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[Fwd: Re: [gnome-uk] Thoughts on the Expo]

Forwarding to marketing list.

Guys, Daf sent this to the gnome-uk list. It might be interesting for
anyone doing an expo roundabout now.
-- 
Andrew Sobala <aes gnome org>
--- Begin Message --- 
Ar 22/04/2004 am 18:18, ysgrifennodd Thomas Wood:
> 
> On 22 Apr 2004, at 16:10, Dafydd Harries wrote:
> 
> I got quite a few people asking how I got GNOME running atop of OS X 
> too, although I was running 2.4 since there are no 2.6 fink packages 
> yet. Another question that came up was, "Will 2.6 be in the next Debian 
> release?", but as one person admitted, that is the million dollar 
> question!

Quite. :)

> I think running a remote gnome-session is a good idea, because then all 
> the "screens" appear to have the same setup (one of the laptops was 
> missing epiphany, which made it difficult to demonstrate the new 
> browser if all the other laptops were in use). Having a new user 
> account was also good as it showed the default desktop, and provided 
> some security. It would be nice to have a few files in the home 
> directory though, so as to demonstrate nautilus' abilities.

I'm not sure if it would be feasible to run five sessions from one
machine. :)

I think it's just a matter of installing a complete desktop before
coming to the expo.

I saved the few files we created (the spreadsheet, mainly) at the expo
so that we can use them next time. I think Telsa had a nice directory
with an image and a sound file and some other things - it would be nice
if we had a good set of demo-ready files.

> >We got a network running where my laptop provided a gateway to the
> >wireless network. The wireless network was a bit rubbish though, and
> >occasionally either stopped working or sent you to a "login" page which
> >was really just a "give us your email address and we'll let you use our
> >network" page. (I wonder how many times "foo bar com" logged in.) It
> >often worked enough for us to be able to load the GNOME home page in
> >Epiphany, though.
> >
> 
> It did have some problems, but was unrestricted as far as I could see 
> (http, ssh and imap ports where both open at least). Taking local 
> copies of web pages to future events might be a good idea though, just 
> in case.

Hmm, maybe. When it did work, it worked fine. It was really handy to be
able to open web pages for things the GNOME development book which we
might not have been able to think of in advance, though.

> >Questions people asked:
> 
> One person also asked if we had CDs with GNOME on. Apart from the 
> obvious trouble of cost, I think this shouldn't be too hard to 
> organise. Possibly using the stable GARNOME scripts (I pointed several 
> people to GARNOME as the best place to get 2.6) to create a garchive 
> and then putting the garchive and suitable adjusted garnome 
> configuration on CD. I don't think requesting a donation would be too 
> much to ask.

I'm not sure how useful that would be. It would be difficult to provide
binary packages for all distributions - for the next expo, GNOME 2.8 may
be just out, so binaries might not even exist for all distributions. And
I'm not sure how many people would want to compile it themselves.

It would be nice if we could give people magic GNOME CDs, but I can't
see a way of doing that at the moment.

> There seemed to be a lot of SUSE users who obviously hadn't used GNOME. 
> Any thoughts on the best advice we could give users on switching to 
> GNOME on those distributions that do not provide it as their default 
> desktop? What about advice on switching from KDE to GNOME?

Shrug.

> >Things we showed off / mentioned as being new in 2.6:
> 
> I mentioned the new background chooser aswell to people. Perhaps it 
> would be good to prepare a list of important things to demonstrate to 
> people that would help convince them of GNOME's strengths.

Ah, yes. The release notes would be the thing to base such a list on.

> The "philosophy" behind GNOME's development was something I was keen to 
> tell people about. The ideas of having sensible defaults, no frivolous 
> options, clean and uncluttered interfaces, etc, as well as 
> accessibility and usability. Some thoughts on how to demonstrate these 
> ideas would be useful.

Yes, something else I forgot about. Yes, a few people asked what the
difference was between GNOME and KDE and I tried to explain it in terms
of differences of focus and approach. I don't think I provided any
examples, though.

> >For next time:
> > - Some of us had some discussion with some of the KDE people about 
> >having a joint Free Desktop stand next time around, in order to show
> >a united front and to be able to negotiate a bigger stand. (We got a
> >few snide remarks about how well the GNOME people got on with the KDE
> >people.) I think everybody generally really liked the idea. We worked
> >out that the two stands had about a dozen people between them this
> >time around. - T-shirts! It would be really nice to have T-shirts. We
> >can work our way up to other things (polo shirts, mugs, whatever)
> >later on. I see two potential difficulties:
> >	- Buying the T-shirts. Somebody needs to pay for them before we can
> >	  sell them and reimburse them.
> >	- Getting them to the Expo.
> >At the very least, we really should have T-shirts for the people on
> >the stand. It makes it clear that we're on the stand, and makes us
> >look more professional. Besides, all the KDE people had T-shirts. :)
> 
> There was a call from the GNOME Foundation for t-shirts a little while 
> ago and I duly put an announcement up on art.gnome.org. I sent the 
> designs that I received onto Tim Ney, but I haven't heard whether there 
> was any decision made on an "official" t-shirt. It would not be too 
> hard at all to put a simple design together and get some printed off 
> though, the only concern being initial cost. I am not sure what the 
> Foundation's position would be on this, but I'm sure it would not hurt 
> to ask if they could lend any support.

Absolutely.

> The other thing that would be nice is to actually have a poster/banner 
> both days! This wasn't any fault of the GNOME team, more of the .org 
> village organiser, but if we could get some banners printed (preferably 
> with the new GNOME logo too), this would help prevent a reoccurrence. 
> Also, I noticed the KDE team had some icons and logos dotted around 
> their stand to make it all the more jolly - something we could easily 
> do for next time.

Yes, they had a fair bit of literature on A4 paper laminated and
bluetacked up.

> >Overall impression: a success! I think we managed to raise GNOME's
> >profile in a very positive way.
> 
> Agreed! I even managed to show off the new crash window in GNOME 2.6 on 
> one occasion thanks to Nautilus. A little embarrassing, but not 
> disastrous!

Well, what you're supposed to do there is use it to show the person
you're demonstrating to how much GNOME cares about bugs and user
feedback. :)

Oh yes, I was demonstrating the new file selectors which had a couple of
bugs in. (The bugs have been reported and have to do with the list of
things on the left hand side.)

-- 
Dafydd

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