linuxworld

Haiku made its "big stage" debut at LinuxWorld for the first time this year. If you follow the feeds on our website, you have probably already read the nice reports that Urias posted on the website during and after the show (day 0, day 1, day 2 and day 3). I thought I would give me own personal recount of the event, in order to perhaps bring a little bit of a different perspective, and hopefully also complement what Urias has already written about the show.

I had never been to LinuxWorld before, but I knew from reading about the conference that it was bigger to other open sources conferences we have exhibited in the past. I also had an idea of the demographics of the event, as I had done a little bit of reasearch before proposing our attendance last year. Average attendance was said to be more than 10,000 people, and by the size of the exhibit floor at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco and the duration of the show (three full days), this seemed just about right; this was obviously a very compelling number from the point of view of getting exposure for Haiku.

Back to the Moscone Center

Haiku and ReactOS at LW2008

Today, Scott McCreary was nice enough to swing by and pick me up on his way to the conference. We cruised by my company's corporate headquarters to pick up a package I was expecting, and then went directly to the Moscone Center from there.

Before the conference was under way, we re-arranged the layout in the booth a little bit, putting Art and the ReactOS machine up in front next to ours a bit more. We felt this might increase the ReactOS-related questions and demos a bit, and I believe it did help. I should note that without Art Yerkes and ReactOS, the event wouldn't have been possible for us this year.

Interest still strong

Today was similar to the first day, but the clumps of visitors were less, and we had more focused and genuinely interested visitors. We did get the usual: "Is this another Linux distro?" questions, but we also got several: "Wow, you re-created BeOS? That is awesome!"

Matt flew 5.5 hours to see us

Later in the day, we were visited by Matt Martz who flew 5.5 hours across the U.S. to see us. At least, this is what we'd like to believe, but perhaps he actually did want to visit a few other booths as well. In any case, he posed for a picture in front of the booth, and laughed when we told him it would probably show up on the website. (I don't think he believed we were serious)

Into the belly of the beast

With the addition of Scott, I was given a chance to finally walk through the floor and see what the other exhibits looked like. There was a Linux "InstallFest" sponsored by Untangle. I briefly considered taking a USB stick loaded with Haiku over there and installing it on a couple machines, but due to lack of time (and courage), I didn't get a chance to do this. Perhaps tomorrow ;) There was an abundance of server and hardware products using Linux on the exhibit floor, and it was clear that Linux on desktops was not a major focus for the event at this point.

All in all, the day was pretty solid. I have begun to lose my voice, unfortunately - mostly due to a recent cold I have been fighting I suspect, but also due to the massive amount of talking I have been doing over the last couple of days. Hopefully it will improve overnight and I will sustain another day.

Day 3 report will likely be delayed as I will not have the opportunity to write anything up tomorrow night.