2002-06-12

Once again, another diary entry in English for all of you who have no idea what the Swedish sentence "Man kan ha mycket kul med en äggvisp" means.

Those of you who are just interested in the photos, go to LinuxtagPhotos

Linuxtag Where linux nerds in ties meet linux nerds in t-shirts.

I was hanging around the Debian booth all the time. I had no idea where all the Kalinux people were, or who they were. I had only met some of them shortly in a pub somewhere in Karlsruhe. By coincidence I walked past the Debian booth, where I helped out for a few hours, and then I stayed there like a stray dog from Sweden, who felt at home with his new friends. I bought a Debian t-shirt and after that, everyone thought I had been a regular for ages. People shook my hand, wanted to exchange gpg-keys and asked which packages I maintained.

Some of the Debian booth regulars

In the booth next to us were Window Maker authors (or at least an enthusiastic bunch of people showing off the latest transparent menu effect) and Fresco (which I unfortunately never spoke with, although we were so close). Across the aisle were Credativ and Mysql. The Credativ people were almost all Debian developers, so it was no coincidence they were there and they had sponsored a bunch of stuff. Behind the booth, there was a big unused area of the convention hall, where we pulled together chairs and tables for the hacker zone. There people brought their laptops and read e-mail and relaxed, but it was also perfect if someone asked how to configure this and that. Then you could always go there, and show him how it was to be done (I never managed to drag a girl with me behind the booth, but someone else did).

Sometimes it was slow and you just stood and idled and chitchatted with the other people in the booth, but most of the time, it was very crowded and you could just go up to anybody who was looking at the booth, asking if they wanted to know anything and you would get all sorts of questions. The most common question (except for "Can I ask a question?") was "When is Woody due for release?". The standard answer was to describe the current situation with the security updates and the unfinished tools to automate the whole security release process that held it back. It was really nice on sunday, when we could say "real soon now", because a mail from Anthony Towns (Woody release manager) explained that the tools were pretty much fixed and now just general fixup was needed before release.

Everytime I showed people how to do stuff on my laptop (normally in the hacker zone), like how to use apt and dpkg, configure network etc. they all asked about my window manager Ion as well. They had never seen anything like it. True, many has not seen the light yet, (except the Window Maker people, who could see virtual light through their menus). If they seemed interested in just learning about different programs, I showed them some of my current favourites, like Galeon and BitTorrent.

I don't know if it was my Debian t-shirt, or if I look like a typical guy in a booth who can answer your questions, but many people asked me questions, wherever I was. The best example was the print booth, which I think belonged to the KDE people. I just wanted to go there, print some stuff and go back, but there was nobody there, so I waited a few minutes, told some people off and said I was just waiting for someone to show up. Then it got annoying, both waiting, and not being able to answer people's questions, so I just grabbed a free computer, tried to get network access. A bunch of people followed my feeble attempts to configure the stupid machine, which didn't want to play with me. I gave up, moved to another computer, where yet another group of people started to ask questions about ghostscript and printcap and some obscure things I had never heard of, or didn't understand because the guy talked quite fast with an odd german accent. I took cover, said I just wanted to print some stuff, and pointed to nearest guy with most beard and said that he perhaps knew better. I later learned it was some guy from FSF (Manolito something) who also was just there trying to print something. He later came and asked me stuff about postscript splitting when I was in the Debian booth thinking I knew better. :)

I could also feel a certain tension when I walked past the Suse people with my t-shirt, but that could have just been that they thought I walked funny. Unless the crowd was thick and people were blocking the way and asking questions, we actually had free sight to the Suse stand and could have easily hit them with bootable Woody pre-release cds if we wanted.

The reason I was away printing stuff, was the (for me) new tradition of pgp key signing I learned. Almost everyone I spoke more than three sentences to gave me their card with their pgp finger print on and showed me their personal id. First I was thinking: "Ok, this looks like him, now what? Is there some secret ritual involved?" Luckily it wasn't, although I probably did a Vulcan greeting and said "Live long and prosper" to someone. It took some time before I understood that I should verify that this person is who he says he is, so that I can sign his public key and know that it belongs to the right person. I had never been so thorough before. Before that day I had never actually met someone in person who uses pgp (at least not enough, to want to sign my key). I've had dozens of keys, mainly because I forgot my secret password after some month of not using it. The first time I used it for real, was when I received encrypted updates to AmigaOS, not to be distributed to the public. As Debian is very open, there is not much need for encryption as far as I know, but you use the sign feature a lot to be able to trust who people are. I generated a pair of new keys, not trusting my old ones, and printed out strips that I gave everyone I could find. Of course, I did all this by hand with Emacs and a2ps, trying to maximize the amount of text on an A4. After everything was nicely formatted and printed someone told me about apt-get install signing-party that does all that for you. Right now, 12 people have signed my key, so even though I haven't sent a signed mail yet, I know somone who will trust it.

When I wasn't standing in the booth I was walking around and looking at other people's booths or listening to various talks. Toys and candy could also be found. There was for instance a Linux antivirus company. Their main contribution was probably the antivirus beer they were giving out (not yet tasted, but I don't think it will be a hit). I forgot to ask them about what they really were doing there. O'Reilly handed out O'Reilly cola, not very tasty, but had a cool can. Fujitsu Siemens gave out flying saucer like modem cables, and thin "LSD on a stamp look-a-like" candy you put on your tongue, which should make you happy, but they don't taste very well. You could get pins from a lot of places, cds with weird stuff on them, and you could buy t-shirts with nice slogans. FFII at the FSF booth were selling t-shirts with the text "We are the Patent office, not the Rejection office", trying to convince more people how absurd the patent issue is. I bought myself a nice GNU t-shirt, and I am also the lucky owner of a Debian apt-get reference mug. :) My flatmates have no idea what it means, but they thought the antivirus beer was cool.

I ended up missing a lot of the interesting talks, like the one from Rik van Riel, but on Sunday I watched Alan Cox tell jokes about how to and how not to submit kernel patches. He was very nice and has lots of beard. I didn't recognize him at first, when he was at the barbeque the night before, even though people were giving me nice hints... "so... who can it be who walks around with a RED hat, with lots of beard, on a night like this?"

There is no magic involved in kernel hacking. You don't need a wand... not even a beard.

On Sunday I also found David Axmark in the MySQL booth and I decided to talk a bit Swedish. Another Swede had already found him first though, so we all had a short discussion about how closely you could "link" a gpl application to your code through a network layer. More people joined (some Zak guy from the PHP people) and at the end we came to the conclusion that there is not a clear line. On the wall in the MySQL booth was a nice diagram of their business model with the usual boxes and arrows in different colours, that you see everywhere. It was a bit hard to comprehend what every box meant, but there were two easy clear goals: "Generating revenues" and "Serving humanity". I and everyone else I showed it to especially liked the "Serving humanity" bit. Much better than something ordinary like "Giving back to the community".

Zak told me that Rasmus Lerdorf was currently there, so I just had to tell him how cool he was to name his son Carl (Christine And Rasmus Lifeform). I am not sure he believed me. "Thanks... I think" was the modest/cautious reply I got, followed by a smug smile. Perhaps he had been warned by the other guys at the PHP booth to look out for the crazy Swedish guy, who were dancing in front of the web cameras they had put up. I just wanted to wave home to Sweden in pseudo real time and to some other friends on the net.

I also got a visitor from Sweden. Erik Josefsson stayed with me during Linuxtag from Wednesday to Saturday. He came down to talk with people about the current patent issue in Europe and to convince people that we need to take action for a software patent free Europe. He had come from some (unfortunately) cancelled meeting in Luxemburg and on Saturday he got a ride with someone to Paris, where he would continue his mission against the big bad European Patent Office. We had a good time. It was a little bit odd though. I didn't know him much before, except from what I have seen him write on http://www.gnuheter.com

One of the guys in the Debian booth was Russell Coker. He sat an hour or two on Wednesday configuring a computer with SELinux. When he was finished, we put up a note with the root password and let people try to destroy the configuration. To get people going we gave them a tip to try rm -rf / as root. It wasn't possible to destroy anything valuable. It was also very hard to do anything at all with the machine though. SELinux inserts a new domain of administration rights above root in the kernel, by hooking normal syscalls like read, write etc. and checking inodes to see if you have read or write access. Russell had a nice idea about a "Linux Open University" that he liked to tell everyone about. Inspired by a similar effort by BBC (without the Linux content of course), he wanted to have some collaboration to send lectures about all sorts of Linux stuff over the net. If you would just use simple existing technology it could work without too much effort. Send two videostreams in different bitrates and an audio only for those with limited band width. You would be able to post questions in an irc channel, somebody would filter out good questions, they would be presented by someone and answered by the person giving the talk. After each given talk, archive it somewhere so you could download it and watch/listen to it later. I knew a great site just for archiving stuff like this, but I still can't remember its name. Really disturbing. In any case, it would be nice to use BitTorrent to distribute those archives.

Leon Shiman of X.org tried to convince me why their new MAS (Media Application Server) was so good. I've heard the name mentioned somewhere, but never understood what it was. It's basically a way to send audio/video and not to loose sync. It also inherits some nice X ideas like network transparency, but should still be fast enough for "time sensitive data". This probably include changing bitrate on the fly etc, but I don't remember everything. He also lost me a bit when he started to talk about single threaded servers and how everything was a device and how you could just plugin input- and outputsources. It sounded really cool, but it felt like my beard just wasn't long enough. I told Russell about it, as it could probably be used for his Linux Open University thing, but he was a bit skeptic because it would take too long for it to be finished. I agree, and even when it is released and let's say it solves many problems, it's still ain't accessible to that many people.

There were two things that I thought people would talk more about and that was United Linux and the German governments use of Linux. Ok, I was hanging around Debian people all the time, and if there was a talk on United Linux, I must have missed it (learned later that there was a chat about United Linux). The Bundestux thing was just a recommendation for using Linux on servers and OpenLDAP for directory services. Another cool thing was the sphinxprojekt for secure e-mail and the corresponding Egypten, which is a free software implementation of the secure e-mail exchange. One thing to note was the small Swedish consult company Klarälvdalens Datakonsult which I've never heard of before, that had helped to implement it.

On Sunday when everything was over, we slowly packed our things together. Todd from the Window Maker booth were giving away stuff they had gotten for free and didn't want to bring home, to make the bag lighter and to make room for Borland cds. Actually he didn't want the cds. Who wanted them anyway? It was the cool cd cases that he wanted. They were given away for free in each of those bags you could find at the entrance. I wanted some as well, and thought it was a neat idea. Other people had already thought of the same idea though, and as we stood their looking for treasures, more joined. It was annual raiding of Borland cd cases. My joy didn't last long though. I heard a hissing sound from my backpack. It was one of those antivirus beer that started leaking.

Afterwards we went for a pizza, where everyone got something else than what they ordered. There was no mixup between persons, just no where near the right ingredients. They tasted ok though. Then I went home and Linuxtag was over. All in all, it was great, but I should really have come more prepared. Four days sounds like a lot, but if you really want to talk to everybody and get/give thorough explanations and discuss and still have time for some serious slacking, it won't cut it.

Don't forget to check out all photos I took with my crappy camera at LinuxtagPhotos

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