[Open-graphics] Linuxtag 2008

[Michael Meeuwisse]

Hi all,

I promised I'd jot some stuff down about what Atilla, Lourens, myself  
and the guys from FFmpeg and MPlayer did last week in Berlin, where  
Linuxtag 2008 was held. So here goes! I know there where quite a few  
people with camera's, and I also anticipated that so I didn't bring  
mine. So far I only know of the photos Roberto Togni took, which you  
can find here:

http://www.rtogni.it/linuxtag08/

Pictures where taken when Roberto had the time meaning when it was  
quiet, so don't worry, the booth wasn't always as empty as that ;)

The exhibition was divided across two halls and talks where held in  
numerous others, as well as straight across our booth. Subjects of  
the talks varied, but there was a whole series on open office, one on  
open solaris, etc. I can't quite recall, but that was mostly because  
I didn't attend any of them except for one on Saturday. More about  
that one later.

Our booth was tucked in the corner of one of the halls which made it  
a relatively quiet spot to be in. Luckily the posters with the logo's  
looked great and people pretty often came to ask "What is the Open  
Graphics Project?". So our name 'out there' is apparently not /that/  
big. However, the second most asked question (in my opinion) was "Now  
that ATI opened up, what are you guys going to do?" so there's a  
whole bunch of other people out there who know what we do, but don't  
know why.

Having an actual OGD1 card on site helped significantly to catch  
people's attention, and it seemed to be a bit of a trend all across  
Linuxtag to show off with hardware. Robots where driving around,  
openmoko was there, beagleboard had some demos running, coreboot had  
a whole bunch of hardware, etc etc. After the first day we added the  
sign "This is not a graphics card" next to the card because a lot of  
people assumed this was the finished product, claiming we where mad  
trying to sell a $1400 graphics card. The sign really helped people  
realise that this was a /development/ board, and they also seemed to  
grasp more easily that the card can be used for other things than  
just graphics.

This brought up the next item which is that the card uses an FPGA,  
something a lot of people are completely unfamiliar with. After we  
explained them what it was and what you could do with it, they really  
started to liken to the idea of reprogramming your own graphics card.  
If we then pointed out that the 'consumer' version eventually will be  
a non-reprogrammable ASIC pretty much everybody was disappointed,  
giving me the impression that there might be a market for a  
'consumer'-version of OGD1. The whole concept of "Start up Quake,  
reload your card with a Quake-pipeline, and boom, you've got a quake- 
card instead of a general graphics card" was something quite a few  
people found very exciting.

Anyway since we where only with the three of us and sometimes  
couldn't be at the booth 24/4, people got helped out by the guys from  
FFmpeg and MPlayer who basically heard what we told people before and  
tried to answer questions as well. At a certain point I came back and  
Måns asked me "These guys want to know where to order one", so I'm  
not sure what he told them that time around. :)

On Saturday morning Lourens did a talk about Open Hardware and  
discussed what open hardware is, how TT, OHF and OGP are organised  
and what OGP really is. It wasn't attended by a lot of people, I'd  
say about 50 maybe? But then again, it was a Saturday morning.  
Afterwards a whole bunch of questions where asked which brought up  
some nice discussions. I don't know if Lourens put the slides online  
somewhere (yet). The presentation was a nice general overview of  
everything we did, and I think most people could easily follow.

Then, to wrap up this overview, a fun little story about this guy. I  
forgot his name, but he was enthusiastic as hell, during the  
discussion grabbed his laptop and even started to take a good long  
long at the schematics and told me that I should told everbody to (I  
actually wrote this down) "Diodes for voltage circuits, connect them  
to the input rail (pin 4) on page 18 and maybe other ones as well.  
Parallel diodes -> lower resistance -> better". I promised him I  
would, although I couldn't guarantee that we where going to change it  
because well, we're already close to actually producing the cards.  
Didn't matter, he said, change it. But apart from that he thought  
this was a brilliant card and he /had/ to tell a friend (who was  
somewhere around linuxtag as well, just not here at the moment) about  
it so he called him. The reply from the other guy came quick enough,  
"Yeah, I know, I already ordered one.".

A few days later when we had dinner with a whole group of people it  
turned out we where actually sitting next to 'the other guy'. Still  
don't know how much of this was 'coincidence', but it was fun  
nonetheless.

So, that's about it, I'd like to say thanks to the guys from FFmpeg &  
MPlayer for sharing the booth with us and the people of Ubuntu for  
the free bbq, and everybody else for the fantastic week. See you next  
year, same event, but then with a working demo card!

Cheers,

Michael
www.projectvga.org