I was not supposed to visit LinuxTag this year and but finally I managed to come on Friday evening, 27 June 2009 (special thanks to those who encouraged me). It was also the first day for Fedora’s FUDCon Berlin 2009 session (the most exciting part of LinuxTag09).
I was supposed to give a presentation (about Fedora Electronic Lab) Friday morning, however due to some personal reasons, I could only manage to come on Saturday. My apologies to those who came to my presentation on Friday. However during the week, MaxSpevack and I exchanged some phone calls so that he could takeover my presentation and show how Fedora is the ideal platform to excel in promoting innovative ideas (FEL, in this case) based on free and opensource software. Special thanks to MaxSpevack.
On the way to check-in at the hotel, I met YaakovNemoy, BertDesmet and a few other Fedora contributors. To my surprise, I got the chance to meet JohnMcDonough and his son, JP. Thanks, to JohnMcDonough who reminded me before the freeze of F-11 release notes to write the release notes for FEL. After check-in, I went straight to my room and met my room mate. I was only able to manage a 2 minutes of chit-chat with him when GeroldKassube knocked at the door to fetch me for the Fedora’s social event, FUDPub.
We arrived around 19h30 at the FUDPub. I was shocked by the number of new faces I could not recognized (149 Fedorans subscribed). I barely shared a hug with Max. Most of the usual Fedora EMEA(aside the French) were having chit-chats with their beers. The germans as usual started pointing to me that I was missing something, beer 
. Out of the blue pizza came to the table, so I took a piece and talked with Kanarip, JP, JohnMcDonough and a few others I didn’t even knew their names. I made a small trip to all the tables saying “hi” to everyone I knew. The waiter came with a vegetarian pizza and no-one was eager to eat it. So I took the pizza to MairinDuffy, knowing the fact that Ray and she have a blog about vegetarian food. Hence I managed to talk to her and JesseKeating for a few seconds, when Kanarip and I engaged into a deep conversation (specially about FEL’s Statistics) and lost completely track of what others were doing. At about 01h00, everyone was gone except the Fedora Italians and AlasdairKergon. In accordance to AndreasThienemann, they went to better places.
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