Hosstraders report

[Benjamin Scott]

On Oct 10 at 10:25am, Ted Roche wrote:
> Bravo to maddog, Ben Scott and Mike Ledoux for manning the Hosstraders booth 
> ...

   I would also like to offer my thanks to everyone who helped out.  maddog and 
Mike, of course.  Also Ted Roche, who brought the *very* nice GNHLUG banner, 
manned the booth briefly, and provided some print services.  Also Bill, 
Heather, and Matt.  I think I missed Ed, I'm afraid.  Aside from the help at 
the booth, I had so many people helping me load my car back up that it was 
done almost before I started.  Thanks, people!

   The crowd reaction to our efforts continues to be good.  As has been noted 
before, the reaction to Linux at Hosstraders has changed from "What's Linux? 
Does it run on Windows?" to frequent "I've been meaning to check Linux out" 
and often even "Yah, of course I use Linux.  You're running Fedora Core 3? 
Man, you're behind the times."  Still, we spread the word to a fair number of 
potential new users, and encouraged others.  Even if people already knew about 
Linux, they didn't always know about Linux User Groups.

   We burned a good number of CDs, although not as many as in previous times. 
That could well have been due to the weather.  In addition to a good number of 
Fedora Core and Knoppix sets, we also saw good interest in The Open CD.  The 
Open CD is a CD of Free/Open Source Software for MS-Windows.  It also includes 
a small bootable, run-from-CD flavor of Linux.  This is an excellent way to 
introduce people to FOSS.  Best of all, if they forget to eject the CD, the 
next time they reboot, they'll get to see how nice Linux is!  ;-)  I believe 
Ted Roche will be presenting on The Open CD at this Thursday's MonadLUG 
meeting.  It's worth checking out if you're in the area.

   We also had one gentleman who was interested in Debian for SPARC, PowerPC, 
Motorola 68K, HP PA-RISC, and SGI MIPS.  Apparently, he is a collector of 
computers, but lives in the North country and has very poor Internet 
connectivity.  Alas, I had (incorrectly) assumed that there could not 
possibly be any interest in Linux for SGI MIPS.  It just goes to show you 
that one size does *not* fit all!

   Thanks again to everyone who helped out or just stopped by.  I'm looking 
forward to doing it again in Spring 2006!

-- 
Ben <dragonhawk at iname.com>