[dot] KDE at LinuxWorld Netherlands Report

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1098974319/

From: Fabrice Mous <fabrice at kde.nl>
Dept: look-and-you-will-find-us
Date: Thursday 28/Oct/2004, @16:38

KDE at LinuxWorld Netherlands Report 
=====================================

   During 13th and 14th October KDE-NL [http://www.kde.nl/] was present
at LinuxWorld [http://www.linuxworldexpo.nl] in Utrecht, the
Netherlands. Bas Grolleman, a member of the Dutch KDE community wrote an
account [http://www.kde.nl/agenda/2004-10-13_14-linuxworldexpo/] of the
event. Here on the Dot is a translation of that account.

     This first LinuxWorld event in the Netherlands was held
simultaneously with two other events: 'Storage Expo' and 'InfoSecurity'.
Many large companies were present including Sun and Novell. It was
styled more as a business event, and because even the penguin in the
logo was wearing a tie I decided to do the same.

     The KDE-NL booth wasn't easy to find. Compared to other booths we
only had a small and humble spot on the Expo floor at the back of the
hall. However our presence was noticed by some visitors during a second
tour of the expo floor. We did have instant access to coffee because we
had the coffee bar for exhibitors in front of us!



     The event was very much focused on Linux in the business-place
(besides the small .ORG pavilion) and there was a large number of
commerical stalls from various companies offering their wares. It was
clear that Linux and OpenSource have become big business and nowadays
everybody has something to say about his or her OpenSource offering.

     Besides the booths, several seminars were held. It was a pity that
some people with excellent technical skills have a slight inability to
keep the audience interested. For example the seminar about
User-Mode-Linux was very interesting on a technical level and it
described very well what you needed to get started with it.
Unfortunately on the level where you need to convince people and make
them enthusiastic to use UML it was running short.

     During the second day I attended a seminar given by the company
Randstad [http://www.randstad.nl/], who described their migration to
Linux. It was very interesting stuff but they did not give much
information about the technical details of this migration. I am very
curious about how it all will turn out for them.

     The KDE-NL team demonstrated the features of KDE as a business
desktop. Jeroen Baten spoke on behalf of KDE-NL during both days, in a
presentation
[http://www.kde.nl/agenda/2004-10-13_14-linuxworldexpo/presentaties/jeroenbaten/lwe2004.html]
about the benefits of using KDE as a business desktop. We spoke with
many visitors, some of whom  were already using KDE and were able to
give us their experience with the KDE desktop.

     We would like to thank our sponsor, IT solutions provider KovoKs
[http://www.kovoks.nl/] who lent us several laptops with the latest KDE
version on. These laptops helped to attract a lot of people. This may
also have been because we were showing the famous Konqi movie
[http://dot.kde.org/1097789248/] on them. We would like to thank Bastian
Salmela (Basse) for making a Dutch version
[http://www.kde.nl/mediakit/animatie/konqi-magical_rope/] of the Konqi
animation.

     Amersfoort, October 2004Bas Grolleman

    * foto's