Tuesday
I sent Jonathan Corbet a couple of advance copies of the LNX-BBC 1.618, and so LWN did a really nice review of our BBC on Tuesday morning. (They mistakenly said that Linuxcare was not continuing its own bootable CD project, so I wrote in to correct them.)
Duncan and I were a little late getting to the conference, because we had to go down to the Hall of Justice to apply for an amplified sound permit from the Permits Section. (Duncan, you see, has government-issued photo ID.)
We were told to come to a hearing Wednesday, so we went in to the show, and spent some time in the EFF booth collecting donations and talking to people about the LNX-BBC system and EFF's work (especially on the DMCA). We were giving out LNX-BBCs in the booth -- with a request for a $5 donation to EFF -- as Duncan had received a few thousand of them from Hong Kong Monday morning. (Our duplicator is Wing Shing Optical, and we are very happy with them.)
Duncan and I gave a conference talk about bootable Linux CDs, with a special emphasis on the LNX-BBC project. There was a mixture of history, discussion of LNX-BBC features, and general overviews of technology (boot loaders, El Torito, initrd, our init script, cloop, and so on, as well as other alternatives to handle compression). We did enjoy bragging about some of the neat stuff which is available on our CD-ROM. We were a little disorganized, but we had a nice time and the audience seemed pretty impressed (and grateful for all the free CDs we passed out).
We did have plugs for EFF and for the Free Dmitry events during our talk, and we also did a live demonstration of some of the BBC's features, including downloadable packages (but unfortunately not sound, because Duncan's demo machine is an IBM ThinkPad 600E). Duncan said that some members of the audience had been confused, or alienated, or something, at one point during my talk.
"What, when I mentioned the kernel not being able to use real-mode BIOS calls to read the CD-ROM in an El Torito no-emulation mode boot, once the kernel jumps into protected mode?"
"No, they were fine with that part. It was the math."
You see, the version number of our release (1.618), is a math joke -- it's phi, the Golden Ratio. So I'd taken the opportunity to explain this and I had a whole slide discussing some of the properties of the Golden Ratio. It was that slide which Duncan said the audience liked least. Alas! Where have all the math geeks gone?
After our talk, an FBI agent who'd been in the audience came up and introduced himself to us. (We spotted the Fed! Oops, wrong conference...)
This reminds me that one person who came by the EFF booth on Tuesday afternoon was a military intelligence officer who works on computer crime -- I'm not eager to identify his service, because perhaps his superiors wouldn't be thrilled that he was talking to EFF. But he looked at our literature about Dmitry Sklyarov and said that it was a shame that Dmitry had been arrested, and that he hoped Dmitry would be freed soon. It was nice to hear that.
EFF gave out a large number of flyers for the Free Dmitry party and the Free Dmitry protest march; I also got the Free software Foundation, Debian Project, and Usenix to distribute those flyers. The Debian booth was selling "debian/rules" shirts (which is a good joke if you have ever compiled a Debian package). Some people have speculated that Debian created a rules file so that Debian would get a good Sucks-Rules-O-Meter score.
A group of people who were either from the Debian project or fans went out to dinner at Buca di Beppo, my very-well-received recommendation. It was really fun.
During the day, we kept on passing out BBCs, and Linuxcare kept on passing out LBTs. We received a steady stream of comments about how cool the BBC system was, and EFF got a fair number of donations in exchange for CDs.
