Friday evening, after the last heroes have arrived (quite sick of traffic jams), we were out for supper in a turkish restaurant (same as last year). The waiter was quite funny - when he noticed we were a group of computer geeks, he started talking about some problems he has with his PC. :-)

In the foreground Andreas 'atte' Gelhausen (NetBSD, left side) is talking to Bernd Harries.

This was already taken on the second day. To avoid the problems we had with the restaurant where we stayed lat year (and waited...and waited), I chose a John Benton steak house this time, and they did quite well.

That person with the long hair is no girl, it's Pekka, our far-travelled Sun/3 hacker from Finland! :-)

Another group of hungry programmers, though not The Hungry Programmers. Peter is proudly presenting his GNU T-shirt.

People start to get tired of smiling into the camera. Could it be that Mr. Organizer should have chosen an earlier time for supper? Btw, Klaus Burkert (right side) is not pregnant. ;-)

Ah, they smile again. Or are they just planning how to prepare Baked Franky?

One of the most obvious facts that distinguishes this meeting from the previous one: People brought a LOT more hardware. While in '96 only a few of us had 2 computers with them, this was almost normal this year. Some had even more - I think Arno held the record with 3 (4?) machines. Maybe he'll take his good ol' VAX with him next time. :-)

One might moan that I put them into a 'ghetto' of NetBSDists, but I just think it made sense to put atte, gizmo and ill together at one large desk. Hard to overlook, the NetBSD daemon is sitting on ill's computer. We'll have a close-up of it a little later.

While Jes and Klaus have fun discussing some technical topic, James is trying hard to get his Atari Falcon to work again (it seems to have suffered a bit from the long transport across part of GB, the Netherlands and Germany). In the end, he did manage to get it to work. Quite an adventurous machine, by the way - it didn't look very much like an original Falcon any more to me. :-)

The obligatory picture, presenting almost everyone who attended the meeting.

Top row, left to right:
Roman Zippel, Klaus Burkert, Klaus Weber, Andreas Gelhausen, Hartmut Koptein, Pekka Pietikäinen, Markus Illenseer

Middle row:
James Troup, Geert Uytterhoeven, Roman Hodek, Bernd Harries, Geert Stappers, Jes Soerensen, Jörg Dorchain

Bottom row, kneeling:
Peter de Schrijver, Arno Griffioen, Ingo Wilken, *me* :-)

Not on this photo are Stephan Kuhlmann and Ulrich Neumann.

Most of my visitors left Oldenburg on Sunday evening, but some stayed until Monday (or later) because they didn't want to begin their trip back home after such an exhausting day. So I invited them into my flat to stay overnight. I learnt from this that it's really no big problem to stuff 5 people into that flat - of course, there was quite a bit of snorting during the night, but they all enjoyed it - or so they told me.
Especially Jes enjoyed his brand-new sleeping bag, and on this photo he just seems to have sweet dreams of working APUS kernels, or whatever. The chaos in the background gives a slight indication of what my flat usually looks like. So don't ever dare to visit me without warning me at least 1 week in advance! :-)

This photo was taken early in the morning when all of us were asleep in the room next door...all of us? Not quite, there's still the photographer (Ulrich) and James building .deb's all the time. Tough guy!

Stephan Kuhlmann (left) and Ulrich Neumann (not related to me), both still going to school in Oldenburg, came with a 486 on which we installed Debian during the meeting and an old Sun 3/60 they got for free. That machine was heavily used by Pekka for kernel hacking, and it seemd to be a quite exciting moment for him when he got a message from the kernel that it would be starting an initial thread (I have to admit I cannot judge the importance of this thing happening, but he WAS excited!).

Ok, I take back the word of 'Danger'. :-) This is the mascot of FreeBSD and probably also NetBSD, the daemon - though it doesn't seeem to have its fork() with it. In Germany, you can order both this one and the Linux penguin from http://www.freibergnet.de (no, I'm not affiliated with them nor do I get paid for this blah blah...I just think they're cute).

While Pekka reboots the Sun 3/60 for the 3176th time, I help Stephan with installation of Debian on his PC. By the way, the Sun 3 is now running NetBSD for a while, and seems to be quite good at this (call us traitors - but there is still nothing Linux-like that could be installed on this one). Of course, the machine is now named 'Sunny'.