Below an event report from the Southwest Computer Conference in the USA.
Awesome work there!
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Subject: Trip Report - Southwest Computer Conference
Date: Monday 06 June 2011, 19:34:25
From: Orv Beach
Our participation in The Southwest Computer Conference went very well.
I gave my presentation at 3 p.m on Saturday to an audience of about
50. Told them there'd be a quiz at the end with prizes, so they paid
close attention :-) I tossed a half-dozen stuffed Novell Tuxes and
openSUSE geckos out to the persons answering the questions properly -
that was a crowd-pleaser :-D Thanks for donating them! The crowd was
very engaged, and asked lots of good questions (I think we're way past
the 'dumb' questions about Linux)
At 5 p.m. Saturday I met with Kevin and Jason on the Expo floor. We
moved all the stuff into the booth from my SUV and set it up. We had
the SCALE banner on a rented pipe & drape, three easels with posters
about Linux (with the SCALE logo at the top of each poster, and an
openSUSE logo at the bottom of the "Linux Installations done here!"
poster).
I also used a projector slaved off of one of our laptops so we could
show visitors various aspects of the Linux desktop. We laid out
openSUSE DVDs and the handouts and swag we had on the tables. The booth
looked as good as any there, and better than the majority.
We had a steady stream of interested visitors past the booth. The
majority of the 200 attendees there must have come by the booth. By my
count we gave away 160 openSUSE 11.4 DVDs, and about as many of our FOSS
informational handouts. I also chatted up a couple of PC club
newsletter editors, who took notes.
We did three successful dual-boot laptop installs, one unsuccessful
(damaged NTFS partition, Jason thinks) - but sent that owner away with
instructions. We were warned about another visitor to the booth with a
non-booting Windows laptop - a high-maintenance, demanding user. We
turned that one over to Kevin, and by booting a Live CD, he was able to
fully recover all her data, transfer it to her thumb drive, and also
determine that the hard disc was failing. So we sent her away fairly happy.
I also helped one guy that had his Ubuntu repository config dorked up
slightly.
I wound up with invitations to present at a couple of other clubs.
One's in Claremont, California. The other is in Sun City, Arizona, at
the big retirement community there. Their club president told me that
they have 2200 members (!) and that 1500 of them have switched to Linux
(?!) If he emails me, I'm going to verify that, 'cause if it's true,
it's a huge win for Linux on the desktop, and deserves a write-up.
I've also had a request to do a repeat Installfest for the Napa
(California) PC club the next time I go up there.
I've posted some photos on the SCALE page on FB. If that doesn't work
for you, let me know and I'll email a couple.
Note that while 200 does not seem like a lot of people at a software
conference, all of the attendees are officials from PC (Windows) clubs
in the United States. They take what they've learned at SWCC back to
their clubs and talk about it. So there's lots of opportunity for FOSS
leverage here :-D
Thanks for assisting with this, guys - it was fun for everyone involved,
and we (FOSS generally, and SCALE and openSUSE specifically ) got a LOT
of positive attention from everyone there.
Orv
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