I’m just back from my one-day trip to the Linuxday 2007, this year in Berlin. The German PG User Group was not present with a booth. My trip was (among other things) to decide, if we will have a booth next year.
Judging last and this years visitors, the LD seems to be back in business, so I recommend to be present in 2008.
The different BSD groups want to organize some more presence and have asked, if we want to join them in something like “BSD use cases”. Sounds interesting to me, also because the BSD groups did a great job with flyer sponsoring (they have some really good PostgreSQL flyers available) in the past and helped out from time to time, if we had to leave the booth for a short time. The BSD people have the same problem as the PostgreSQL people: it seems, that many companies are using PostgreSQL. But since the BSD license does not require to publish the source or even tell the customer, what OS/database is used, almost nobody knows about BSD/PostgreSQL. Why do we know? From time to time, this companies have a problem they cannot solve and then they are asking in a forum, on a mailinglist or even on IRC. But we should not wait until problems appear, if we want to know about the PostgreSQL usage in companies.
GIS is a very hot topic: the freeGIS group was present, flightgear is using PG and GIS for storing map data. Intevation GmbH is providing GIS solutions and support for authorities.
Oh, and by the way, the Fedora project made my day ;-)
They had two machines installed the same way: troubleshooting contest. Two people try to repair the system which should, according to project members, not even boot without problems or if the machine does boot, it will display an error right after login. Ok, contest starts, I can decide between “normal boot” and “rescue boot”, I took the first one. Linux comes up without problems, root password was gives on a paper and I tried to login. Successfully, no errors at all. That was a very fast contest ;-)