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List:       suse-linux-uk-schools
Subject:    Re: [opensuse-edu] Debriefing from NUI France on Event 31st
From:       "James Tremblay" <JT () newmarket ! k12 ! nh ! us>
Date:       2008-07-30 13:02:15
Message-ID: 48902E17.B2A1.00B2.0 () newmarket ! k12 ! nh ! us
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Jimmy,
Thanks for all the work you are doing there. I warms my heart to hear
these stories.
I only wish I could get the time and sponsorship to do as much
evangelizing here!
My little school district thinks I'm nuts working so hard on all this
stuff. Sometimes they are even mad at me. When I walk into the
elementary school and go look at my little LTSP on SLED clients being
used by children and they are all doing something different on one of
the many programs Lars has mad run for us, it is all worth it. I wish I
could find a group of PHP \mysql users to volunteer to help with the
server stuff I am doing. 

I spoke recently at a new conference in NY state , it was only 65 other
educators but I planted some seeds. I hope they grow.

 
 
> > > "Jimmy Pierre" <jimmypierre.rouen.france@gmail.com> 07/30/08 6:01
AM >>> 
Greetings,
This is a long overdue debriefing on our amazing week end at Maubeuge
31st May to 1st June 2008.
Friday night, we settled to have dinner in Paris as we worked all day
and depending on traffic, we felt that it was safer to eat before
hitting the road. We are all on a diet, so it was Mediterranean food! We
waited for the traditional Friday nights traffic jams and took the
motorway, northwards. Three  of hours later, at 43 Kms to Maubeuge, we
met with road works, so we left the motorway for the country roads.
Despite GPS, we got lost and returned to the motorway about one hour
later. Got the hotel alright and Parked the vehicles in a way that
people could not break-in as we were too tired to unload the gear.
The hotel's breakfast was not very interesting, so we headed to the
venue. There was breakfast there, thanks the Lord! After taken some
energy, we deployed the gear, banners, electricity sockets et al : 
Day 1:
5 laptops (3 with openSUSE 10.3, 1 with openSUSE RC3 and one with SUSE
Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP1)
1 Server with openSUSE 10.3 KDE + open-EDU
1 openSUSE 10.3 Gnome
1 Switch 10/100 24 ports
1 Screen switch
openSUSE  DVDs
openSUSE Caps
NUI brochures

We were in business! We were surprised by the number of people that did
not know about SUSE nor openSUSE, we spent a lot of time explaining the
different versions and this really slowed the process of getting them to
play with openSUSE/SUSE. However, we managed to cope with the
overwhelmed visitors to find an alternative to Microsoft Windows and
Ubuntu. We had good contacts with pure Debianists. We had OpenOffice
just on the other side of our wall, but OpenOffice, mingled more with
Ubuntu across the alley. We really had absolutely no time to visit other
stands, that is good, meaning that we were busy, but strictly on the
personal level, it was frustrating as all exhibitors had "lunch" on
their stands.
We had dinner at the hotel after "visiting" the town to find a
restaurant. 
Day 2 :
No breakfast and no church on Sunday as we were due back at 09:00AM.
Breakfast was as on Saturday. There was less people at the venue in the
morning, so we could sort of pop round and see who is who and who is
doing what. At 17:00 we found that Internet was off, and people were
closing down their stands, so we followed the example. We packed up,
gave hugs to our new friends and started our return back home.
Success stories:
1.	The guys who hosted the venue came to each stand to find out
what we do, fraternize and deliver luncheon vouchers and soft drinks.
openSUSE? Kesako? This is the French for "What do you mean? They
visited us quite often and seeing the audience and the affluence, they
did know what openSUSE was and did. They also told security to keep an
eye on our gear at night, because we went to sleep, but the Venue stayed
open 24/24 for the University competition.
2.	As there were many, many university students from all over
France for the competition, that counted towards their Degree, there
were inevitably Teachers!!!! This breed of Evangelists had no clue what
openSUSE/SUSE was  By the time that they feel openSUSE/SUSE, you start
thinking, yes, he/she is hooked, not quite! Until one of them ask just a
question. Hence, "Does openSUSE/SUSE support music programs like
Lilypond ?  �. 

"It's a mystery to me ! The game commences. For the usual fee plus
expenses. Confidential information, it's in my dairy" you start
singing this mentally, because, one, never heard of it and two,
Lolypond? what? But there goes YAST2, my Super Hero and you say,
"Let's install it and find out together…". The guy thought
giving you a challenge. But would Lolypond hurt as much as installing
openSUSE/SUSE on the wife's eeePC? Luckily, it went as a charm, the
teacher Jean-Baptiste was stunned (me too) and he played with Lolypond
and wrote to me the same evening after installing openSUSE 10.3 on one
of his boxes. He said openSUSE is a full and complete OS! Wow!
3.	I noticed a guy popping from time to time and each time we we
were all busy, I smiled at him, acknowledging his presence.  When
finally, his turn arrived, he introduced himself as Grégory from LIMBAS
Software Factory and while talking to me, he lured me to his stand, and
what did I see there? openSUSE with KDE as the solutions he was
promoting. Needless to say as his company is near Champagne and I stayed
3 weeks there in 1986, we became friends and promised to keep in touch!
Here we go, a company is selling its services built on openSUSE and I
never heard of it!
4.	Definitely, I must be paranoid, I noticed another guy, smiling
at me this time and when we could shake hands, we ended up hugging,
because we were cyber friends as NUI and his forum exchanged links ages
ago, Nicolas from alionet.org We never met in person. Well, I mean it
when I said, "Only mountains do not meet!" He is a printer in real
life and proposed to do business cards for nui.fr for free.
5.	Then, we had a special visitor, a Chemist, well you would say
what is the bond between  Chemistry and openSUSE/Linux? Don't ask! The
guy is a Mathematician and wanted quite particular things that we must
have forgotten since we all left College. He immediately argued that
openSUSE could not be used with postgreSQL and de facto, PostGIS
"spatially enables" the PostgreSQL server, allowing it to be used as a
backend spatial database for geographic information systems (GIS), much
like ESRI's SDE… So I trained him in installing his applications from
the Internet with YAST2. He stayed for a couple of hours and finally
adopted openSUSE as he saw the system stayed stable even after all the
ill treatment it endured. He was a Ubuntu/Debian user, Mandriva as well.
(Not to be made public what follows : We will reformat the system for
our next venue, because we have no idea what he exactly
installed/tweaked and how to get rid of these applications.) –End
6.	Among the hundreds of visitors, we had a web 2.0 developper. He
knew of the existence of openSUSE, but never "saw". Tall fellow, if
NUI had a basketball team, I would recommend him. There is a picture of
us both. Debianist, but seemed unhappy, so a DVD, an openSUSE cap and we
were in his good books, he wrote as well and confirmed the shift.
7.	We had loads of Belgians as I guessed would happen, 15 mins to
the venue, and no frontier, why not our Belgian cousins? Many
interesting contacts and a guy selling computers with GNU / Linux and
openSUSE of course. He was happy to learn that his clients would have a
LUG to join!
8.	We were next door to April.org, Richard Stallman's partners in
France. They had no switch, no RJ-45 cables, so I helped the guy with
DHCP from our switch, and they were up and running.
9.	OpenAguila gave us an inside/out demonstration of ERP/CRM and
will consider openSUSE.
10.	BGE, the local government people tried to get NUI to delocalize
to this county in France to counter Microsoft who is opening a
"plant" there with 1500 employees or something like that. They
took Microsoft for economic reasons, but woulg prefer open source stuff
rather. 
11.	A teacher was completely lost when we showed her openSUSE. But,
as an environmentalist, she liked the idea of free software, no paper
manuals etc. She was convinced that the society will have to move for
such a model. We have a fan!
12.	An accountant having  a couple of hundreds of customers liked
the idea that *he* could save money to his customers with openSUSE and
OpenOffice!!!!!
13.	A newly converted to openSUSE decided to call me Mr SUZE because
of the origin of SUSE, hence Germany and Suze as you know is an
intoxicating drink. He emails from time to time.
14.	We had a visitor who really had no idea what the venue was
about, he had problems with XP. He came both days as he took solutions
from most exhibitors and came the next day to tell how he got on.
Interesting, he is still with XP and openSUSE is too "complicated"
for him. As you gather, we will not have this one as a fan!
15.	ETC…
In conclusion, we had a splendid time there, people were motivated to
learn. Sharing was of utmost importance and networking as well.
Of course we have some pictures, here we go :
http://nui.fr/linpha/viewer.php?albid=137&stage=1
more :
http://picasaweb.google.fr/galagann/3iMeSalonDeLInformatiqueLibreDeMaubeuge
A special note for James and all my friends at openSUSE-EDU :
As promised, and in view of the audience present, students, teachers,
we dedicated a openSUSE 10.3 KDE box with 2 Gb of RAM and a 80 Gb HD. In
a nutshell, everybody was interested, even people from the Ubuntu stand
across the alley came back often and play. The Astronomy program caused
a few problems and we had to reboot a couple of times. My philosophy was
to let kids/people play and tell us what they feel/think, that worked!
Furthermore, I was approached by a school that uses Debian in their
classrooms. They liked what they saw and started to regret their
decision wheras taking Debian in the classroom. Some teachers from
Nantes were aggressive and said that the "reference" for IT in the
classrooms was Mandriva *full stop*. Well, as this was their only
argument, we invited them to have a go! After a while, they said
"interesting". The issue was "how do we get support?". We
will certainly need to develop a Mailing List/Forum in French…. [Off
topic] I contacted a government agency last week in order to inform the
Ministries about openSUSE-EDU. Wait and see!
 What now?
We are on the big move! Guys, we need your help as early as you can, so
whatever you can spare for these forthcoming events.

06 – 07 September, 2008 = Lille (2 million visitors! 
http://www.lavoixdunord.fr/Braderie-de-Lille/Languages/2008/07/22/article_welcome-to-our-website-about-the-annual-flea-marke.shtml


20nd September, 2008 : Software Freedom Day – Rouen – One thousand
+

27 – 28th September, 2008 – Tourcoing - Village de l'Economie
Sociale et Solidaire – Thousands +

11th October, Associations Day and meeting with the Mayor of the City
– Rouen – Thousands of visitors.

I look forward to reading you on these projects.
Cheers,
Jimmy


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