Linux World Expo 2006

[Michael Wood <michael x3n me uk>]

Hi everyone,

Here is a brief report on gnome-uk at LinuxWorld expo 2006

The GnomeUK stand had a good location this year, on the stand we had the 
2 TFT panels, 1 desktop (these from the Gnome event box) and some of our 
own laptops.

We also had prepared leaflets on "why chose gnome", "what is gnome" and 
importantly the GUADEC leaflets. Thos and I had made up a few posters on 
some of the popular gnome applications which had snippets of information 
about them.

This year we also had a special "wall of hate/love" which we invited 
current gnome users to put their comments, hates and loves about gnome. 
This went down pretty well and helped us to actually get down the 
feedback without spending a lot of time writing it down ourselves etc.

The desktop from the gnome event box had been pre installed with the 
latest version Mandrieva and was running XGL and compiz. We also had a 
laptop linked to one of the
TFT monitors which were running AIGLX and beryl/emerald on ubuntu edgy.

Having the fun graphics and showing some of the actual practicalities of 
the new abilities that XGL* introduces brought a lot of attention to our 
stand. At peak times we had quite a crowd, dealt excellently by the 
tireless by the UK Gnome team on the stand.

A lot of the discussion between the members of the public were a lot to 
do with explaining that gnome was the desktop environment. IE a lot of 
them had used distributions that used gnome but had not realised that 
gnome was a separate entity from the distribution it's self, We also 
demoed what people will be able to expect from Gnome 2.16 and future 
desktops (via XGL). Concentrating on the ease of use that has now come 
upon us via the gnome desktop, such as Gnome VFS, USB memory sticks auto 
mounting and so on.
There were a few technical queries about how to do certain things which 
we were either able to solve or we put them up on our  "wall of 
hate/love" .
One of the common questions was what makes gnome different from KDE, 
more specifically what makes it better, these are quite difficult to 
answer I find because it is a lot down to personal taste. Possibly in 
future we ought to generate a sheet that mentions things that makes 
GNOME different from other desktop environments in a direct comparison.

We collected quite a lot of email addresses and business cards for 
keeping people in touch, especially in terms of information regarding 
GUADEC, which quite a few people had heard about but didn't know it was 
going to be in the UK (Birmingham 2007).

Well done to everyone involved, another successful LinuxWorld expo.. 
Bring on GUADEC 2007 !