Re: Linux Forum Brussels [Summary]
Martin Schulze announced this event:
> We have been offered a free booth at the Linux Forum Brussels. The
> forum will take place on October 26 & 27 th, 1999, at the AUTOWORLD,
> in Brussels, Belgium. "Linux-Forum 99 is the prime venue for
> interested computer professionals and manufacturers. The event is
> organized in a double fashion." See also http://www.linux-forum.net/
But was unable to be there:
> First I thought that I could run the booth myself but unfortunately
> this is in the middle of the week which makes it difficult for me.
Therefore...
> Thus, I'd like to have one or two people who can help run the
> booth (one maintainer will be there anyway). So if you would like
> to go there, please contact me immediately.
I was there, alone.
But he also said:
> Running a Debian booth requires at least one box for demonstration.
> It's fun most of the time.
and it was true.
Here is my story as the 'official Debian man' :)
Time is a scarce resource and I started to worry about what to do when
Martin said he was unable to be there i.e. late.
I don't live in Brussel. I don't have a car. The booth required one box - at
least one box. This promised to be fun.
So I spent sunday and monday sending mails asking lots of people if I
could borrow them a box. Without much success. Finally I received a
mail from the president of the Brussel LUG (now referred as bxlug) who
offered me a few little boxes (486s and p75). Better than nothing.
And tuesday arrived. I managed to reach the right building (despite I
don't know anything at all about Brussel streets) and looked for our
booth. Nothing. I ask someone for the Debian booth: "I know it was
there" (pointing to an empty corner of the room). It promised to be
fun.
I supposed the problem was that since I was unable to phone to confirm
we'll be there (nobody answered my phone calls) they removed the
booth. Happily a guy from an other booth came to me and said he is the
bxlug president and that we'll share the same booth.
That said everything began to run fine. I opened my heavy bag to take
the box I finally decided to take. And that box was a real success: it
was a Mac SE/30 (running Slink, why bother asking?). I also installed
my hard disks in an other box and voila. People could come, we were
ready.
I answered lots of question about 'that "what???" mac?', spoke about
Debian and why it was better than the other distributions (with lots
of "objective" arguments), installed slink over nfs in a few minutes,
answered general Linux questions, talked with bxlug members, upgraded
the newly installed slink over http, ...
[On wednesday I also met Filip Van Raemdonk who has applied to become
maintainer and we exchanged our keys]
And voila. We had nothing to give/sell (I pointed interested people
to websites where they could buy Debian CDs) but were a popular booth
(we had not our names written on the walls so people were forced to
ask us who we were :) ). It was not a huge event but I had fun and
convinced the bxlug to use Debian :)
The conclusion is that nobody should miss an easy way to meet people
and talk about our lovely system...
Regards,
Frederic
[PS: you're not supposed to reply to this post but if you do please cc
me since I'm not subscribed to debian-devel]
--
Frederic Peters <fpeters@multimania.com> « Le travail a été ce que l'homme
Debian GNU/Linux : http://www.debian.org a trouvé de mieux pour ne rien
Gaby : http://gaby.netpedia.net faire de sa vie. » R. Vaneigem
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