[dot] KDE at CeBIT 2007 Report

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1176710077/

From: Daniel Molkentin and Alexander Neundorf <>
Dept: better-late-than-never
Date: Monday16/Apr/2007, @00:54

KDE at CeBIT 2007 Report
========================

   KDE was present at Cebit 2007 [http://www.cebit.de] in Hannover, the
world's largest IT fair. The booth was located inside the LinuxPark
[http://www.linux-events.de/LinuxPark_2007] in Hall 5, where Linux New
Media had given us and other open source projects the opportunity to
present their work. Alexander Neundorf, KDE buildsystem maintainer and
the booth manager in charge for large parts of the event, considers this
year's CeBIT "a very successful event for KDE". Read on for his report.
     The tower at the fairgrounds in Hannover.
     On Thursday, when the exhibition started we occupied booth G64,
directly next to the Debian booth. Unfortunately, only wifi was
available, which not all of our demo boxes had support for, but the
friendly Debian guys were so kind to let us connect to their wired
ethernet switch, so we finally had network. We attracted a lot of
visitors and it turned out that the booth was a bit small for us.
    Despite the tiny booth, everybody is eager to see KDE 4.0.
     So our Debian friends arranged that we could exchange the booth
with Franz Schmid, who presented Scribus [http://www.scribus.net/]. So
starting from Saturday we had a bigger booth available with two demo
points.
     The team for the first day of CeBIT (ltr): Joost Sander and Sabina
Weiland (both Kubuntu), Andre Wöbbeking (long time KDE developer),
Melissa Steinhagen (first time contributor), Alex Neundorf (long time
KDE developer)
     We had the Gnomes as direct neighbors. This turned out to be a lot
of fun and we helped each other where we could. The days of animosity
between KDE and Gnome developers (if there ever was this) are long gone.

     Thanks to our great community the KDE booth was always very well
staffed, both by experienced KDE contributors and our friends in the
Kubuntu and Fedora communities, but also the first time contributors
Melissa Steinhagen, Tobias Pfeiffer and Steven van der Vegt. It's nice
to see such enthusiastic new contributors coming to KDE :-)

     We had a lot of interesting chats with visitors. There were very
different groups of visitors. Some of them were experienced KDE users
and maybe we were able to motivate some of them to contribute to KDE
themselves. Then there were also visitors completely new to Linux, we
could show them that nowadays Linux with KDE is a viable if not even
more powerful alternative to the commercial offerings. I guess the most
asked question was "what will KDE 4 be like?". For these visitors we
could show some bleeding edge KDE 4 applications.

     During the event, members of the KDE projects gave a couple of
talks in the Linux Forum
[http://www.linux-events.de/LinuxPark_2007/LinuxForum/vortraege.html].
On Saturday, Jürgen Gerner talked about KDE in everyday business while
on Sunday, Torsten Rahn talked of the current state of KDE and gave a
glimpse of KDE 4.0. On Wednesday, Daniel Molkentin of KDE PIM fame was a
guest in a public round table on groupware systems, which targetted
medium-sized businesses.

     Due to the generous support from Novell, Canonical and and Fedora
we were able to give away a lot of CDs/DVDs to visitors so they could
get a real-life impression of the power of KDE. Thanks also go to all
those who staffed the booth, especially all first-time contributors and
the people from the German Kubuntu team
 [http://www.Kubuntu-de.org].