[vox-outreach] Any word on GTC day 2?

[David King]

Assuming that day 2 was today (as I write this, Thursday), it went great! I
had a blast personally, and took pictures for the group.
http://ketralnis.dyndns.org/~ketralnis/GTCPhotos.tar (compression had less
than 4k effect, it's 22mb so watch out! I'll leave it up for 10 days, so try
to hurry and get it). I can write up captions if anyone wants me to, but
most are companies to whom I spoke that use Linux. We were right next to a
company called Tadpole Computers that makes SPARC and Intel laptops that run
Solaris. The Google web accessories, for instance, run Linux. Sun's Java
Desktop is based on SuSe. Novel just bought SuSe, and so I made sure to get
pictures of them, too. The lady at the Novell booth seemed very interested
in presenting to LUGOD, and I gave her a few business cards. She assured me
that the merging will not discontinue SuSe's availability. I got a free copy
of the most recent SuSe from them, I don't have a use for it so I'll try to
bring it to the next LUGOD meeting I attend. I had my iBook running PowerPC
GentooLive to show off, we gave away a ton of Knoppix and GNU-Win-II CDs and
had a lot of questions asked. A huge number of small-business owners and IT
managers and the like showed deep interest in "taking the plunge" and asked
for advice on migration configuration and such. Our booth seems to have done
a lot of good :) Microsoft did a presentation on "Mobile Windows," talking
mostly about Windows XP Tablet Edition and Windows PocketPC. I met a lot of
people with questions about BSD, which is good because I'm a BSD user,
myself. I tried not to advocate too much in a Linux User's Groups booth ;),
but it was very useful to the users to be able to talk about both. Most
people that had heard of Linux seemed to be interested in learning more, and
the people that hadn't heard of it seemed to just walk past the booth, so it
seems that the focus needs to be public awareness. I got a lot of people
saying things like "You guys are doing a good thing, this is a corporate
computing world and that needs to end" and a lot of people very enthusiastic
about what we're doing and rooting us on, so to speak. Those that hadn't
heard of Linux that did attend the booth were very excited that Knoppix is a
"Do no harm" solution, and that we offered the GNU-Win II CDs to get a feel
for OpenSource. Not many people played with the demo machine, but a lot were
surprised that I had it running on my iBook and wanted to play with that.
    In general, it was a great day (I might show up for it, same shift,
tomorrow (Friday), but I can't make any promises. We got the word out, and
everyone that I spoke to was enthusiastic about the OpenSource movement and
about Linux in general. Hopefully the Novell people will get in touch with
us for speaking at a meeting, but if not I'm sure we can contact them and
give it a shot.
    Get ahold of me if you want to know more!

David King
http://ketralnis.dyndns.org/~ketralnis/

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bill Kendrick" <nbs@sonic.net>
Subject: [vox-outreach] Any word on GTC day 2?

> So what's the haps? :)
> I hope today went alright!
> -bill!