Dear list,
Am Donnerstag, den 29.05.2008, 13:39 -0400 schrieb Joseph Smith:
How is LinuxTag 2008 going Peter, Paul, and Carl-Daniel?
Pierre, who offered his help with the booth and is considered a spammer by trac, is also presenting coreboot.
Are you getting alot of people excited about coreboot?
So I will try to give a quick summary of the first two days. I was there about 70 % of it.
- Peter is talking a lot to people. As evidence he is gravelly. Especially after the workshop/talk he gave today.
- The booth is really small and located in the embedded area. Peter brought the GA-M57SLI-S4 SPI and alix1c and their output is displayed variantly on a monitor over Peter’s monitor switch. Most of the time bayou with coreinfo, tint and filo is shown on the alix1c.
I would guess that we talk to about 4–6 people in an hour. But since we are talking to them about 10 minutes the booth is busy most of the time and it would be rather crowded if more people are there. There knowledge on coreboot varies. Even more because of the name change early this year. So the strategy is like
1. Show them how fast it is on by resetting the GA-M57SLI-S4 SPI.
2. Tell them a little bit more about coreboot and some advantages from Carl-Daniel’s list (mainly speed, free software, C code, English error messages).
3. Often answer their question: „How risky is this.”
4. Tell them to look at the website to see if their motherboard is supported.
5. Tell them about flashrom.
6. Give them a flyer with information about coreboot, the website and the list.
Some people have already seen the project last year and have quiet some knowledge about the hardware. Then I need the help from Peter.
1. One guy said there is a well-known problem with the alix1c, that the temperature sensors are not calibrated correctly and asked if that is fixed when using coreboot.
2. Another guy was thinking about a NAS-Device with a Celeron processor. But he will come back some other time, because Peter or Carl-Daniel were busy with the workshop then.
- Although the booth is small and there is not enough room that more than four people have room around the booth, I believe that a lot of people are passing by, because their are just two bare boards sitting on the table and the monitor is displaying a ncurses-menu. The poster has also only coreboot on it. So we do not have a real eye-catcher. Maybe we should hack a screensaver payload which just displays „Want to boot faster?”, „Free your BIOS?” and so on in big ASCII on the monitor or write it on the poster.
When they see the demonstration, they are a little bit more excited. And some even want to take a deeper look at it.
There are also not so many business guys running around—especially no mainboard vendors. So I guess the main objective is, to make coreboot more known to the world and probably attract some potential developers.
If you have some more marketing ideas or objectives, please tell me/us.
- Each of Peter (English) and Carl-Daniel (German) gave a talk/workshop on flashrom today. I listened to the one of Carl-Daniel and there were about 15 people.
- Presenters are supplied with sandwiches (rolls) and some fruit for lunch. I liked, but I do not know, what it is compared to other fairs.
- Carl-Daniel arrived today. But it looks like he left his alix1c board in the cardboard in the workshop room and it was not there anymore when we came back. Hopefully we will find it or the one who took it brings it to the lost-and-found office, because that was the only presentation board, when Peter is leaving tomorrow. And Carl-Daniel is going to have a workshop with this board on Saturday.
Ok, that is it for now. I think I missed a lot and hopefully I did not write wrong stuff. I am enjoying it very much and I really like how nice you guys are also in “reality”, i. e. face to face. It is a real pleasure.
Greeting from Berlin,
Paul