robert’s rant room

LinuxTag 2009 is over. I slept 12 hours after that, slightly less than the total of sleep I got throughout the four days. But it was amazing. There’s so many people I have to thank that made this a unique experience. Here’s my attempt at a partial list. Thanks to…

• All visitors for keeping us busy through discussions, compiling buttons together, and by accepting all our sneaky attempts to hand out flyers.
• Gentoo e.V. for covering the costs for printing flyers, buttons, banner, sweets and drinks.
• Alex Legler for designing the flyers, the banner, making sure they get printed in time, and manning the booth.
• Sebastian Pipping for designing both the t-shirts and word cloud with me, and giving valuable of feedback on the booth presentation. He also organized sweets and the diner table of Tuesday evening.
• Christian Faulhammer for manning the booth longer than anybody else; he helped out throughout all four days, from the first minute until his train left.
• Tobias Scherbaum for approving all our funding requests; being there even at a busy time and organising the two Gentoo book samples.
• Wernfried Haas and Claudia, for creating and hanging up the great Larry prints again. What would a Gentoo booth be without them?
• Sebastian Dyroff for driving all the boxes to the exhibition grounds and back to my place, and staying at the booth for quite a while.
• Luca Barbato for being around every now and then, while not busy at the ffmpeg booth.
• Florian Streibelt for fixing the presentation machine, providing some hardware on short notice and his booth service.
• Daniel Sturm for lending the button machine and buying all supplies, and manning the booth.
• Fabian Groffen for taking the long drive from the Netherlands, and work the booth despite partying.
• Valentin Haenel for being at the booth on Saturday.
• Torsten Schmits for manning the booth on Friday. (Hope you get better soon!)
• Björn Tropf for preparing the flyer with Alex and being there two days.
• Gordon Malm for proof-reading and improving the flyer.
• Tobias Kral and an unknown messenger for getting the stickers and mouse pad to the event.
• Benedikt Böhm, Christian Parpart, and Hanno Boeck for stopping by at the booth and saying hello.
• All LinuxTag helpers for all the work they did, including full-time catering. Special thanks to Daniel, Sebastian Pipping and Fabian for participating in that.
• All corporate sponsors of the event, they paid for catering and parts of the Social Event.
• Fedora for the free pizza on Friday.
• Ubuntu Berlin for the barbeque on Saturday.
• All those who offered help for next year. We will come back to you, LinuxTag 2010 is June 9 to 12.

Let me finish with a few bytes of statistics. There were more than 10 000 visitors, we sold 39 t-shirts, drank 34 bottles of Mate and 10 bottles of water, and ate 3 kg of sweets. Ohh, and here’s us again:

Last row, from the left: rbu, grobian, sping, fauli behind dertobi123, a3li, Claudia and amne. Front row: Florian, Sebastian Dyroff, Dan Levin.

So the first day of the four days of Gentoo at LinuxTag is almost over. It’s a very exciting event, talking to users, visitors, and devs, and in the end we could even convince some unhappy Ubuntu users to try Gentoo. Here’s some pictures of what happened so far.

Pictures were taken by Florian, amne and fauli. The word cloud poster is by sping and me.