Reflections on Lisa02

[Ian Reinhart Geiser]

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Greetings
	Zack and I just got done with doing the Lisa02 Convention here in Philly and
wanted to share a few experiences from that event.

	As background Lisa is a USENIX technical conference.  So the 15 and under
linux crowd is very very slim.  Most of these guys have been manageing  or
dealing with Unix longer Linux has been around.  They are the ones who are
on an island now, and management wants these weirdos to be gone.  KDE makes
their Solaris cad/cam workstations seem less weird and play better with their
users and IT staff.  We really where popular and got quite a few positive
visitors and maby some big opportunities to get KDE noticed.

	First some quotes:
		"Konqueror is the browser I use when I need things to work."
		"That [kio_fish] is the coolest thing I have seen all day."
		"The kde print system is awesome"
		"KDE rocks!"

	The biggest hits of the show where:
		KDE Print system
		KDE Kiosk mode
		KIO Fish
		and Konqi
		(KOffice while in most peoples opinion was not quite ready for 
		prime time was very promiseing and impressive)

	Mind you this was a systems administrator show, these guys don't manage one
toy linux box, they are manageing 5-500 desktops running solaris, irix and
hpux.  We actually got quite a few negative responses to crystal and keramic.
This was because they did not want to have the UI change so much and where
more concerned that we where wasting our time with eyecandy than with more
meaningful features.  Remember these are the guys who like the fact that CDE 
even though it sucks has remained unchanged long enough to learn. This was 
calmed when I was able to show them how to push out the old style with little 
trouble.   Although they were very pleased to see that Keramic even though 
its more glitz was not noticeably slower than hicolor on a PPC 450Mhz box 
serving on remote X.

	The KDE Print system really amazed quite a few people.  We even where
mentioned in the Printing BOF meeting (BOF meetings are meetings where admins 
all got together talked about how they solved certain problems) later that 
night.  Great job in that dept there guys!

	KIO Fish has the power of voodoo.  It can entice even the most hardcore old
school unix admin to use Kate, just so he dosent have to use vi over a
2400baud connection ever again.  I wish I had KVim there to really impress
them. 

	Kiosk mode is basicly what unix admins have always wanted.  While not 100%
perfect it did impress quite a few admins who need to control how the users
are using their desktop.  No-one had an aversion to the method of
configuring the system, save for the docs where kind of light, but remember
these guys are unix admins and where thankful we did not use the C or guile
style of config files :)

	Not everything was perfect though, there where some questions we got over and
over again so obviously there are some unaddressed issues.

	a) Where can we get good packages of KDE for RH 7.1/7.2/7.3/8.0
		Remember this is America and RH == Linux, worse, very few companies
		are running latest and greatest.  Most run RH 7.2 or 7.3 with some hacks.
		I know we would like to keep our head in the sand on this one, but maby we
		need to rethink this.

	b) When will KDE be out for solaris 8/9?
		Yes i know we have random packages for random install configs out there
		for solaris 7/8/9, but those don't make it to who really needs them.

		Cool thing out of this, SUN was more than willing to give me a copy of
		Solaris 9 and working on getting me more developer access to their
		systems.  The current party line is "We want to give our users more options
		than they already have".  (Read this how you will, but note CDE was the only
		thing running on all solaris boxes there, so I think they have yet to find a 
		usable alternitave to it yet.)  If anyone is interested in working with me
		on this please drop me a private email.

		In short we should be on the Sun freeware site and CD shortly.

	Lastly, we got an invitation from CMP (the publisher of Dr Dobbs and
SysAdmin Magazine)  to submit press releases and papers for publication.  They 
sounded like they would even do the press releases for free.  If anyone knows 
how we can most efficiently set this up let me know and we can get this 
rolling.

	Cheers
	-ian reinhart geiser
- - --
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A sine curve goes off to infinity or at least the end of the blackboard
		-- Prof. Steiner
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