Re: [opensuse-edu] Debriefing from NUI France on Event 31st May to 1st June 2008.

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"Jimmy Pierre" 07/30/08 6:01 AM >>> 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

Jimmy, Thanks for all the work you are doing there. I warms my heart to hear these stories. I only wish I could get the time and sponsorship to do as much evangelizing here! My little school district thinks I'm nuts working so hard on all this stuff. Sometimes they are even mad at me. When I walk into the elementary school and go look at my little LTSP on SLED clients being used by children and they are all doing something different on one of the many programs Lars has mad run for us, it is all worth it. I wish I could find a group of PHP \mysql users to volunteer to help with the server stuff I am doing. I spoke recently at a new conference in NY state , it was only 65 other educators but I planted some seeds. I hope they grow. 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_we... 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@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-edu+help@opensuse.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-edu+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-edu+help@opensuse.org