OpenExpo Day 2

A very bad start...There were no more places left in the parking garages around the exhibitions place. So Timea and I was a bit late but red was already there and has placed the goodies on the table. The morning was the same as wednesday. We were not very busy and had a lot of time to talk with the people from other projects. The consent was that we all play the same game on the same playground and the only difference is the color of our shirts (ok, gentoo was sitting on the penalty bench). And it's not a good idea to convince the users of an operating system, it's better to show them the advantages and answer the questions of them. At the end every user have to made the decision about the operating system she/he wants to use by herself or himself. We also agreed on the most stupid question at the OpenExpo 2007 in Zurich: I'm a XX (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuSE, Gentoo or FreeBSD) user, convince me about xx (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuSE, Gentoo or FreeBSD) ? You are a linux user, good. I or better we don't want and have to convince you. Let Fedora or every other os convince you, take a Fedora 7 DVD or an other live/install media and try it out. Some you will like others you will hate. It's a fact that a lot of users change from Fedora to Gentoo, from FreeBSD to OpenSuSE, and back from Gentoo to Fedora. After lunch I have had a little chat with Shane Coughlan from the fsfe about the importance of having a presence of open source project at events (commercial events, too) in Switzerland because in the past was a lack of this. We remarked that a lot of visitors have no idea what Linux is. It was good that there were not much people till 2 pm because so we have more time to help and explain every important point to them. During the afternoon all Fedora 7 DVDs are gone away (the rest of the sticker and t-shirts too). The guys from freiecomputer.ch have tried the whole afternoon to fix the internet access because all their stuff was online and the organization team wasn't able to fix it. Nobody have had internet access (only the hotspots from the commercial providers were available). After 4 pm most the visitors went back home slowly. Another good time to chat a little with our fellows from the other projects and clean up the booth. Recapitulation A very good idea to make people stop by our booth was a large banner called "GNU/Linux distro Timeline" (from A. Lundqvist published under the GNU Free Documentation License). In Switzerland a lot of end-users don't know Fedora. I guess that's because there is no marketing in this sector. Almost everybody know Ubuntu. But at the other hand the advanced users knows Fedora quite well and asked some very interesting questions. For visitors who are interested in Linux generally it would be helpful when we have flyers (like the one at LinuxTag 2007) for them. The organization team of the event was taking care of the open source part very well. They brought along food and beverages to all the open source guys, free of charge of course and 5-6 times during the day. Now I like to thanks Jenny Happl from Red Hat Munich to provide us with Fedora 7 DVDs. In my eyes it's very important to have high quality produced DVD to give away because after the visitors went home and take the DVD in their hands they can better remember what Fedora is about (the little flyer would help too). This kind of users want to have an overview of the distribution and don't browse through the directories of a mirror server with hundreds of Linux distributions and download one. A big thank goes red and Timea, too. Without their help it would not have been possible to cover this event.