LinuxForum 2004
This past weekend we had the good fortune to be involved in the 2004 LinuxForum here in Copenhagen. Since we participated last year with the crazy CopenhagenConnectedCycle, they had kindly asked us if we had something to participate with again. Did we ever :-)
We actually ended up doing a pretty informal World Record attempt for Mesh networking using the mobilemesh software from MANET and a lot of participants linux-laptops. Whether it's an actual reord or not is hard to say, but we got 28 simultaneous users onto a single dynamically routed ad-hoc wireless network, all conneting to the net through a single gateway, the ever wonderful Mesh Cube.
It was mobile, it was ad-hoc and it was pretty intense as we spent most of the day helping people get an extremely wide variety of wireless cards to run on their linux-machines. I had my fingers in at least 6 different drivers, and 5 differnt distributions that day. The drivers included madwifi for atheros chipsets, wlan-ng for prism2/2.5/3 chips, prism54 for prism54 chips, orinoco_cs for orinoco chips and both the commercial driverloader from linuxant and the gpl'ed ndiswrapper project for loading windows drivers under linux. The distributions were the usual gaggle of SuSe, Fedora Core, Mandrake 9.2 and 10rc2, Debian, gentoo and both knoppix and morphix for those pesky windows-only laptops. It was fun.
To read more about Mesh networking, check out the article Sebastian and I wrote for the O'Reilly Network.
The second part of our Linux Forum participation was a presentation in the Center-hall, the biggest stage of the event. I think it was one of the biggest audiences I have ever presented to, probably more than 100 people, filling almost all the seats in the area. But it was also one of the best presentations I have ever given, essentially a re-take on the presentation I gave recently at O'Reilly's Emerging Technologies conference, it was in danish, and to a room full of enthusiastic geeks and Open Source supporters. I spent 30 minutes talking about wireless in the developing world, and the Wireless Roadshow (essentially hte Emerging Tech speach in danish), and another 10 minutes drumming up enthusiasm for the world record mesh attempt and adding a little status on wireless drivers for Linux for the geeks in the audience (everyone?).
Feedback from this presentation was amazing, much better than for Emerging Tech, and I've spent some time thinking about why. I was woefully unprepared, especially for the parts talking about status of wirless on linux, down to adding points to the agenda while i was already plugged in to the big screen in front of the audience. OpenOffice acted up, making pictures disappear, and crashing my computer when i tried to change my virtual desktop to show some websites in the browser. I was actually in quite a bt of pain, and unable to stand still on stage. Nevertheless, people responded with enthusiasm, good questions and positive feedback.
I think a large part of it was down to the audience and the fact that the story i was telling was beyond their expectations. Another part of it is that it is an audience I am intimately familiar with. DAnish Open Source geeks are a large part of my professional life :-), and finally i think i was just in the mood, no feeling little pressure to perform, and just highly freeflowing.
