Quite calm about LiMux? Yes and no - the project is ongoing and there are no outstanding news at the moment. Work has to be done and is perpetually done 
We are preparing the switch to Debian etch for next spring, of course we’ll talk about our experiences
Two people of our linux team are in Edinburgh right now to join this year’s Debian conference, DebConf. As far as I know they’re going to give a talk about our improvements and extensions on FAI and GOsa tomorrow.
More details at this Blog: http://www.marsmenschen.com/2007/06/19/deconf-is-hard-work/
My special greets to Jan and Florian in Scotland
It’s over and I’m back in Munich now, very zapped
I read the articles and blogs about the event and I wonder if some people really attended the same event. In my opinion it was a really great Linuxtag in Berlin compared to the last one in Wiesbaden. Our LiMux info point at the Debian booth was over-crowded from 10 am to 3 pm every day, even on saturday (the day with less people from public administrations, our target audience). I had more than twice as much people attending my talk on wednesday than the one last year and afterwards some really interesting discussions. In our LiMux opinion the booth and the talk were beneficial to spread our message I wrote about on friday. Great 
But I also enjoyed the Linuxtag 2007 as a whole. Of course, there have been some problems at the beginning, e.g. the high and difficult to access info points, the improveable signage inside and outside of Messe Berlin and the missing open air lounges outside the halls, like it was in Karlsruhe. But I’m sure the motivated team will go about all issues and do possible improvements. Berlin is a great city for the Linuxtag and I’m looking forward for the next year’s Linuxtag.
Yes, on thursday and friday the number of interested visitors at our LiMux booth was as high as on wednesday. We had the possibility to discuss the advantages of free software and open standards for the public authorities in detail. One question is, what we are going to sell or what are our goals at this booth. Well, the answer is quite simple: we did it! Free software is an excellent alternative to Microsoft products and it is ready for business use.
That’s our message to other public administrations. You do not longer depend on the Microsoft monopolistic structure, you can choose between a lot of choices. Use an alternative operating system, like we do with our LiMux client, take the first step and switch to OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office, or simply use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer. But you now have the choice to do so, and that’s a great achievement.
I hope other cities will follow, e.g. Berlin will be a interesting migration project. Of course, they have to be aware of huge lobbying activities by Microsoft, but since the last days, the enormous public interest and the press coverage make underground activites more difficult for Microsoft. I whish you all the best, Berlin!
Today I attended a great talk of Martin Michlmayr, a former Debian project leader. The talk was about release management in large free software projects. I got some good ideas to improve our release process for the LiMux client, which partly faces the same difficulties as free software projects. Maybe it is a good improvement to do time based release planning and not only feature based. I discussed some ideas with Martin afterwards and got the idea of a mixture o some release models. We’ll see next week…
Now it’s late and after four days and nights without much sleep I have to be prepared for the last day of Linuxtag 2007 tomorrow
Today started the first Linuxtag at its new location Messe Berlin. My first action was to give a talk about our project’s progress, as I told on monday. But then everything changed in comparison to last year. In 2006 there were only the exhibitors visiting themselves on the first day. This year our shared booth (together with Debian GNU/Linux and FAI) was crowded until afternoon. Great, I hope this will continue on the next days
There have been some television stations interviewing exhibitors, so I hope the media will broadcast some short info spots about Linuxtag and especially LiMux. A 5 minutes interview by the ZDF is online available: here
Additionally I attended an interesting public discussion between some IT leads from the city of Berlin about the future of open source software in Germany’s capital. They face similar organizational problems like we do in Munich and as far as I understand they’ll solve them in the mid-term, but want to try solutions for one example city district asap. The news coverage will show the details during the next weeks…
In general, my first impression of the “new” Linuxtag is mainly great, motivated organizers trying to do their best, a great location at Messe Berlin and a lot of interested visitors - go on this way!