LugRadio Live (Wolverhampton, UK)

[Paul Sladen]

Yesterday, LugRadio Live! happened:

  http://www.lugradio.org/live/2005/

This is the first large community-organised Linux 'exhibition' in the UK
and I found it refreshing lacking corporate blitz (but lacking in corporate
freebies).  LugRadio Live happened in the bar of a football (soccer) stadium
of Wolverhampton Wanders FC, so everything was painted Yellow in colour.

Somehow the LugRadio guys managed to squeeze in lots of people (many who may
not have been in a LUG or Linux-expo before), various distros/open-source/
Free-software groups and a main stage area in the middle of the space for
speakers' talks and recordings.

On the Ubuntu side we had a few surprise visitors fly in (rumour has in that
SABDFL Mark couldn't get permission to land a helicopter in the car-park),
train in (Matthew Garrett, Colin Watson), roll in (Henrik Nilsen Omma), walk
perhaps (Scott Remnant), drive in (I've lot count at this point)...

The new CEO of Linspire, Kevin Carmony was there and shared a panel
discussion with Mark Shuttleworth so I think there was a good bit of
interaction about how the future of Free software will progress!  Hopefully
something may pop up on the BBC thanks to Bill Thompson who was there.

In the four corners we had A Bar (the type that serves expensive alcohol-
based drinks);  next there were most of the stalls (including half an Ubuntu
stand and a Kubuntu stand);  Corner number 3 featured O'Reilly and rounding
off the final-intersection-of-two-walls-at-a-perpendicular angle ('corner')  
there was the exclusive Bytemark+Debian+Ubuntu+Linspire groupage.

Debian bought about 200 t-shirts with various slogans like "We only release
it when it's ready", Linspire had caps with the ever-so thought out
"Linspire" slogan and Ubuntu had CDs (lots of CDs) and still ran out of x86!  
Jonathan Riddell and Chris Halls of Kubuntu-fame were busy dishing blue and
green Konqi Kubuntu CDs.

I had a Debian shirt on (sorry, it'd what I had in my bag when I last set
off three days ago).  But it also help to remind the punters that Ubuntu and
Debian are interlinked and not independent, including many of the people who
stand with at least one foot in both camps.

I've mentioned a few people above, but at this point I'm going to admit that
there were many more people there than I can remember and I expect everyone
has their own story.  (eg. all the other people conspicuously mingling
whilst wearing the exclusive Ubuntu t-shirt swag---Thanks to Canonical, who
also supplied an enormous Ubuntu poster for the wall).

On the useful side, I spent most of the afternoon trying to do an Ubuntu
Hoary net-install (with no internet-access) on somebody's laptop (with no
floppy or CD-rom).  From that experience I think from that I've come up with
a couple of ideas about how we can streamline net-boot/net-install for
Breezy and I found a case where fat32 resize could do with giving more
informative output.

Speak up folks, how was the day for everyone else---hopefully between all
the tip-bits there'll be enough for a news article?

Any photos?  Only ones I've seen so far are from a camera-phone:

  http://www.splashblog.com/andySpace/

which make everything look like it was held in a fish-tank.

	-Paul
-- 
It sometimes snows here.  Cambridge, GB