* NetBSD at the 4th Chemnitz Linux-day: A daemon among penguins

March 9/10 was a big "Linux" event at the university of Chemnitz, Germany.
About 1500 attendees visited technical sessions in several tracks, went to
the "install fest", watched demonstrations or participated in workshops.  
The event also had some BSD content: a booth with (Net)BSD was available
as well as several presentations mentioning NetBSD in detail.

The (Net)BSD booth was manned by Karl Uwe Lockhoff, Andre Niklas and
Hubert Feyrer.  On display were a Shark doing a slideshow, a i386/-current
machine showing vanilla X with xterms and twm ("this is what you get with
the NetBSD base distriution") and a notebook that had KDE2, Netscape,
OpenOffice etc.  running ("This is what you get by installing third party
applications from pkgsrc"). Available print documentation included a
printout of Federico Lupi's "NetBSD Guide", a copy of "Design and
Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System" as well as the
german-language book "BSD mit Methode".  Wasabi Systems donated a bunch of
1.5.2 CDs (thanks!) that were handed out. (Let's toss some numbers: from
the 1500 visitors, 40 were interrested in getting a CD). There were also
two boxes of the 1.5.2+pkgs release from Wasabi available (not for handing
out) that did attract people. Two plush BSD daemons helped getting
attention as well as the above-mentioned slideshow running on the shark. A
preview of the latter is available at
http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/clt4-slideshow.gif, full archive at
http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/clt4-slideshow.tgz.

Presentations that mentioned NetBSD in quite popular ways or used it for
demonstrations included "DNS with BIND9", "BIND9 with IPv6" "Migration
to IPv6 with 6to4" and "*BSD - Alternatives to Linux". Surprisingly, each 
of the presentations had >50 attendees (in contrast to the 3-5 people that 
we expected ;-). 

General information on the 4th Chemnitz Linux-day can be found at
http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/linux/tag/lt4/ which will get updated with links 
to presentations (including mp3 streams!) within the next few days. 

As a summary, the (Net)BSD booth was a big success, and it did definitely 
fit into all the other Linux-centric presentations and demos. A booth for 
CLT5 is in the works. :)


 - Hubert

-- 
NetBSD - because Unix isn't just #include <linux.h>, i386, ILP32, ELF, ...!