[coreboot] LinuxTag 2008 Status

[Paul Menzel]

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
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