I visited LinuxTag Stuttgart on July 5 2001. On this page I will give an impression of the event.

It took me almost six hours to reach Stuttgart to travel more than 600 kilometres. I woke up at 3:00 'o clock in the night, and arrived at 10:40 hours in Stuttgart. I spent the whole day until 18:00 hours, and arrived 1:15 hours in the night back at my home town in the Netherlands.

Linux Tag is an open source event for business and free software in Europe. The slogan for Linux Tag is: where .com meets .org. Non-commercial and commercial people can meet each other and exchange ideas among others. It was located in hall 5.0 from the Messe in Stuttgart.

The presentations where given in the same hall, giving you the chance to listen if you like it and then attend at any moment during a presentation. Most of the presentations were in German, a minority in English. More than 95% of the visitors were from Germany, maybe that will change in the weekend. Presentations will be given during the four days by a lot of people, the most known ones being Eric S. Raymond, Hans Reiser and Jon "Maddog" Hall.

There is a two-day congress (costs money, the exhibition and other presentations are free) called "Linux goes Business".

You can click on the pictures below to enlarge them.

Non-commercial

A lot of areas in the Linux community presented themselves with a booth, some of them can be seen below. As usual those booths are far more busy than some commercial ones, because they have something to show, and you can talk to the developers themselves to ask the question that you always wanted to ask.

Below you can see from left to right an overview of some of the booths, the 3d/wm, Berlin and wine booth, the XFree86 booth, and a booth which presented VRML solution on Linux, with a live demo with glasses, a helmet and a pointing device.

Some of the other projects that presented themselves were FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Debian, FlightGear, Free Software Foundation, GIMP, GNOME, KDE, Krypto, Linux-Audio, Linux-Networking, Linux-Printing, MobiliX, PHP, PingoS, Worldforge, Zope among others.

Commercial

A lot of commercial companies were present to show what they have to offer on Linux. Some of the booths are shown below, with from left to right SuSE (2x), Fujitsu/Siemens, LinuxLand International (2x), Bytec, Pyramid Computer and Compaq. The booths where you could buy software, books or Tux and friends were very popular.

There were hardware companies, software companies, service companies and media companies.

Presentation
As already said above, a lot of presentations were given, most were free to attend. Below there are pictures from the MySQL presentation by a Finnish employee of MySQL AB (who knows his name? It was a difficult one to remember). Databases are not my favourite subject, but the presentation was a very good overview of MySQL from past to future, with some interactive elements in it.

Agenda Computing

Agenda Computing deserves a separate part in this report, because I own a Developer Edition myself. The booth was very busy, and people could try an Agenda themselves. Below you see a preview of an Ethernet cradle, which would be a lot faster than the serial connection we have to use currently. It should be available in fall 2001.

Innominate was also present in the Agenda booth, they are working on a protected email client for the Agenda VR3. It will offer encryption, device authentication, user identification, POP3, IMAP, SSL, TLS among others. The current state of the client can be downloaded.

Qt

Because one of the areas of expertise of my company is portable software development, I spent some time at the Trolltech / Klaralvdalens Datakonsult booth. I talked to Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, president of Klaralvdalens Datakonsult, which offers courses, mentoring, Qt add-on components, a resource converter among others. He is currently working on a new version of his book "Programming with Qt", which is updated to Qt 3.0 and will become available soon after Qt 3.0 is available (Qt 3.0 is currently in beta). They showed their own add-on components on Linux, Mac, Windows and an IPAQ.

Matthias is giving Qt courses all across the world, next week he will be in the Netherlands, enjoying a beer of Grolsch in the evening.

The official web site of the event can be found here.

It was a nice event to attend, but next time I will trade my car for a plane.

Kind regards,

Aschwin Marsman
aYniK Software Solutions

Please mail your comments and/or updates to:

Aschwin Marsman(a.marsman@aYniK.com)