Suppertime I (Friday)
This is an alphabetical list of the people who attended the meeting:
Klaus 'crest' Burkert Jörg Dorchain Andreas 'atte' Gelhausen Frank 'Franky' Neumann Arno Griffioen Bernd Harries Roman Hodek Markus 'ill' Illenseer Jes Soerensen Hartmut Koptein Pekka Pietikäinen Peter de Schrijver Geert Stappers James Troup Geert Uytterhoeven Klaus 'giz' Weber Ingo 'Nobody/TeaMan' Wilken Roman ZippelAlso, there were two more guests, Stephan Kuhlmann and Ulrich Neumann, two pupils from a school from Oldenburg. They brought a Sun 3/60 and hoped to get Linux/m68k running on it - though it was far too early at that time for even a running kernel. But Pekka was very happy to be able to use that machine for hacking his kernel.
So, without any further repeating of what I wrote last year about that year's meeting (it's always the same motivation :-), here are the pictures (the large sizes are only available through the ftp:// method, as my ~/public_html would otherwise exceed its quota). Clicking on the thumbnails will get you the large versions, which are all in the 25 - 70 KBytes range.
Suppertime I (Friday)
Friday evening, after the last heroes have arrived (quite sick of traffic jams), we were out for supper in a turkish restaurant (same as last year). The waiter was quite funny - when he noticed we were a group of computer geeks, he started talking about some problems he has with his PC. :-)
In the foreground Andreas 'atte' Gelhausen (NetBSD, left side) is talking to Bernd Harries.
Suppertime II (Saturday)
This was already taken on the second day. To avoid the problems we had with the restaurant where we stayed lat year (and waited...and waited), I chose a John Benton steak house this time, and they did quite well.
That person with the long hair is no girl, it's Pekka, our far-travelled Sun/3 hacker from Finland! :-)
Suppertime III (Saturday)
Another group of hungry programmers, though not The Hungry Programmers. Peter is proudly presenting his GNU T-shirt.
We Heap hungry! (Apologies to M.P.)
People start to get tired of smiling into the camera. Could it be that Mr. Organizer should have chosen an earlier time for supper? Btw, Klaus Burkert (right side) is not pregnant. ;-)
Still Suppertiming IV
Ah, they smile again. Or are they just planning how to prepare Baked Franky?
Lots of Hardware
One of the most obvious facts that distinguishes this meeting from the previous one: People brought a LOT more hardware. While in '96 only a few of us had 2 computers with them, this was almost normal this year. Some had even more - I think Arno held the record with 3 (4?) machines. Maybe he'll take his good ol' VAX with him next time. :-)
The NetBSD crew
One might moan that I put them into a 'ghetto' of NetBSDists, but I just think it made sense to put atte, gizmo and ill together at one large desk. Hard to overlook, the NetBSD daemon is sitting on ill's computer. We'll have a close-up of it a little later.
Is it working? Is it working now?
While Jes and Klaus have fun discussing some technical topic, James is trying hard to get his Atari Falcon to work again (it seems to have suffered a bit from the long transport across part of GB, the Netherlands and Germany). In the end, he did manage to get it to work. Quite an adventurous machine, by the way - it didn't look very much like an original Falcon any more to me. :-)
Early in the morning...
This photo was taken early in the morning when all of us were asleep in the room next door...all of us? Not quite, there's still the photographer (Ulrich) and James building .deb's all the time. Tough guy!
Our young guests.
Stephan Kuhlmann (left) and Ulrich Neumann (not related to me), both still going to school in Oldenburg, came with a 486 on which we installed Debian during the meeting and an old Sun 3/60 they got for free. That machine was heavily used by Pekka for kernel hacking, and it seemd to be a quite exciting moment for him when he got a message from the kernel that it would be starting an initial thread (I have to admit I cannot judge the importance of this thing happening, but he WAS excited!).
The Red Danger
Ok, I take back the word of 'Danger'. :-) This is the mascot of FreeBSD and probably also NetBSD, the daemon - though it doesn't seeem to have its fork() with it. In Germany, you can order both this one and the Linux penguin from http://www.freibergnet.de (no, I'm not affiliated with them nor do I get paid for this blah blah...I just think they're cute).
Busy activity everywhere
While Pekka reboots the Sun 3/60 for the 3176th time, I help Stephan with installation of Debian on his PC. By the way, the Sun 3 is now running NetBSD for a while, and seems to be quite good at this (call us traitors - but there is still nothing Linux-like that could be installed on this one). Of course, the machine is now named 'Sunny'.
Da whole posse, man.
The obligatory picture, presenting almost everyone who attended the meeting.
Top row, left to right:
Roman Zippel, Klaus Burkert, Klaus Weber, Andreas Gelhausen, Hartmut Koptein,
Pekka Pietikäinen, Markus Illenseer
Middle row:
James Troup, Geert Uytterhoeven, Roman Hodek, Bernd Harries, Geert Stappers,
Jes Soerensen, Jörg Dorchain
Bottom row, kneeling:
Peter de Schrijver, Arno Griffioen, Ingo Wilken, *me* :-)
Not on this photo are Stephan Kuhlmann and Ulrich Neumann.
Sweet dreams are made of this.
Most of my visitors left Oldenburg on Sunday evening, but some stayed until
Monday (or later) because they didn't want to begin their trip back home
after such an exhausting day. So I invited them into my flat to stay
overnight. I learnt from this that it's really no big problem to stuff
5 people into that flat - of course, there was quite a bit of snorting
during the night, but they all enjoyed it - or so they told me.
Especially Jes enjoyed his brand-new sleeping bag, and on this
photo he just seems to have sweet dreams of working APUS kernels, or whatever.
The chaos in the background gives a slight indication of what my flat
usually looks like. So don't ever dare to visit me without warning me
at least 1 week in advance! :-)
Yeah, that's all folks. What else to say? Well, with a bit of pushing from your side *hint hint*, there might be a third (and final) meeting here in 1998, probably again around September. I say 'final' because I'm pretty sure that I won't be in Oldenburg one year later - yeah, I really make progress regarding my studies. Of course, I already said that 7 years ago, but.. :-)
Yet again, I enjoyed the meeting - I hope everyone else did. It would be really nice to see you all again here some day.
Special thanks go to the following persons for helping me in planning, organizing etc.:
Back to my home page.
Frank Neumann (Franky) E-Mail: Frank Neumann@informatik.uni-oldenburg.de / April 12th, 1998