From 4th to 6th of September, the 9th International Linux-Kongress
took place in Cologne, Germany.  The Linux-Kongress is the developer
congress for Linux in Europe.  But what is a Linux event without a
BSD booth? :-)

In contrast to our booth at the Linuxtag in Karlsruhe, we actually had
one or more computers running each, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.  Among
them, obscure hardware like a MicroVAX, PDP-11, Dreamcast and more common
hardware like a PowerMac, SparcStation 10 and a PC.

People were particulary interested in the more obscure stuff mentioned
above ;-)

Another interesting piece of hardware was the BSD booth webcam which
delivered a 24 hour picture of the booth to the outside world.

Other things we were showing included several books ("The Design and
Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System", "The FreeBSD Corporate
Networkers Guide", "FreeBSD", "UNIX Network Programming" and "UNIX
Internals: The New Frontiers"), several issues of Daemon News, BIM flyers
and a printout version of Sebastian Benner's FreeBSD introduction
(thanks to Dirk Meyer) which many people were very interested in.

Stuff we were handing out for free or for a small change included FreeBSD
4.6 CDs and stickers (kindly donated by Daemon News Mall), NetBSD 1.5.2
all archs/no packages, NetBSD stickers (kindly donated by Wasabi Systems) and
the usual OpenBSD merchandise Wim Vandeputte sent us (with more or less trouble,
never trust a german package delivery service ;-).


Interesting bits and pieces:

- Moshe Bar told me that he's working on a FreeBSD version of his OpenMosix
  clustering software
- German package delivery services suck
- People like old hardware :-)
- Daemon News Mall and Wasabi Systems donated CDs, Stickers and some other
  stuff, thanks!
- No FreeBSD/NetBSD shirts/posters, the OpenBSD folks showed once again what
  merchandising can look like
- Thanks to the Linux-Kongress organizers and the GUUG for letting us
  participate and for the nice food!
- Next event will be the Linuxdays of Luxembourg Oct 1-3 2002 (http://www.linuxday.lu)


All in all, the booth was another great opportunity to show what BSD is and
that it's a real alternative.

We are still looking for some people who want to participate in a BSD booth
at the Linuxdays Luxembourg.  So if you got some spare time and want to
promote BSD, please contact Hubert Feyrer <hubertf@netbsd.org>


Pictures:

- http://unixpages.org/pics/Linux-Kongress-2002/


The online-version of this report can be found at:

- http://unixpages.org/events/linux-kongress-2002.html


- Christian

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