I am thinking of organising a stand for BETT next year that would be a joint effort by a number of Linux parties eg SUSE, Mandrake, Redhat, and perhaps small companies from this list. If there is sufficient interest - and I believe now is the time to start planning - collective strength would be better. I also think that by next bet we will have several 10s of schools at least using Linux at the desktop and so it will have much more impact.

While I think this is a good idea... I think it is worth mentioning that 10+ companies on one stand (for example) could actually give the reverse impression.. that Linux is marginalised and not popular.. whereas a whole bunch of Linux oriented stands in a group.. or spaced around the areans.. might be more pervasive. Actually the one stand that interested me most was 'Name forgotton' that sold hardware & software for web-filtering/proxy/cache/etc/etc all for about £2,000 ... but what struck me was that it was all running on Linux.. and that wasn't even really advertised. It was simply a good product.. for a good price. In fact I walked back uninterested until my subconscious made me go back to check out the monitor.. which gave away that it was running debian. Anyway.. back to the point... wouldn't there be some way to stands sponsored by free software advocates.. even FSF so that Linux could get more _space_ at BETT next year. More space is probably better than more companies crowded into one stand. -- Azrael ("\''/").___..--'''"-._ `0_ O ) `-. ( ).`-.__.`) (_Y_.)' ._ ) `._ `. ``-..-' _..`--'_..-_/ /--'_.' .' ((i).-'' ((i).' (((.-' Of all God's creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with a cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat. ICQ#52944566 _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.