[Ambassadors] Review about the Szabad Szoftver Konferencia 2010 in Szeged, Hungary

[Robert Scheck]

Good evening,

even if I'm home now since Sunday evening, I'll let you know a bit about
Szabad Szoftver Konferencia 2010 (Hungarian: Szabad Szoftver Konferencia
2010) in Szeged, Hungary. The event was held as a conference and took place
at the Educational and IT building of the University of Szeged.

Last Thursday morning, I started my long trip by car near Stuttgart, where
I live. I drove via Heilbronn, Nuremburg and Regensburg and filled my car
with liquid petroleum gas somewhere around Regensburg. As I was still too
far away from Austria, I later had to do another break to get the highway
vignette for Austria. Somebody silly in Austria decided in the past, that
vignettes have to be put on the front window at the car side of the driver
- which minimizes the field of view of the driver. Finally, I found a place
behind the inside mirror and drove further, via Passau (still in Germany),
Linz (Austria) and Vienna, to Györ (Hungary). In Austria, I had to notice,
that liquid petroleum gas isn't common and nearly nowhere available, so I
used regular gasoline once I run out of liquid petroleum gas. Fortunately
the Hungary people use electronic vignettes for their highways, so I didn't
have to immolate another place at the front window in my car.

About 9 hours and 800 km after starting, I arrived at 8:00 pm at Zoltán in
Györ. At Zoltán, I got a great dinner with various Hungarian specialities
(thanks to his mother) before we finally went to bed. After ~ 4.5 hours of
sleep, at 4:00 am on Friday morning, we got up and travelled the remaining
300 km from Györ via Budapest to Szeged in my car, where we arrived at 8:15
am. Fortunately there was a gas station at the Hungarian highway offering
liquid petroleum gas (which is always cheaper than regular gasoline).

Thanks to the organisation of Zoltán, we had a parking place in the basement
garge at the University of Szeged. We started building up the booth and used
e.g. the rollup banners from FrOSCamp/FUDCon Zurich. Unfortunately, we were
nearly the only project with a booth: Mozilla Firefox also had a booth, but
they only rarely attended the booth with personal, just put some swag on the
table and left again.

Closed to our booth, there way a conference room, so when people left and
waited for a talk, we always had really a lot of people at the booth. Some
of them even didn't know Fedora - a mark, that we have too less presence in
Hungary so far. Later at morning, Zoltán gave his talk "Fedora Spins" and
then in the afternoon, I gave my talk "How to get Enterprise Software into
Fedora". In general, I can't say anything about the talks, because they all
were Hungarian - except mine, which was English. And I don't speak any word
Hungarian, just to remember. So Zoltán was always translating a lot at our
booth, if the visitors didn't speak or understand English. Back to my talk:
There were about 50 people in the conference room.

During the day we mainly promoted Fedora, handed out some media and swag,
answered questions around the OLPC XO and tried to encourage new Hungarian
Fedora Contributors and Ambassadors. I don't think we got a new one right
now, but some of the very interested people might get contributors. As far
as I got, there was a Hungarian KDE translator at our booth and people who
created the Fedora OSSMath Spin, which isn't an official spin so far. There
also was the CEO of ULX, the Hungarian Red Hat and JBoss partner, and when
we talked, he mentioned, that he would like to see more Fedora presence at
Hungarian events and that ULX could maybe support Fedora activities in the
future. It would be awesome, if they really support Fedora in Hungary.

Finally, it was really another great event with many interesting people.
I've made pictures and as I dislike Flickr and similar portals, decided
some time ago to start my own tiny gallery at my fedorapeople.org space:

  http://robert.fedorapeople.org/events/2010/szabad-szoftver-konferencia/

In the evening after the event, we cleaned up the booth, checked in at the
hotel and went for dinner. I don't recall the names, but it was Hungarian
fish soup, Hungarian Pancake etc. - Zoltán always kept an eye onto that :)

At Saturday morning, we went to the historical IT museum of Szeged, where
Zoltán managed it to have it opened just for us including a guided tour by
one of the founders. Let me say, that I already was in various museums in
Germany which exhibit old and historic computers and things, but this one
topped them all. There were three huge floors with really old computers and
mainframes; especially from Eastern Europe, Soviet Union/Russia and also
from Hungary. I'm still lacking words to describe that, it's just amazing.
If you would like to get some impressions, have a look to the pictures at
http://www.infmuz.hu/Kepek.htm, but they're showing just a tiny part. And
yes, Zoltán translated the tour for me from Hungarian into English.

After lunch we travelled back to Györ again, but had some traffic jam near
to Budapest. When we arrived at Zoltán's home, I got another excellent
dinner. At that place, I would like to simply say "thank you" to Zoltán's
mother once more. Afterwards, I drove another 350 km homewards to a friend
of mine living near to Linz where I slept as well - before I drove back the
final and last 450 km at Sunday. So I arrived at ~ 7:30 pm at my home...

Even it was hard to me to drive ~ 2200 km across three different countries,
it was definately worth all efforts, missing sleep and the much coffeine at
the way back from Hungary. And as this event wouldn't have been that great
and well organized as it was, I just can send another monstrous "thank you"
to Zoltán!

Zoltán, thank you very much for all your support, translating and efforts!


Greetings,
  Robert
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