LinuxTag 2011: More Wayland, Ubuntu Pickles

The Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest was not the only European Linux event taking place last week. From Wednesday through Saturday was LinuxTag back in Berlin at their Messe Fairgrounds.

Due to the Canonical event colliding with this annual German Linux conference, I was only able to catch the tail end of the conference this year. While only there briefly, it was yet another great LinuxTag.

There was the usual collection of German and English technical talks along with their show-floor with a variety of booths for Linux distributions (Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, Kanotix, etc), free software projects (libav, etc), and various Linux-related hardware/software vendors.

There were also a variety of workshops and their annual hacking contest. LinuxNacht again was a staple of the event, but sadly most of these events were missed out due to the Ubuntu Developer Summit.

One of the few talks that I had time to attend was one about Wayland, with the speaker being SUSE's Egbert Eich, who was also one of the RadeonHD driver developers. I've got permission to post his Wayland slides on Phoronix soon as he sends them over, which should be within the next day or so. Nothing too ground-breaking during the talk, but a nice overview. I also recorded an iPhone 4 video of this LinuxTag Wayland talk.

On Saturday evening was then the Canonical-sponsored Ubuntu Berlin event. Sadly, it was ill-organized, poorly prepared food, and overall just a mess.

Egbert Eich, for all of his X.Org development work over the years, managed to find himself a free (Ubuntu) pickle before abandoning this Canonical-sponsored event. It was far different from the quality of the Ubuntu Developer Summit and other events. Instead, Phoronix readers (well, those that support our advertisers, are Phoronix Premium subscribers, or use our shopping links) bought him a proper dinner while reminiscing over the RadeonHD days. It was a meal of blutwurst (blood sausage) and apfel-hefe (Apple weiss beer).

While on the AMD topic, on the Sunday prior to the X.Org Developers' Conference 2011 in Chicago (XDC2011) that I am organizing, there may be an open-source AMD birthday party hosted by Phoronix. AMD's open-source graphics driver strategy will be turning four years old this September when the XDC Chicago event is taking place and the RadeonHD driver would have also been turning four years old.

LinuxTag 2012 will be back at Berlin Messe and is taking place towards the end of May in 2012.