Looking back at CLT 2010

Yesterday I came back from Cologne, where I stayed a night at Enrico’s before taking the train back to Münster. After I arrived home, my customers kept me busy, but now I have some time to blog about the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage (Chemnitz Linux Days) last weekend.

Let’s start from the beginning: On Friday I took the train to Dortmund where I met Bert, Yakoov and Gregory. Bert gave me a ride to Chemnitz. When we checked in at our hotel, we met Jörg, but he was in a hurry to get back to his parents, who live not far away from Chemnitz. After the check-in we met with Sven and his friends at the Ratskeller to have some delicious food. Thorsten called me and showed up just a little later and half an hour later the Xfce people arrived too. While I already knew most of them because I met Enrico last year at OpenRheinRuhr and Dominic, Michael and Simon happen to be Fedora contributors too, I was very pleased to meet Fabian Nowak. I know him for quite a long time, but we never met in person.

After finishing our meals we walked over to the Turmbrauhaus (Tower brewery) for some beers. There were quite a lot of people from different projects there, CentOS, Debian and the FSF just to name a few. They all were sitting around a really long table, chatting, drinking and having fun. In another room Jörg Schilling had dinner with two lawyers friends.

The next morning we arrived at the university where the CLT takes place. Robert and Jörg already built up the booth on Friday, so there was not much left for us to do. I decided to have breakfast first. The catering at CLT is really impressive, people even call it the “Chemnitz Catering Days with Linux talks“.

The Fedora booth was pretty busy all day, so I didn’t manage to attend any talks or help the at the Xfce booth. I talked all day long, it was loud and crowded, and in the evening at the social event I nearly lost my voice. The problem was that I had to give my LXDE talk on Sunday. So I left the social event early and got back to the hotel with Jens to cure my voice.

On Sunday I was much better again. Although speaking loud was exhausting, I managed to do my talk and it seems people liked it. After the talk a lot of the visitors came up to the Fedora booth in order to get the Fedora LXDE spin on a USB key. Next year we should also do an Xfce talk to gather more attraction.

After the first round of people was served with USB keys and live media, I burned some Xfce media and headed over to the Xfce booth. I felt really bad because I could not spend that much time on Xfce, but I know that they had enough people to do well. Nevertheless I would have liked to spend more time with Enrico, Fabian and the people from the Fedora Xfce SIG.

Later that afternoon I had to repair the display connector of the Fedora video beamer and I needed a tong. Instead of asking all kinds of people for a tong I went straight to the debianforum.de booth and of course, they had what I was looking for. Debianforum.de never disappoints you! It was also nice to meet the guys from Debianforum.de again. The first time I met Sebastian in person was last year at Chemnitz and I owe him and his forum so much.

Another person that I was happy to meet is Sirko. He used to be part of the CLT organization team, but last year they had some disagreements. I cannot comment on that, I was just lucky to see Sirko again.

As you can see: Chemnitz Linux Days are a place to meet the German Linux community. I even think it is the best Linux community event in Germany. I enjoyed it last year, I enjoyed it this year and I will definitely go there again next year:

But there were also two things I did not like:

• Simon’s talk about OSSTMM and the Fedora Security Spin was rejected although it would have fitted perfectly into the forensics track.
• The German Federal Foreign Office rejected Hiemanschu‘s visa for no reason. It would have been awesome to have Hiemanschu at the event because then the three people involved in the F13 Security Spin (Jörg, Hiemanschu and me) would have been gathered at one place.

Anyway, there is nothing we can do about these problems, so let’s focus on the positive aspects. For me the two most important things are

• Fedora had a very strong presence at CLT: If you count in all the people (even the ones not doing official booth service or the ones serving at the Xfce booth), we were 13 Fedora contributors (in alphabetical order): Bert, Christoph (myself), Dominic, Gregory, Jens, Jörg, Marcus, Michael, Robert, Simon, Sven, Thorsten and Yakoov.

• The large number of Fedora contributors at the Xfce booth also proves that we are doing a good job with the Xfce SIG. The number of Xfce users in Fedora is growing and so is the number of Fedora users in the Xfce community, for example in the IRC channels. I’m looking forward to Xfce 4.8 because I’m sure the new release will help us to make Xfce even more attractive.

Looking forward to rock Chemnitz next year with Fedora and Xfce. Maybe we will even haven an LXDE booth, who knows?