Our local user group, the Hungarian BSD Association attended the GNU/Linux
conference last Saturday here in Budapest, Hungary.  Our participation was
an unquestionable success - our table was rounded by dozens of people
continously, inquiring after BSD.  Our chairman, Gabor Zahemszky hold a
long course in one of the conference rooms; the room was full.  Two
computers could be seen at our table: one with FreeBSD 4.4 and one with
NetBSD 1.5.2.  The FreeBSD box ran multiple jails; /etc/ttys was modified
so by logging in at different vtys, you found yourself in different jails.
The third vty was a complete Debian Potato system under linuxemu - our
enquiers were impressed.  There was also a fullscreen divx movie.  The
NetBSD box drove 6 CD writers, we used it to copy BSD CDs (more than 200
of them were handed out).  Now everyone is speaking about the conference,
in phorums, on the IRC, etc.  They say that the conference itself wasn't
perfect, but the BSD stuff was amazing and our presentation was the most
professional (yeah, Gabor is a professed Unix teacher ;)).

We started to organize our things last summer, when Julian Elischer (who
spent some months here several times) gave us a lesson on FreeBSD kernel
debugging.  Our BSD.hu portal started that time.  The association was founded
in November.  Since then, the membership of the local freebsd mailing list
has been doubled (~200-250), linux portals have started to carry BSD-specific
news and articles, hundreds of BSD CDs have been burnt.  Several
Hungarian guys appeared in the GNATS database (filling send-pr) or in
the ports tree (submitting new ports).  Not a big thing in itself,
but we're happy to see them.  There are lots of good Linux guys here and
a lot of them are moving to BSD now, or at least they will try to
make their work less linux-specific (Zorp and mplayer are two
examples).  I was glad to hear that there are BSD programmers here, too
(not committers though).  Eg. http://kombain.sf.net seems to be
interesting.  We are aware of several (security) consultand companies that
prefer BSD; some ISPs are using it, too, as well as our famous (well,
famous here, around Hungary) FTP server, ftp.fsn.hu.  BSD is like a legend
here these days.

Some pictures from the conference: http://shooby.gnome.hu/sebastien/

best wishes,

Gabor Suveg <gsuveg@bsd.hu>
vice-chairman