LinuxInfoTag Dresden 2003 -- Report
Although it was the first time the LUG Dresden organised this event, they did a very good job! They had some good talks - including talks about shell-tools, Knoppix remastering and 64-Bit programming - and workshops (including one about LaTeX). They even organised a small barbecue and provided small snacks.
They did a very good promotion job, too. I guess that more than 650 people visited this event, and most of them came to our booth at least once. I took a box with about 125 CDs with me, which we gave away at LinuxTag, and around 100 flyers. Additionally I got some Debian pins and stickers from Credativ.
Well, we run out of pins, before the first visitor arrived. There are many Debian fans in the organisation team and at other project booths. We ran out of CDs at noon, and we hadn't have a single flyer left over at 4pm: Two hours before this event closed.
I think the visitors were a little bit different from those of other events. Normally many visitors know Debian quite well, and have some kind of trouble, while the rest knows GNU/Linux, and like to know what Debian is. This time, there where many people who didn't even know what Linux is (and therefore hadn't even heard of Debian either). So we had to explain what GNU/Linux and free software is in general quite often, also what Debian is in particular, and ... well... what to read (German only, I think it is similar to Learning Debian GNU/Linux) to start with that unknown Linux thing.
I think the explanation for this is, that they promoted the LinuxInfoTag very good at the local university - I heard in every lecture they invited the students at least one time.
There was even a student, who had a problem to install Debian on his Computer, which had some kind of onboard raid system. We managed to get this done finally, when he brought his computer and we googled a little bit.
Sometimes we ran into trouble when showing some things on my own notebook (which runs a sarge/sid mix), because I completely forgot that I had a woody-chroot environment prepared.
Of course we had a good time in a student pub after the event, and in the next morning we had a guided tour through Dresden, too. All in all it was a very nice event, and I'm looking forward to travel there next year as well.
Last not least I would like to thank Erik Schanze, who volunteered to man the Debian booth in Dresden. He did a good job, brought his Computer as well as some other useful equipment (including breakfast and thermos of coffee).
