearly all other
free software booths have been running KDE. The only noticable exception
was the Debian booth. (I think they had wm and E/GNOME mostly)

The european media including the German TV stations seem to simply love
KDE and reported several times about KDE.

At night we gathered for a social event dinner with good food and drinks.
The KDE table was soon joined by Debian developers. These guys are all
very reasonable and friendly neither bashing nor stupid discussions. My
impression was very positive! We talked about possible inclusion
of KDE in their main distribution. (Qt-2.0 will be definetely in the main
section). It looks like nearly all Debian cdrom vendors add KDE to their
CD sets due to popular customer demand anyways. Torben/Arnt/Matthias and a
lot of other developers had a lot of fun together with the Debian
guys. The RH people (with good looking lady ;-) next table later joined
and we switched the language to English still having a lot of fun.

Later this day Mirko showed his dialog class and others compiled/installed 
KOffice on all machines at the booth.

I went to bed around 4:00 a.m. After getting up at around 8:30 I had to
hurry to go to the gymnasium for having a refreshing shower. On this
second day people haven been already piling up in front of the entrance
long before 9:00.  

Burkhard Lehner gave a well attended lecture (about 400 visitors) about
KDE programming. From the questions asked I derived that most attendies
have been experienced Windows programmers looking for alternatives (Linux
Bandwaggon / cross platform Qt programming) or Java people. 

http://www.linuxtag.de/abstracts.html#So12-1

Torben gave his _third_ talk about KOffice (still in the big lecture hall)
and was this time able to use kpresenter during the talk. The following
presentation of KWord, KSpread and KIllustrator incl.  embedding, multiple
views and corba communication lead to numerious ahhs and ohhs. There was
definetely no doubt that the audience enjoyed the presentations very much. 

(Lets hope that we can meet all the expectations people seem to come up
with) Some people simply seem to be so much impressed that they believe
that whatever KDE guys touch turns magically into gold while forgetting
the incredible amount of work which has to be done in order to get a
reliable and functional piece of sw done. 

Finally Matthias Ettrich gave his talk on OpenSource software. I
personally liked the speach very much. Matthias analyzed the success and
failures of OpenSource Software projects like Mozilla and the GIMP. 

I have been talking to a ERP company who is currently in the process of
porting their commercial application to Qt/KDE. This reminded me of the
need for a Kuiken program. Any ideas?

During the afternoon I got informed that I have to meet my boss in
Tuebingen and therefore had to leave rather soon. Maybe someone else will
summarize the rest of sunday.

Yours,
-- martin

// Martin Konold, Herrenbergerstr. 14, 72070 Tuebingen, Germany  //
KDE:  A stable GUI for a reliable OS.

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