Trip & Conference Report Linux Tag 2008

[Marcus Meissner]

Hi,

I was at LinuxTag 2008, which is the largest Linux User fair in Germany.

The fair was from Wednesday to Saturday, however I was only there
Saturday. Saturday was openSUSE day and we (openSUSE) had a conference
track over the whole day. 

One of those talks in this track was my talk on "Wine - applications
and games on Linux". My talk was well received, the lecture hall was
about 80% full with around 180-200 people.

My german slides are at:
	http://files.opensuse.org/opensuse/en/0/08/Lt2008-wine.pdf
	http://files.opensuse.org/opensuse/en/6/66/Lt2008-wine.odp
2 smaller german online journals commented on it, mostly regarding
the 1.0 release part:
	http://www.golem.de/0806/60100.html
	http://www.oszine.de/node/9141
(There might even be a Video recording later on.)

I received totally unexpected applause on announcing that after 15 years
we finally come to 1.0 release (after over 200 alphas, and 60 betas).
After the talk I had 10 people around me asking questions, and one
specific problem with Adobe InDesign FileOpen Dialog on a laptop
brought to the openSUSE booth.



Interesting Wine related points:

- Kai Tietz of mingw64 told me that they have a GCC patch ready for
  gcc 4.4 which will support the Win64 calling convention attribute
  just like __attribute__(stdcall).

  Was committed to GCC TRUNK:
	  http://gcc.gnu.org/viewcvs?view=rev&sortby=date&revision=136311
  __attribute__(ms_abi)

  If we have more GCC requirements for Win64, he is willing to help.

  In general he would like to have Wine as a testbed for mingw64
  development (and we could use it as testbed the other way round).

  http://mingw-w64.sf.net/


- Avira (Antivirus vendor)

  They use Wine in house to at least get some info on Windows DLLs,
  using version.dll.GetFileVersionInformation. 

  While this works for Win32 DLLs, it stopped working/currently does not work
  for Win64 DLLs.


- scan.coverity.com

  Talked to Coverity folks, and also to David Maxell.
  The application will receive an update from Coverity 2.9 to 3.2 in
  the next days/weeks. Not sure if it brings new features.

  Also process issue: We have a large backlog of UNINSPECTED features.
  They suggested that in those cases we could just say "lets not look
  at this old cruft" and mark them somehow "PENDING" or similar. Not
  sure it helps us, but at least we could use "PENDING" for partially
  inspected issues.


- Booth or no Booth

  (We had no booth this year.)

  Since the question will likelay appear again, I thought about whether to
  have a Wine booth itself next year... Well, if we dont have at least 2
  people there over the whole 4 days it does not make sense and finding
  those 2+ people likely is difficult.

  I might be able to spare the time, but this year it was not possible due
  to overlapping schedule. Perhaps its also easier to have a demo-point on
  another larger booth (could ask openSUSE if they would have Wine there).

  At least the Saturday visitors got their knowledge on Wine increased
  by my talk at least.


I got the feeling that people are still quite unsure what works and what
not and expect clear and definitive statements from us.
I pointed to the AppDB several times in those cases and tried not to make
overly positive statements.

People are expectant on 1.0 and I think they are willing to be suprised.

Ciao, Marcus