Difference between revisions of "LinuxTag 2008"

Revision as of 18:26, 7 June 2008

The first ever LinuxMCE gathering, and if you weren't there then, well... you've missed it! Everybody else: please dump your stories, pictures, videos, etcetera here.

Timeline

Please improve/expand/correct...

Saturday May 24

Dan ("ddamron") arives at Berlin airport, and is picked up by Hari after some delay. Dan wanted to make sure he'd have no problem if he took his equipment back home again, which aparently confused some officials.

Sunday May 25

Zaerc arrives late in the afternoon at the trainstation in Hamburg and is picked up by Possy ("posde"). They both ride to Berlin in the "possy-wagon" and are welcomed by Katrin and Hari into their home where Dan is also staying.

Monday May 26

This day was mostly spent playing around with Hari's sytem at home while preparing and testing a lot of things we were going to use in the booth. Amongst others we:

• Played around with setting up MDs
• Checked in a template for the camera
• Tested several orbiters on mobile phones and nokia webpads.

Tuesday May 27

Daniel ("danielk") arrives at the airport around 10am and is picked up by Hari, we all meet at Hari's house, before going to the convention center. After checking in and receiving our passes we arrive at the booth and start unloading the cars. We rearrange the furniture a bit and setup the hardware. Thom ("TSCHAK") arrives at the airport around 2pm and is picked up by Possy and Dan, together they return to the booth.

Since Hari had dropped the install DVD, we decided to install from CDs because Daniel has a Kubuntu live CD with him and the ISOs on his laptop. The install of linuxmce-0710 i386 took about an hour (after the kubuntu install). We ran into the problem that the Media Directors were recognized as AMD64. So Thom set them up manually as i386.

Wednseday May 28

The first day of the show. Daniel was finished setting up MythTV with DVB-t. Dan and Zaerc set up their laptops as extra Media Directors. Kaj ("|kr|") whom we know from the chatroom comes by as a visitor.

After the show closed at 6pm (for visitors at least) one of the major sponsors had arranged a tap with free beer. Lateron we went to dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. Where Hari ordered a very "special" beer for Dan, who had enjoyed the free beer earlier just a little to much. And there was much rejoicing when, halfway through, Dan discovered it was actually alcohol-free beer. Kaj joined us for dinner a bit later, he wanted to stay for the next days as well. Zaerc offered Kaj the fold-out couch in his appartment so he wouldn't have to sleep in his car.

Thursday May 29

Marko ("Maroko") joins us.

Daniel's wife Jessie arrives in Berlin.

...

Daniel had gotten us all tickets for the LinuxTag social gathering party, but strangely enough he didn't show up himself. There was lots of good food, cold drinks, interesting people, a band playing and a DJ afterwards.

At the end of the party Dan, Kaj and Hari decided to promote LMCE some more with a few wrestling demonstrations in a hallway with huge glass windows on both sides, fortunately nobody got hurt.

Friday May 30

Michael ("m1ch43l") and Ladislav (also known from the chatroom) came by, and showed the beautiful new skin they're working on.

In the afternoon there were some hardware problems with the core involving the external ethernet port. So after some mucking about, we decide to continue without internet acces, since that is not really needed for the demonstrations anyway.

Possy won us an OpenMoko phone to use for development, after Zaerc made everyone enter in the competition where they gave them away. After that we closed the booth around 6pm and went to dinner, then straight to our sleeping quarters. Everybody was beat and glad to get an early night in.

Saturday May 31

The core machine kept acting up so we ditched it and installed one of the Media directors as a Hybrid instead, problems solved.

The DVDs to hand out have finaly arrived from Pluto. A decision is made to just hand them out left and right since it's the last day anyway.

We get a prize from the organization for having one of the best 2 booths at the show. Everybody is dead tired, but we wait until closing time before packing everything up not to dissapoint the last visitors that came by.

At six we took everything down and moved most of it back to Hari's house. He stayed at home to get some rest while the rest of us went out to dinner. After Dinner Michael and Ladislav had to go home, and Possy was to tired to join us for drinks so he went for a nap in the posse-wagon.

The remaining party of Dan, Thom, Daniel, Jessie, Kaj and Zaerc went for some drinks in a place that Hari and Katrin had taken Dan earlier, it had a really nice alternative atmosphere. Some crazy things happened but we all enjoyed ourselves and had a really great time. Dan spent the night on the couch at Thom's appartment to give Hari some desperately needed alone time with Katrin.

Sunday June 1

Possy, Thom and Dan leave for Poland in the possy-wagon to visit Thom's girlfriend Quynh ("grebe"). Daniel and Jessie take off for a short vacation touring through Germany. And before driving home himself, Kaj drops Zaerc off at the central station of Berlin, from where Zaerc took the train back home.

Equipment used

"Closet" setup

• Generic PC as Core
• Zwave Controller
• Freecom DVB-T USB dongle.

"Living room" setup

• MSI Media live barebones
• TV (rs232)
• Receiver (rs232) + loudspeakers
• Bluetooth dongle
• 2× Z-Wave light controller + lamp
• Fiire dongle

"Bedroom" setup

• MSI mobo based MD
• Generic flat panel
• Amplifier + loudspeakers
• 2× Z-Wave light controller + lamp
• Z-Wave appliance controller to drive a table fan
• Fiire dongle

Other

• Cisco 79XX Phone
• D-Link IP camera
• Switch
• Wifi router

Remotes

• Fiire chief
• Gyration

Orbiters

• Nokia 770 webpad
• Nokia 800 webpad
• Nokia 810 webpad
• Nokia .... mobile phone
• Nokia .... mobile phone
• Nokia 7650 mobile phone

Extra Media Directors

• Dell ...
• Dell Inspiron 8200

Credits

Huge thanks go out to:

• LinuxTag for sponsoring the booth, special thanks go to Mako Jung
• SerNet (http://www.sernet.de) for sponsoring all our expenses (travel, hotel, t-shirts), special thanks go to Johannes Loxen
• IrTrans (http://www.itrans.de) for sponsoring two IrTrans units
• Cisco (http://www.cisco.com) for providing a Cisco CP7970 IP Phone
• Abaton (http://www.abaton.at) for providing a MSI MediaLive Barebone
• Insteon (http://www.smarthome.com) for providing Insteon equipment
• ComputaCenter (http://www.computacenter.de) for providing a Denon AVR 4306
• everybody that made this possible in one way or another, special thanks go to possy (and we all know why)