The expo was quite interesting but far more corporate than FOSDEM. I was disappointed at the high prices of the tickets to see any of the talks - I think it was about £75 per session which is too much for us lowly developers… They didn’t provide any kind of network access to us either, so we were cut off from the world and unable to fetch anything we didn’t have mirrored on disk already. We got set up with a dual xeon box loaned to us by James (edit_21) for the duration of the show along with a 15" TFT screen. I brought along my new toy - the Acer Ferrari 4005. I did manage to break it a little by recompiling everything with GCC 4.0.2… It actually works really well apart from the sucky ATI binaries which fail to load because they are binary and I am forced to wait until ATI choose to recompile their drivers (assuming they can) using GCC 4. As a result 3D performance was poor, and the silky smooth cube demo I was going to put on it ground to a jerky holt! The ComputaShop kindly printed the large G logo and donated the CD-Rs and printed labels for us to use at the show too. Once the portage xorg-x11 ebuild contains the patch for the open source drivers to work on my ATI X700 PCI-E graphics card I think I am going to abandon the binary drivers unless I need them for opengl (I hardly use that stuff anyway). When I do I should probably be working! I learnt something new whilst at the expo too - cokehabit actually does something productive for Gentoo! He is one of the contributors to the GWN, and I have a wonderful picture of this colourful Gentoo user at the expo
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