Hello :-) The "Aquitaine" is a french region between Toulouse and Bordeaux, on the South West of France. This meeting was organised by "AGENUX" the Linux User Group of Agen, small town of this region. This is 200 km fom my home, so I could attend it. The meeting was mainly devoted the discuss between local Linux users Groups. General public was welcomed but not really invited. So I thought it was a very good occasion to promote openSUSE (among other more local things). see images here: http://dodin.org/piwigo/index.php?/category/2228 Where present approx 40 people from 15 groups. As I had some T-shirts from openSUSE, I could wear one and give one as a gift to the leader of the organisation, and this was really appreciated. We all where very well received, with coffee, cakes and at noon fried saussages and chicken with rice, local (very good) wine and strawberries at the end, all this for free! openSUSE was the only officially presented distribution, Mageia being the second one with a member (but nothing to hold a stand). It's not completely openSUSE related, but it's still of interest to know that the main Mandriva related community (locally known as MLO (Mandriva Linux on line) forked from Mandriva and is now completely related to Mageia. Rumor said that Mandriva was now more Russian than french and that the new sponsors are not community friendly, but I can't confirm this, so not to be trusted entirely (even if coming from usually very good source). I could show my new banner (very impressive on a table, see the photos). Knowing this meeting involved groups I could bring a lot of demo dvd and give them to be redistributed to each groups members. The french situation is may be special. 10 years ago SuSE was very well represented, then Mandrake (future Mandriva) come and took 80% of the market. Remember on these times, downloading a dvd from the net was not an option, one had to buy a box. Then Mandrake had problems, become Mandriva and was slowly shrinking when come Ubuntu. Till then the marketting was mostly "use Linux, choose a distro". Then it become "use Ubuntu (is that Linux? may be)". With a cd spreading very agressive politic, at a moment where downloading was possible but not current, Ubuntu took nearly all the market. I always thought this was not friendly for Debian, nor for the other Linux partners. So I'm very glad to see openSUSE becomming more agressive as a distribution on the marketting point of view. During this meeting I had the occasion to say that the problem that have many of our french groups (less members, probably largely because the installation of a distro is now very simple and people need less help) is made worst by the fact that each distro fight for himself and not for the community. We have one main competitor, Microsoft. If we spread out forces, we can't survive. Right now, most french represented distributions agree on this. For the RMLL (Strasbourg 9-14 Jully), we all will share a booth (at least openSUSE, Mageia, Fedora and others). openSUSE certainly made good points on this day... Problems found: I had to make two install on computers aimed to the public of Agenux (the inviter group comed with the computers they use to share with the public and asked me to install openSUSE on two of them). * the first reboot try to use kexec. This fail on many computer, specially on these eeePC Acer. A manual reboot fix the problem; * X fails to correctly detect some low end screens. I had only 1024x600 screens and they where detected as 1280x768, and so no image, only blurred sreen. I could start in failsafe with an x screen, install the nvidia repository and the privative nvidia driver setup correctly the screen. so not a problem for me, but could cause problems for non experienced users at the end, a good day :-) jdd -- http://www.dodin.net http://www.youtube.com/user/jdddodinorg http://jdd.blip.tv/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-ambassadors+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-ambassadors+help@opensuse.org
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jdd