Hi, I just wanted to let you know about our LDD yesterday evening. Our LDD was in Treslinghuis, the regular meeting place of computer hobbiists (HCC) in the city of Groningen. Our LDD was scheduled as the first meeting of HCC after summer holidays. I am lucky to have good connections with Le Reseau, a local Linux dealer in Groningen. He provided me with SuSE 6.1: 150 evaluation copies and some 5 complete boxed sets. Granted, they are old now SuSE 6.2 is available, but a free gift is never bad. At 20:15 I started with a presentation of Dragon Linux, a 8 floppy Linux distribution. Because it is not the high-tech shine KDE interface, I wasn't carried away into to much technical detail. After about one hour people started to ask questions. A discussion arose about the use of Linux in companies. Someone from the audience said companies need support. He got a nice reply from Rik van Riel (http://www.nl.linux.org/~riel, kernel hacker and employed by Le Reseau): our company delivers the support you need. After the central presentation our LUG demonstrated Linux and Linux applications to individual people. In a corner of the room we had approximately 10 computers running Linux, interconnected by coax. We had 2 notebooks (I wish I had one); we had no Alpha, Sparc or other non-Intel computer (but then, running Linux you can't tell them apart anyway). Even though our LUG is always present at meetings of HCC, we have never had this many computers running. The central presentation was followed by approximately 40-50 people. This is certainly not a bad result for the first meeting after summer. At the end, at around 23:30, all 'normal' people had left, most of them with an evaluation copy of SuSE 6.1. We did make some promotion of Linux in the city: - faxes to some local newspapers, though it could have been earlier. - flyers to the main shop in the city selling Linux, though other shops could have been included. - flyers to the library of the university, though other libraries and other educational locations could have been included. - an anouncement on our website, refering to www.linuxdemo.org as well. - anouncements in all relevant Dutch newsgroups and mailing lists. As we don't want to spam, we certainly didn't overdo this. My main learning points: - start earlier (even when the weather is good and the garden needs attention as well) - organize people and search for funding to copy and send/bring flyers to schools and shops. In conclusion It was a good meeting. Thanks to Deepak for starting this. Thanks to other people on this list for ideas on how to present Linux. Thanks to the sponsors, I will present your product in upcoming meetings. Johan Swenker Coordinator of the Linux working group of HCC department Groningen. -- "Some people claim that the UNIX learning curve is steep, but at least you only have to climb it once" --- This message was automatically sent by the Linux Demo Days mailing list To remove yourself from this list, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the "unsubcribe" in your message body.
