Ubuntu Wiki

With: Mark, Michel, Peter and Ismaël

First of all we'd like to thank the people of the mailing list who came to support/visit us and made this possible! We appreciate it!

The setup

We didn't took any pictures, sorry guys. We arrived at +- 9 o'clock and we started to set up everything by 10 o'clock we were finished and the people started to enter. We had a little advise by Mark and the party began together with some music of Eddy Wally and La Esterella (Mark's choice).

Our equipment

• 2 flat screens
• 2.1 stereo
• A pc running Edubuntu (sponsored by Peters)
• 2 laptops
• 1 running the Ubuntu 6.10 live cd
• 1 Ubuntu installed version 6.10 and
• On the flatscreens we displayed Edubuntu 6.10 (1pc, 2 flat screens cloned)
• Some candy/Drinks (sponsered by Peter)
• Ubuntu 6.10 and 6.06 cd's
• Kubuntu 6.10 cd's 32bit and 64bit version
• Edubuntu 6.06 and 6.10 cd's
• Ubuntu 6.10 cd's
• Flyers
• 3 coulored posters of Ubuntu
• 2 b/w posters of Ubuntu
• Our sponsoring box (for the people who want to give us some money)
• Motivated volunteers

How the day went

Try to visualise al this stuff together and you will have an image. I don't know why, but we attracted a lot of people +55 Years.

Because we were with 4 people, we really had the time to talk to people seperately. They really felt relaxed because we had enough screens to show them how everything worked and looked like. The first thing after we told what Ubuntu was and stands for was to show them how it looked, because a lot of people have had a bad expirience with Linux in the past. It was to difficult or there weren't any drivers for their hardware. The people who didn' t had any experience with other Linux distro's or just didn't know what Linux was. To them we listed some very known programmes that are used in Ubuntu like Firefox and OpenOffice.org and we had a picture made by Peter on The Gimp that was shown to see how proffessional an Open Source program can be. We also had this for OpenOffice.org. (a spreadsheet, word processor document,..)

So once they saw the new graphical user interface they got interested. Then we could really get their attention and show them how easy it is to use it. If they still didn't believe it, they could test it. Some people went so far they installed the live version, just to see how easy it is. When there were questions, we answered them of course. But it's also very good to point them to the website so they can see, there are people working on it to get Ubuntu known. They do this without gaining any profit on it. Just to support the Ubuntu-spirit.

Once they tested Ubuntu or Edubuntu they asked us how much this al costed, although we had said like 5 times before "everything is free". That was sign, the sign to tell them we sponsored our own team. Just because we believe in the Ubuntu-spirit. Then there were some people who gave us some money. Just stress the point a little that we are working for free and Vista will cost them +-500 Euros (a salesman told there will be 12 versions of Vista and they were advised to sell the version that will cost appr. 500 Euros).

Conclusion

We gained about 35 euros in total and a lot of happy people. They thanked us a lot that we took the time to tell them about a good alternative for Windows. Peter paid the computer fair (38 euros) so we can add the 35 euros to Ubuntu-be for buying flat screens for the fairs. Because a lot of people asked for further support we came up with an idea of making a newsletter. Where they can see what we do, what's up in Ubuntu-be and on which computer fairs we will be. (just a suggestion)

Then we had a dinner, chatted about the computer fair and went home.