LWCE/SF 2005 Debian booth organization

[John Hauser]

Joshua Kwan wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Hans and I mostly organized this last year and we now have some
> experience of what we should do more of and what we shouldn't. I thought
> we might first recollect our experiences from last year (those who
> manned the booth) and then plan accordingly for this year's.

one thing i did for the Redwood Tech Expo where our local LUG 
<http://humlug.org> had a booth, was to set up 4 small form factor dell 
desktops in a stack under the table connected via a kvm to one LCD 
panel. we stuck a different live CD version in each and had a chair in 
front of the setup so that visitors could sit down and experience the 
different faces of desktop linux. i believe we used knoppix, ubuntu, 
MCNL Montreal and Mepis. we got some good feedback from visitors about 
this setup because they could see that these machines weren't gamer or 
enthusiast quality but more like what they might have as a second 
machine at home.

We stressed the use of Live CDs because of the following points:
- you don't have to climb the install learning curve just to experience 
       linux
- you can experience linux in as small doses as you need on your own 
schedule and always escape back to your own familiar environment
- you don't need to use a slower "second class" machine; you can use the 
same machine that you've got running your main operating system.

most people "get" that the Live CD will be way slower than a hd install, 
they're just not sure they want to go through the install hassles before 
they've decided that they want to try linux on their desktop.

many visitors had tried linux more than a couple of years ago and were 
*amazed* at how the desktop had progressed. we gave away about 350 live 
CDs during the two day expo; mostly knoppix and ubuntu but smaller 
quantities of mepis and kanotix.

since a lot of our members have laptops running linux, next year we're 
thinking of bringing only laptops to the booth.


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