[vox] GTC first day wrapup

[Rob Rogers]

We had a VERY succesful first day at GTC. Our booth was almost the first
thing you saw after walking in the southwest enterance. Last year that
was mainly an exhibitor enterance, but this year there were a lot more
attendees coming through there. (higher exposure for us) I brought 100
double sided CD sleeves to give out Knoppix and GnuWin CDs together, and
I believe we ran out of those by 11:15. Some of these were people who
grabbed and ran, just like last year, but I think we talked to probably
3/4ths of the people who grabbed discs, and there was a lot of genuine
interest in what we had. There were times, especially earlier in the day
when you had literally 10-15 people standing around the booth listening
to a description of Knoppix, and then a rush of "Wow, and these are
free? Can I get one?"

Our average visitor this year seemed to know a lot more about Linux than
I remember from last year. Many approached our booth specificially to
ask Linux related questions, or because they had a friend who had been
trying to get them to try linux.

Bill Heitman brought a laptop running Xandros that we ended up using as
a Knoppix demo machine. We had OpenOffice.org running on there, and I
even had someone who seemed a little surprised when I told him it wasn't
MS Office he was playing with.

I had to leave at around 2pm, so I'm not sure what our totals were for
the day but I think we had given out over 150 of each Knoppix and GnuWin
discs by then. So many in fact that we were really questioning whether
we were going to have enough GnuWin discs to last for the next 2 days. 

It was also nice that people were hearing about Linux from multiple
directions all day. The Novell guys were giving out copies of SuSE, and
really playing up linux on the desktop. There was also a Sun booth
(Govstor actually, but they're a large CA state government vendor of Sun
products) with a Sun Java Desktop machine running. This was actually a
$299 WalMart computer that comes preloaded with Sun Java Desktop.