From: Michael Banck (mbanck@gmx.net)
Date: Sun Nov 17 2002 - 23:26:45 CET
Hi,
OK, so here is my try for a review:
The expo took place in a part of hall 6 at the Frankfurt Messe from
Tuesday, Oct. 29 till Thursday, Oct. 31.
- Booth building-up
Can't really say much here, as I didn't hear my alarm and arrived quite
late to bring the beamer with me :-/
- The Booth
We were really far off, the booth most distant from the entrance in a
corner. On the other hand just opposite of us was the Credativ booth
with Michael Meskes and Noel Köthe, who equipped us with CDs and Flyers
and came over for a chat from time to time. The booth only had one wall,
so we could not put too many posters there, as the beamer was using most
of it. We had to share one DSL connection with the whole .org-Pavillon,
but most of the time it worked out. Two notebooks on a small table and
one desktop in the corner equipped the booth, the beamer was plugged
into one of the notebooks. All computers were i386.
- The Staff
Alexander Schmehl, Jörg Jaspert, Chris Halls and me where at the booth
most of the time. Daniel Priem was at the booth all day on tuesday, Rene
Engelhard helped out on wednesday afternoon and Erik Tews showed up for
a short time on tuesday afternoon, too. As I've said above, Noel came
over several times for a chat and was talking to visitors, too.
- The Visitors
Naturally, there was a quite changing flux of visitors at our booth.
Most of the time, one or two of us was not in conversation and able to
read mail or have a look around at the other booths. There were some
longer periods with no visitors at all (towards the evenings usually)
and sometimes the booth was swamped with people...
There where several types of people coming to our booth:
1. People from corporations or public administration who screened every
project, asking us: 'So, what's special about, uhm, debian?' I told
them general stuff about 'stable', security.debian.org, non-free !=
debian and so on.
2. Similar people as above, but asking like: 'So, I've heard debian has
excellent security updates. How does that work?' They were quite
nice to talk to, the conversation was quite technically usually.
3. Staff from other booths like AMD or Sun going: 'Well, we have to use
SuSE|Redhat at work, but at home I've got debian running of course.
Great work!' They usually stayed for a small chat and/or SuSE-
bashing.
4. Staff from other booths who asked for specific debian-related stuff.
For example, an Oracle employee who was put at the SuSE booth once
came over asking if Oracle ran on debian, and what he could tell
his customers inoffcially if they asked for debian. An AMD employee
told me he'd loved to see an opteron port of debian and was
discussing 64bit versus 32bit user-space a bit with me.
5. Regular users who apparently didn't know debian too well, took a CD
and left.
6. Regular debian users who applauded us for our work and usually
stayed quite a while asking all kinds of general questions and/or
telling stories about their use of debian/linux (blocking
conversation with other, still-to-be-converted people sometimes) One
of them even wanted our autographs on his newly-bought LinuxTag
Debian CD-Set...
7. Regular debian users with very specific questions that we tried to
answer. One of them asked how to install some obscure variant of an
alpha box which needs a custom kernel or something, for example.
8. Celebreties. Klaus Knopper, the guy behind the famous Knoppix
Live-CD visited our booth on wednesday IIRC. He showed how to
install Knoppix permanently on a hardisk and experienced a debian
install for the first time ever. Jörg Schilling was at our
booth for a long time on wednesday and thursday, explaining his
smake build system and some of his other programs to Jörg (and me,
when I was able to listen). Very interesting.
- The Stuff
We had flyers and LinuxTag-CDs. Some people asked for posters or
T-Shirts, but I think they were too few that it would have been worth
the effort (I bought an FSF shirt though). Virtually nobody gave any
donations in exchange for CDs, it's a business thing after all. We ran
out of CDs sometime on Thursday, burning blank CDs for interested
visitors with Jörg's burner. I think flyers were out on thurday, too,
not sure. Oh, and LinuxLand 'donated' some PC-case stickers with a
debian swirl to the developers, after some talking-in.
- The Beamer
Most of the time on Tuesday and Wednesday the beamer was used to show
off 'bb' as a screen-saver. Alexander Schmehl walked a couple of
visitors through the installation on wednesday and thursday which caught
the interest of other visitors even more :) Perhaps we should put a sign
'Installation demonstrations on demand' somewhere at the booth next
time, I think it was a very nice demonstration.
- The Social Event/The Evenings
Sorry, I was not able to attend those, more or less being on holiday at
my parents.
- The Conclusion
I was really happy with the expo. Our booth seemed to be one of the most
frequented of the .org pavillon. I was able to talk to a lot of
interested and interesting persons during the time, as well as chatting
with the fellow developers and users. I think every single person I've
talked to who knew debian already was very positive about it, some
seemed to have come because of our booth alone. The ones who didn't know
about it seemed to be at least a little bit impressed.
Overall, did I say I was really happy to be there?
Until next year hopefully,
Michael
-- <erno> hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is.
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