Linux Expo '99 - London
Some of you may know that Debian manned a successful stall at the linux
expo in london wednesday and thursday this week.
I hope the others will interject with their own thoughts, but here are
mine: (I was only there on Thursday)
The event was a success. We had a shoe-box stall, but we managed to cram
around 7 or 8 of us in. We had the Mike from empeg with us for some of it
- and we had his empeg player blasting away quietly.
We managed to muster a tower case intel machine, a miscellaneous ARM
machine, and a rather neat little 'libretto' palmtop running debian. The
last attracted a lot of comment.
We shifted our entire stock of double-CD slink sets - 300 of them - and
most of the freebies that linux emporium had given us, and well as some
rather good debian T-shirts that Phil got printed, so we covered our costs
- indeed, made a slight profit.
We fielded some quite interesting enquiries - lots of public sector people
there, the police, various government agencies - as well as some
non-obvious private companies, like london transport.
SGI came over for a word with us, as did a motorola rep, who wanted to
know if debian runs on motorola chips (it does, of course).
A fair few people were mystified by free software - we had some handy
printed propoganda leaflets, which hopefully people are reading and
thinking about. (The suits found my habit of describing the flyers as
'propoganda' amusing).
Hopefully this forms a good precedent - it had been moderately hard to get
the stall, but Matthew (Vernon) eventually talked the organiser into
giving us the stall which had been booked and paid for by someone who
eventually ducked out...
I managed to con free drinks out of a client of mine for the entire team,
which made a pleasant ending to the afternoon...
Jules
/----------------+-------------------------------+---------------------\
| Jelibean aka | jules@jellybean.co.uk | 6 Evelyn Rd |
| Jules aka | jules@debian.org | Richmond, Surrey |
| Julian Bean | jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk | TW9 2TF *UK* |
+----------------+-------------------------------+---------------------+
| War doesn't demonstrate who's right... just who's left. |
| When privacy is outlawed... only the outlaws have privacy. |
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