It’s Freitag already? I’ve been in Berlin since Tuesday evening, and busy with LinuxTag since then. The first two days of LinuxTag have been a lot of fun and really interesting. We’ve had a lot of traffic in the openSUSE booth, and I’ve been walking around and talking with some of the people from other projects and companies. The booth directly next to us is full of embedded Linux projects, including some motorized critters that look like fun to play with. In back, we’ve got the JackLab booth, so we’ve been getting some interesting music to accompany the openSUSE discussions…

Martin Lasarsch did a great job planning for the show and getting everything set up. It’s a shame the car was too full of swag for me to ride with him to Berlin… the train ride was great, though. Had a great talk with Robert Lihm, who speaks English, German, and Czech, about language.

Spent some time talking with Max Spevack about how openSUSE and Fedora might work together and about a few projects that are also underway (like using Smolt with openSUSE as well). Also wanted to give Max a look at Zypper, but the network didn’t want to cooperate… Zypper’s blinding speed was, sadly, foiled by an uncooperative network. (It doesn’t matter how fast package management works if you can’t, you know, actually download the packages. Don’t get me started on show networks…

The downside to shows, of course, is that you usually just see the hotel and show facility, and not much of the city where the show is being held. That’s a shame, because Berlin looks really interesting, and I wish I had some time to go out and explore the city a little bit more. From what little I’ve seen of Berlin so far, it looks like a really cool city.

But, I’ve been having plenty of fun and interesting conversations here at the show, and I really enjoy being able to talk to openSUSE contributors and users in person rather than on the phone, via email and IRC. Until they perfect a “beer over IP” protocol, shows are still much more fun…

Tomorrow, we have a full schedule of openSUSE sessions starting at 10:00 a.m. Martin Lasarsch will start off the day with the “state of openSUSE,” and then I’ll be up to talk about some of the things coming up in 2008 and 2009, plus a look at openSUSE 11.0 with Stephan Kulow.

Adrian Schroeter will be giving a presentation on the openSUSE Build Service, Henne will be covering multimedia with openSUSE, Beineri will be talking about KDE4, and we’ll also have talks on Wine and virtualizing Mac OS X on openSUSE.

And, of course, the openSUSE booth has demos of 11.0 and we’d be happy to show off the new features and answer questions about openSUSE 11.0 and the openSUSE Project. Or just stop by to say hello and let us know what you think about openSUSE!

Now I’m off to see Nat’s keynote… should be very interesting.

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