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The 13th International Linux System Technology Conference AKA Linux-Kongress took place the past few days, September 5-8, 2006 at the Georg-Simon-Ohm-Fachhochschule in Nuremberg, Germany. The event sported two days of tutorials and two days of talks, and we had a NetBSD booth during the last two days of the conference.

Nuremberg's not far from my home town and as I can stay with my girlfriend I made it to the conference. The booth setup consisted of info-material (some books, printout of NetBSD, Internals and pkgsrc guide, flyers etc.) and some merchandizing (t-shirts, posters, CDs, pins, CPU badges, stickers), some posters, our NetBSD flag and a shark running a slideshow.

On thursday the booth was ran by my girlfriend Kathrin and me, on friday I had some occasional help from Kvedulv from the Munich BSE group.

A few points of interest:

• several people knowing/recognizing NetBSD very well, but Linux "worked first", and it still works, so there's no real reason to make them change. When there are problems with distribution X, people are more likely to switch to distribution Y.
• 1 person asking about the future of the NetBSD project and if it's really going to be cancelled. Had to tell them that's definitely not going to be the case, whatever our disgruntled project founder says.
• I had a very interesting talk with John 'maddog' Hall about keeping up the fun in hacking & open source. Do what you want to do and you will be good at it!
• I had a lengthy talk with Benedikt Stockebrand about his new IPv6 book
• pkgsrc needs active marketing - it can scratch quite some itches, but people don't know about it! Anyone interested in making a flyer for our collection (http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/advocacy/#flyers) please contact me!
• I made contact with a local user group, and may be able to help out at one of their upcoming install parties with NetBSD contents.

All in all the event was big fun, very relaxed with a very nice & friendly athmosphere.

Anyone wanting to attend a similar event (and possibly do a NetBSD booth there :) have a look at the GUUG spring talks, which will take place Feb 27 to Mar 3 2007 in Berlin, Germany. See http://www.guug.de/veranstaltungen/ffg2007/ for more information.