Solutions Linux 2009

[Guillaume Lasmayous <netbsd-lists%guigui2.net@localhost>]

Hello,

Please find below a short summary of "Solutions Linux and Open Source"
2009 exhibition.

"Solutions Linux and Open Source" (hereafter noted as SL) is a yearly
exhibition held in Paris, France, made of two parts:
- corporate show, where all big players in the OpenSource market can
be found (SuSe, IBM, Sun, and a lot of services company).
The other   part is called - "village", constituting of many associations
dealing with Free Software in France: Lea-Linux, Da Linux French
Page, Traduc.org, and so on.
For the complete list of exhibitors, you can refer to
http://www.solutionslinux.com

This year, together with my friends behind http://www.netbsdfr.org,
we decided to hold a booth during the 3 days of the exhibition, to
do some advertising around NetBSD.
All BSDs representations were located at the same place
in the village, next to each other: BSDFrance / FreeBSD / OpenBSD /
NetBSDfr.
Minimal official representation though - only one developer -
we are not affiliated with the project, but just a group of users.

A few figures: 100 flyers (translations of the ones found here:
http://netbsd.org/gallery/advocacy/#flyers), 60 Jibbed 5.0RC3
LiveCDs (both AMD64 and i386 versions) have been given to the
visitors during the 3 days. 5 new users joined the
#netbsdfr@freenode IRC channel.

Among the recurring questions:
- how do you compare to {Free,Open,Whatever}BSD ?
- how do you compare to Linux ?
- what kind of applications is best suited for NetBSD ?
read: can it be used as a desktop, or is it a strictly
server OS ? )
- how do you compare NetBSD/Xen version with Linux's one
(more generally: how do we compare to Linux virtualization options)

For SL2010, we intend to be there again.
I hope I'll be able to get a little support from the project.
This was not intended to be an official representation of
the NetBSD project. But to be honest, we "suffered" from the
proximity of the OpenBSD booth, which was much more
attractive than ours, with colorful T-Shirts, stickers to
give away to visitors...
Even if I'm a NetBSD enthusiast, I've no mean to fund the
printing of T-Shirts and stickers, or to order them from the
CafePress.
I hope we'll be able to find a clever way to have more
goodies on the booth for next year.

Guillaume Lasmayous, for NetBSDfr.