The demo day for the Ames Area Free UNIX Group (http://www.aafugit.org) in Ames, Iowa, was actually extended over the course of two weeks. If you go to the User Group list and read our plans, you'll see that we organized a four phase effort to reach potential new users of Linux. We began on September 8th with our monthly Free Unix User's group meeting. As this was the first meeting of a new semester, we used this opportunity to recruit new members and ask for more volunteers for the demo day projects. We placed posters all over campus and all over town and as a result we had about 40 new members turn up. Of the people who subsequently volunteered for the other projects, about 50% were new people who attended this meeting. We followed this with a Linux panel discussion on September 10th on the Iowa State University campus. I gave a brief history of Open Source and Linux and we had a high school student, a freshman, a senior, a member of a research team and a member of the local business community discuss how they used Linux at home, at school and at work, including pitfalls as well as good reasons why one would want to use it. The discussion was well attended with about 50 people in the audience. Then, on the evening of September 10th, the demo day volunteers met to discuss coordination and software installation. We chose a group of applications we felt must be on the machines and then proceeded to install them. We chose to have two machines at each location, one demonstrating Gnome and the other with KDE. We installed the Loki game demo, a copy of Quake and a copy of Descent on each machine. We also installed WordPerfect, Star Office and Applix on each machine. One of our members contacted Cygnus and was able to obtain a copy of Code Fusion so we demoed this at one location as well. Finally, we designed a poster which would be on display on an easil at each location describing who we were and what Linux was. We also created posters advertising our group and advertising an installfest we carried out this past Saturday as the fourth phase of our demo day. We had pizza, talked and had a lot of fun until 1:30 am. Our actual demo day was September 15 and it went very well. We set up in three locations. The first was at the campus Computation Center where I am employed and it was here where we received the most traffic. Many of the people passing through were tech-heads and hence we agreed we would have the best shot with them. The highlight of this location was a demonstration of VMWARE. One of our volunteers installed Windows 98 on his machine in his dorm, using VMWARE running on his machine in his dorm, with the display open on the demo machine so that we could watch it. The second location was completely a suprise. One of the local computer stores came to us, having heard about LDD elsewhere, and asked if they could volunteer their location and their equipment. They set up a large sandwich board out front and had Linux running on a strawberry-colored Imac inside (that was an interesting site in itself) in addition to an Alpha and our own machines. The third location was at our local shopping mall where we partnered with Waldenbooks. The mall manager had heard of Linux and helped out in every way he could. Waldenbooks provided tables in return for our allowing them to set up a book kiosk to sell books. The most requested software were word processing packages and a way to run Win32 applications under Linux. The more scientifically minded were quite pleased to find that Linux came with X windows and compilers they currently used in their research. Highlights of the demo day: (a) The following conversation, repeated several times: Interested person: "How much is it?" Us: "It's free" IP: "Really. How much is it?" Us: "It's free." (b) seeing all the couples walking by the display at the mall, the men wanting to come over and look and the women dragging them onward. (c) The number of women interested in Linux. One woman even told me her boyfriend had installed it and she wanted to learn it for herself so she wouldn't have to be so dependent on him. Thanks to MacMillan, we had books for her to look at. We kept a tally of how many people we talked with and, in total, we answered questions for over 300 people at the three locations. All of these events were designed to lead up to an installfest we had two days ago on Saturday, September 18th. Friday night, we once again got together and discussed the best way to proceed. We set up five machines as network servers and two burning stations. The networking part took the most of our time. This was done in one room. We also planned to have non-network installs proceed in another room (using CDs). We spent the rest of the evening burning CDs and making boot floppies. The next day we opened our doors at noon and at 12:10, we had five people show up. Three network installs and two non-network installs. We burned more copies of software during the day and in the end completed 20 installs. Many of these people were people we had talked with at the demo day. The first install was actually for a woman, which made me quite happy. There were a few pitfalls involving installs which took us 3 or more hours but due to the level of knowledge we had present, we were able to send everyone out the door with a Linux installation. We had LinuxPPC and *BSD installations available as well but there were no takers. The most popular installs were RedHat and Mandrake followed by Slackware, SuSE and OpenLinux. The one definite upside of this whole event was that it allowed our user group to bond more than it had before. We are a much stronger organization than we were two months ago. It also gave me a lot of pride to see so many people volunteering time and equipment to help out. We began planning in July and it appears that that was sufficient for us. We'd really like to thank SuSE, Linuxcare and MacMillan. All of the items they sent were popular and useful (especially the business card boot CD from Linuxcare). Kudos also go out to Cygnus and Applixware and especially to Penguin computing. I saw one of their hilarious posters at the Open Source Convention. I called them and requested 10 more and they were nice enough to comply. The posters attracted several people to our table and brought a laugh or a smile to the faces of many more. RedHat, well, what can I say. The distro for which we had the most requests for information at the demo was RedHat. They really dropped the ball on this one. They could have had free publicity if they had only sent something, even flyers. If there is a demo day next year, and only one day is chosen, we will probably hold ours on a weekday as we did this year, regardless of whether the rest of you hold yours on a Saturday or a Sunday. Weekdays are the times when we are most likely going to catch students and faculty members on campus. In addition, many people here go home on the weekends. I hope this won't disqualify us from participating. Finally, I would to thank all of you for your suggestions and your example flyers and press releases. They were very useful. Special thanks go to Deepak for organizing the whole thing. It was a very good idea and a lot of fun to do. See you all next year! Dave Edsall Ames Area Free UNIX Group --- This message was automatically sent by the Linux Demo Days mailing list To remove yourself from this list, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the "unsubscribe" in your message body.
