[brlug-general] A great time at Free Speech Alley.

[willhill]

Blair Smith, a post doc, and myself had a great time showing LSU student 
gnu/linux at Free Speech today.  We gave away all the CDs we brought and 
people wanted more than I could burn on batteries.  The weather was beautiful 
and lots of people stopped by.   They taught us a lot about people's 
familiarity with free software.

The porting of a few good applications to Windows and Mac is a winning 
strategy.  Most of the people who stopped by asked if the distributions we 
were handing out came with Firefox, Open Office and the GIMP.  It's nice to 
be able to tell them that those applications work better in their native 
environment.  Mac users, familiar with Safari, have great respect for KDE and 
are thrilled to learn that Konqueror does even more under gnu/linux.  These 
applications have introduced them to the benefits of free software and 
created brand loyalty.  Six click install live CDs are the easiest way for 
them to get and keep using their favorite applications until vendors start 
selling computers with free software installed at a price point that reflects 
it's true relative cost to non free sotware.  

I've only scratched the surface at LSU and there's plenty more to be done.  
Because few people actually use free software for their primary desktop, most 
people don't know what they are missing.  Even the power users at ACM who 
think they are familiar with gnu/linux don't realize the performance and 
feature gains available.   Opening a c source file in a new tab from a web 
site, sftp transparency and other very nice KDE things surprised some ACM 
members when I demonstrated a little hack to them last week.  Everyone is 
impressed by an E16 desktop with it's transparency, multiple desktops, pagers 
and speed, especially when that speed comes from a five or eight year old 
laptop.  I have to do this again with more CDs, fliers pointing to resources 
like the CCCC desktop sig and brlug mailing lists, better power supplies and 
more light and magic in general.  

Finally, I have to thank all of the nice people who helped make it happen, 
especially Michelle Lowery and Susan Reed.  

I'll have pictures up eventually.