Survived LinuxTag

The social event on Friday night was nice - this year, the queue in front of the buffet wasn’t 50m long. At one of the sillier moments we took pictures for Hot Alfie and Hot enrico (ITPs to be submitted X-).

The main event on Saturday was the keysigning party. Peter tried a little variation of the usual "all line up" scheme by initializing it with participants 70 to 1 on the right side and 71 to 154 on the left. Surprisingly, everyone found their place quite fast and we were finished in some 80min. caff seems to be a real success this year, I've already received signatures from some 20 people using it. cabot is still used used by some. I found most other systems either hard to handle (requiring me to sign a challenge several times per key or send mail "from" a uid) or broken (someone claimed one of my keys was signing-only which isn't true). caff cannot yet handle multiple keys in batch, so I will probably implement that before having to sign every key twice.

We started dismantling the booth around 5pm, which caused a last-minute rush for the Debian T-shirts. Apparently, we sold the coolest on the whole fair :-) Back at home at 9pm, I was quite exhausted, but managed to rename all pictures and remove some of the less interesting. If I got some names wrong or omitted some, please tell me.

Overall, Saturday saw more "end users" at the booth compared to the days before, but certainly less than 2004. I don't know how many visitors managed to get one of the free "eticket" invitations, but the default 15€ per day certainly kept some away. If this trend continues, and a good part of the LinuxTag staff is quitting as rumors say, maybe there won't be a LinuxTag 2006 - which would really be sad.

[Update 21:26 UTC: image URLs fixed]

• Debian