Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-edu (60 mails)
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[opensuse-edu] Debriefing from NUI France on Event 31st May to 1st June 2008.
- From: "Jimmy Pierre" <jimmypierre.rouen.france@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 12:01:08 +0200
- Message-id: <48903bf1.0b38560a.4e26.36ba@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Greetings,
This is a long overdue debriefing on our amazing week end at Maubeuge 31st May
to 1st June 2008.
Friday night, we settled to have dinner in Paris as we worked all day and
depending on traffic, we felt that it was safer to eat before hitting the road.
We are all on a diet, so it was Mediterranean food! We waited for the
traditional Friday nights traffic jams and took the motorway, northwards. Three
of hours later, at 43 Kms to Maubeuge, we met with road works, so we left the
motorway for the country roads. Despite GPS, we got lost and returned to the
motorway about one hour later. Got the hotel alright and Parked the vehicles in
a way that people could not break-in as we were too tired to unload the gear.
The hotel’s breakfast was not very interesting, so we headed to the venue.
There was breakfast there, thanks the Lord! After taken some energy, we
deployed the gear, banners, electricity sockets et al :
Day 1:
5 laptops (3 with openSUSE 10.3, 1 with openSUSE RC3 and one with SUSE Linux
Enterprise Desktop 10 SP1)
1 Server with openSUSE 10.3 KDE + open-EDU
1 openSUSE 10.3 Gnome
1 Switch 10/100 24 ports
1 Screen switch
openSUSE DVDs
openSUSE Caps
NUI brochures
We were in business! We were surprised by the number of people that did not
know about SUSE nor openSUSE, we spent a lot of time explaining the different
versions and this really slowed the process of getting them to play with
openSUSE/SUSE. However, we managed to cope with the overwhelmed visitors to
find an alternative to Microsoft Windows and Ubuntu. We had good contacts with
pure Debianists. We had OpenOffice just on the other side of our wall, but
OpenOffice, mingled more with Ubuntu across the alley. We really had absolutely
no time to visit other stands, that is good, meaning that we were busy, but
strictly on the personal level, it was frustrating as all exhibitors had
“lunch” on their stands.
We had dinner at the hotel after “visiting” the town to find a restaurant.
Day 2 :
No breakfast and no church on Sunday as we were due back at 09:00AM. Breakfast
was as on Saturday. There was less people at the venue in the morning, so we
could sort of pop round and see who is who and who is doing what. At 17:00 we
found that Internet was off, and people were closing down their stands, so we
followed the example. We packed up, gave hugs to our new friends and started
our return back home.
Success stories:
1. The guys who hosted the venue came to each stand to find out what we
do, fraternize and deliver luncheon vouchers and soft drinks. openSUSE? Kesako?
This is the French for “What do you mean? They visited us quite often and
seeing the audience and the affluence, they did know what openSUSE was and did.
They also told security to keep an eye on our gear at night, because we went to
sleep, but the Venue stayed open 24/24 for the University competition.
2. As there were many, many university students from all over France for
the competition, that counted towards their Degree, there were inevitably
Teachers!!!! This breed of Evangelists had no clue what openSUSE/SUSE was By
the time that they feel openSUSE/SUSE, you start thinking, yes, he/she is
hooked, not quite! Until one of them ask just a question. Hence, “Does
openSUSE/SUSE support music programs like Lilypond ? ».
“It’s a mystery to me ! The game commences. For the usual fee plus expenses.
Confidential information, it’s in my dairy” you start singing this mentally,
because, one, never heard of it and two, Lolypond? what? But there goes YAST2,
my Super Hero and you say, “Let’s install it and find out together…”. The guy
thought giving you a challenge. But would Lolypond hurt as much as installing
openSUSE/SUSE on the wife’s eeePC? Luckily, it went as a charm, the teacher
Jean-Baptiste was stunned (me too) and he played with Lolypond and wrote to me
the same evening after installing openSUSE 10.3 on one of his boxes. He said
openSUSE is a full and complete OS! Wow!
3. I noticed a guy popping from time to time and each time we we were all
busy, I smiled at him, acknowledging his presence. When finally, his turn
arrived, he introduced himself as Grégory from LIMBAS Software Factory and
while talking to me, he lured me to his stand, and what did I see there?
openSUSE with KDE as the solutions he was promoting. Needless to say as his
company is near Champagne and I stayed 3 weeks there in 1986, we became friends
and promised to keep in touch! Here we go, a company is selling its services
built on openSUSE and I never heard of it!
4. Definitely, I must be paranoid, I noticed another guy, smiling at me
this time and when we could shake hands, we ended up hugging, because we were
cyber friends as NUI and his forum exchanged links ages ago, Nicolas from
alionet.org We never met in person. Well, I mean it when I said, “Only
mountains do not meet!” He is a printer in real life and proposed to do
business cards for nui.fr for free.
5. Then, we had a special visitor, a Chemist, well you would say what is
the bond between Chemistry and openSUSE/Linux? Don’t ask! The guy is a
Mathematician and wanted quite particular things that we must have forgotten
since we all left College. He immediately argued that openSUSE could not be
used with postgreSQL and de facto, PostGIS "spatially enables" the PostgreSQL
server, allowing it to be used as a backend spatial database for geographic
information systems (GIS), much like ESRI's SDE… So I trained him in installing
his applications from the Internet with YAST2. He stayed for a couple of hours
and finally adopted openSUSE as he saw the system stayed stable even after all
the ill treatment it endured. He was a Ubuntu/Debian user, Mandriva as well.
(Not to be made public what follows : We will reformat the system for our next
venue, because we have no idea what he exactly installed/tweaked and how to get
rid of these applications.) –End
6. Among the hundreds of visitors, we had a web 2.0 developper. He knew of
the existence of openSUSE, but never “saw”. Tall fellow, if NUI had a
basketball team, I would recommend him. There is a picture of us both.
Debianist, but seemed unhappy, so a DVD, an openSUSE cap and we were in his
good books, he wrote as well and confirmed the shift.
7. We had loads of Belgians as I guessed would happen, 15 mins to the
venue, and no frontier, why not our Belgian cousins? Many interesting contacts
and a guy selling computers with GNU / Linux and openSUSE of course. He was
happy to learn that his clients would have a LUG to join!
8. We were next door to April.org, Richard Stallman’s partners in France.
They had no switch, no RJ-45 cables, so I helped the guy with DHCP from our
switch, and they were up and running.
9. OpenAguila gave us an inside/out demonstration of ERP/CRM and will
consider openSUSE.
10. BGE, the local government people tried to get NUI to delocalize to this
county in France to counter Microsoft who is opening a “plant” there with 1500
employees or something like that. They took Microsoft for economic reasons, but
woulg prefer open source stuff rather.
11. A teacher was completely lost when we showed her openSUSE. But, as an
environmentalist, she liked the idea of free software, no paper manuals etc.
She was convinced that the society will have to move for such a model. We have
a fan!
12. An accountant having a couple of hundreds of customers liked the idea
that *he* could save money to his customers with openSUSE and OpenOffice!!!!!
13. A newly converted to openSUSE decided to call me Mr SUZE because of the
origin of SUSE, hence Germany and Suze as you know is an intoxicating drink. He
emails from time to time.
14. We had a visitor who really had no idea what the venue was about, he
had problems with XP. He came both days as he took solutions from most
exhibitors and came the next day to tell how he got on. Interesting, he is
still with XP and openSUSE is too “complicated” for him. As you gather, we will
not have this one as a fan!
15. ETC…
In conclusion, we had a splendid time there, people were motivated to learn.
Sharing was of utmost importance and networking as well.
Of course we have some pictures, here we go :
http://nui.fr/linpha/viewer.php?albid=137&stage=1
more :
http://picasaweb.google.fr/galagann/3iMeSalonDeLInformatiqueLibreDeMaubeuge
A special note for James and all my friends at openSUSE-EDU :
As promised, and in view of the audience present, students, teachers, we
dedicated a openSUSE 10.3 KDE box with 2 Gb of RAM and a 80 Gb HD. In a
nutshell, everybody was interested, even people from the Ubuntu stand across
the alley came back often and play. The Astronomy program caused a few problems
and we had to reboot a couple of times. My philosophy was to let kids/people
play and tell us what they feel/think, that worked! Furthermore, I was
approached by a school that uses Debian in their classrooms. They liked what
they saw and started to regret their decision wheras taking Debian in the
classroom. Some teachers from Nantes were aggressive and said that the
“reference” for IT in the classrooms was Mandriva *full stop*. Well, as this
was their only argument, we invited them to have a go! After a while, they said
“interesting”. The issue was “how do we get support?”. We will certainly need
to develop a Mailing List/Forum in French…. [Off topic] I contacted a
government agency last week in order to inform the Ministries about
openSUSE-EDU. Wait and see!
What now?
We are on the big move! Guys, we need your help as early as you can, so
whatever you can spare for these forthcoming events.
06 – 07 September, 2008 = Lille (2 million visitors!
http://www.lavoixdunord.fr/Braderie-de-Lille/Languages/2008/07/22/article_welcome-to-our-website-about-the-annual-flea-marke.shtml
20nd September, 2008 : Software Freedom Day – Rouen – One thousand +
27 – 28th September, 2008 – Tourcoing - Village de l'Economie Sociale et
Solidaire – Thousands +
11th October, Associations Day and meeting with the Mayor of the City – Rouen –
Thousands of visitors.
I look forward to reading you on these projects.
Cheers,
Jimmy
--
To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-edu+unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-edu+help@xxxxxxxxxxxx
This is a long overdue debriefing on our amazing week end at Maubeuge 31st May
to 1st June 2008.
Friday night, we settled to have dinner in Paris as we worked all day and
depending on traffic, we felt that it was safer to eat before hitting the road.
We are all on a diet, so it was Mediterranean food! We waited for the
traditional Friday nights traffic jams and took the motorway, northwards. Three
of hours later, at 43 Kms to Maubeuge, we met with road works, so we left the
motorway for the country roads. Despite GPS, we got lost and returned to the
motorway about one hour later. Got the hotel alright and Parked the vehicles in
a way that people could not break-in as we were too tired to unload the gear.
The hotel’s breakfast was not very interesting, so we headed to the venue.
There was breakfast there, thanks the Lord! After taken some energy, we
deployed the gear, banners, electricity sockets et al :
Day 1:
5 laptops (3 with openSUSE 10.3, 1 with openSUSE RC3 and one with SUSE Linux
Enterprise Desktop 10 SP1)
1 Server with openSUSE 10.3 KDE + open-EDU
1 openSUSE 10.3 Gnome
1 Switch 10/100 24 ports
1 Screen switch
openSUSE DVDs
openSUSE Caps
NUI brochures
We were in business! We were surprised by the number of people that did not
know about SUSE nor openSUSE, we spent a lot of time explaining the different
versions and this really slowed the process of getting them to play with
openSUSE/SUSE. However, we managed to cope with the overwhelmed visitors to
find an alternative to Microsoft Windows and Ubuntu. We had good contacts with
pure Debianists. We had OpenOffice just on the other side of our wall, but
OpenOffice, mingled more with Ubuntu across the alley. We really had absolutely
no time to visit other stands, that is good, meaning that we were busy, but
strictly on the personal level, it was frustrating as all exhibitors had
“lunch” on their stands.
We had dinner at the hotel after “visiting” the town to find a restaurant.
Day 2 :
No breakfast and no church on Sunday as we were due back at 09:00AM. Breakfast
was as on Saturday. There was less people at the venue in the morning, so we
could sort of pop round and see who is who and who is doing what. At 17:00 we
found that Internet was off, and people were closing down their stands, so we
followed the example. We packed up, gave hugs to our new friends and started
our return back home.
Success stories:
1. The guys who hosted the venue came to each stand to find out what we
do, fraternize and deliver luncheon vouchers and soft drinks. openSUSE? Kesako?
This is the French for “What do you mean? They visited us quite often and
seeing the audience and the affluence, they did know what openSUSE was and did.
They also told security to keep an eye on our gear at night, because we went to
sleep, but the Venue stayed open 24/24 for the University competition.
2. As there were many, many university students from all over France for
the competition, that counted towards their Degree, there were inevitably
Teachers!!!! This breed of Evangelists had no clue what openSUSE/SUSE was By
the time that they feel openSUSE/SUSE, you start thinking, yes, he/she is
hooked, not quite! Until one of them ask just a question. Hence, “Does
openSUSE/SUSE support music programs like Lilypond ? ».
“It’s a mystery to me ! The game commences. For the usual fee plus expenses.
Confidential information, it’s in my dairy” you start singing this mentally,
because, one, never heard of it and two, Lolypond? what? But there goes YAST2,
my Super Hero and you say, “Let’s install it and find out together…”. The guy
thought giving you a challenge. But would Lolypond hurt as much as installing
openSUSE/SUSE on the wife’s eeePC? Luckily, it went as a charm, the teacher
Jean-Baptiste was stunned (me too) and he played with Lolypond and wrote to me
the same evening after installing openSUSE 10.3 on one of his boxes. He said
openSUSE is a full and complete OS! Wow!
3. I noticed a guy popping from time to time and each time we we were all
busy, I smiled at him, acknowledging his presence. When finally, his turn
arrived, he introduced himself as Grégory from LIMBAS Software Factory and
while talking to me, he lured me to his stand, and what did I see there?
openSUSE with KDE as the solutions he was promoting. Needless to say as his
company is near Champagne and I stayed 3 weeks there in 1986, we became friends
and promised to keep in touch! Here we go, a company is selling its services
built on openSUSE and I never heard of it!
4. Definitely, I must be paranoid, I noticed another guy, smiling at me
this time and when we could shake hands, we ended up hugging, because we were
cyber friends as NUI and his forum exchanged links ages ago, Nicolas from
alionet.org We never met in person. Well, I mean it when I said, “Only
mountains do not meet!” He is a printer in real life and proposed to do
business cards for nui.fr for free.
5. Then, we had a special visitor, a Chemist, well you would say what is
the bond between Chemistry and openSUSE/Linux? Don’t ask! The guy is a
Mathematician and wanted quite particular things that we must have forgotten
since we all left College. He immediately argued that openSUSE could not be
used with postgreSQL and de facto, PostGIS "spatially enables" the PostgreSQL
server, allowing it to be used as a backend spatial database for geographic
information systems (GIS), much like ESRI's SDE… So I trained him in installing
his applications from the Internet with YAST2. He stayed for a couple of hours
and finally adopted openSUSE as he saw the system stayed stable even after all
the ill treatment it endured. He was a Ubuntu/Debian user, Mandriva as well.
(Not to be made public what follows : We will reformat the system for our next
venue, because we have no idea what he exactly installed/tweaked and how to get
rid of these applications.) –End
6. Among the hundreds of visitors, we had a web 2.0 developper. He knew of
the existence of openSUSE, but never “saw”. Tall fellow, if NUI had a
basketball team, I would recommend him. There is a picture of us both.
Debianist, but seemed unhappy, so a DVD, an openSUSE cap and we were in his
good books, he wrote as well and confirmed the shift.
7. We had loads of Belgians as I guessed would happen, 15 mins to the
venue, and no frontier, why not our Belgian cousins? Many interesting contacts
and a guy selling computers with GNU / Linux and openSUSE of course. He was
happy to learn that his clients would have a LUG to join!
8. We were next door to April.org, Richard Stallman’s partners in France.
They had no switch, no RJ-45 cables, so I helped the guy with DHCP from our
switch, and they were up and running.
9. OpenAguila gave us an inside/out demonstration of ERP/CRM and will
consider openSUSE.
10. BGE, the local government people tried to get NUI to delocalize to this
county in France to counter Microsoft who is opening a “plant” there with 1500
employees or something like that. They took Microsoft for economic reasons, but
woulg prefer open source stuff rather.
11. A teacher was completely lost when we showed her openSUSE. But, as an
environmentalist, she liked the idea of free software, no paper manuals etc.
She was convinced that the society will have to move for such a model. We have
a fan!
12. An accountant having a couple of hundreds of customers liked the idea
that *he* could save money to his customers with openSUSE and OpenOffice!!!!!
13. A newly converted to openSUSE decided to call me Mr SUZE because of the
origin of SUSE, hence Germany and Suze as you know is an intoxicating drink. He
emails from time to time.
14. We had a visitor who really had no idea what the venue was about, he
had problems with XP. He came both days as he took solutions from most
exhibitors and came the next day to tell how he got on. Interesting, he is
still with XP and openSUSE is too “complicated” for him. As you gather, we will
not have this one as a fan!
15. ETC…
In conclusion, we had a splendid time there, people were motivated to learn.
Sharing was of utmost importance and networking as well.
Of course we have some pictures, here we go :
http://nui.fr/linpha/viewer.php?albid=137&stage=1
more :
http://picasaweb.google.fr/galagann/3iMeSalonDeLInformatiqueLibreDeMaubeuge
A special note for James and all my friends at openSUSE-EDU :
As promised, and in view of the audience present, students, teachers, we
dedicated a openSUSE 10.3 KDE box with 2 Gb of RAM and a 80 Gb HD. In a
nutshell, everybody was interested, even people from the Ubuntu stand across
the alley came back often and play. The Astronomy program caused a few problems
and we had to reboot a couple of times. My philosophy was to let kids/people
play and tell us what they feel/think, that worked! Furthermore, I was
approached by a school that uses Debian in their classrooms. They liked what
they saw and started to regret their decision wheras taking Debian in the
classroom. Some teachers from Nantes were aggressive and said that the
“reference” for IT in the classrooms was Mandriva *full stop*. Well, as this
was their only argument, we invited them to have a go! After a while, they said
“interesting”. The issue was “how do we get support?”. We will certainly need
to develop a Mailing List/Forum in French…. [Off topic] I contacted a
government agency last week in order to inform the Ministries about
openSUSE-EDU. Wait and see!
What now?
We are on the big move! Guys, we need your help as early as you can, so
whatever you can spare for these forthcoming events.
06 – 07 September, 2008 = Lille (2 million visitors!
http://www.lavoixdunord.fr/Braderie-de-Lille/Languages/2008/07/22/article_welcome-to-our-website-about-the-annual-flea-marke.shtml
20nd September, 2008 : Software Freedom Day – Rouen – One thousand +
27 – 28th September, 2008 – Tourcoing - Village de l'Economie Sociale et
Solidaire – Thousands +
11th October, Associations Day and meeting with the Mayor of the City – Rouen –
Thousands of visitors.
I look forward to reading you on these projects.
Cheers,
Jimmy
--
To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-edu+unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-edu+help@xxxxxxxxxxxx
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