Diff for "KdeExpoList2003" - the.earth's UK Tech wiki

Differences between revisions 22 and 29 (spanning 7 versions)

1. KDE at Linux Expo 2003

See ["DebianExpoList2003"] for dates, links, Debian-people, .org section layout, LPI registration, reminder to bring GPG keys and a passport, suggestions of places to stay.

2. People

Name (Email)	Mobile	Tue 7th - setup day	Wed 8th	Thu 9th	Notes
[http://jriddell.org/ Jonathan Riddell] (debian-wiki@jriddell.org)	07941-938-912	Prob.	Yes	Yes	I have merchandise
David Pashley (debian-wiki@davidpashley.com)	07980-752-297	Prob.	Yes	Yes	One of us (don't let the Debians steal him)
Jono Bacon (jono@kde.org)		Nope	Yep	Yep	Might give a talk, also hanging around with LUG
Paul Cupis (paul@cupis.co.uk)	07762 821809	Probably not	Yes	Yes	May drift between Debian and KDE stands
Chris Howells (howells@kde.org)	07816 528475	No	Yes	No	Bringing laptop with CVS HEAD
Lee Jordan (lee@leejordan.org.uk)		Nope	Yus	Yus	Printing T-Shirts for stall runners, also hanging around with LUG
Ben Lamb (kde@zurgy.org)	07940 538948	No	Yes	Yes	Can bring desktop PC + laptop both running KDE CVS. Need external monitor for desktop or someone to help carry a 15" montior from Brixton.

3. Things on the stall

A (preferably non-laptop) demonstration machine with CVS KDE (I should be able to get one but open to suggestions - jr)
Jonathan has 6 polo shirts (a snip at 20UKP each) and badges ('pins', £1.50 ) to sell and stickers to give away
Jono will bring his stuff from previous expos
Setting up on the Tuesday should not take long, maybe we can arrange a time to do it
We need leaflets to give out, with general KDE info and KDE 3.2 features on it. See kde-promo in (non-anonymous) CVS for inspiration. (I'll try and make something up - jr)
I have one KDE t-shirt to wear, Jono can you bring yours? Sure.
Lee, did you get anything useful made with the SVG logos?

Also:

Please bring 4 way power adaptors and extension leads (if possible with surge protection)
There will be wireless internet on the stand (but not fast)

4. Other things

LONIX will be organising a social event (drinking in a pub) on the Wednesday night:Leaving the expo at 5pm and heading for the Lowlander pub in Covent Garden. Following Lowlander if you are still standing a table has been booked at Spice of London indian restaurant (http://www.spiceoflondon.com/) at 22 Drury Lane for some high quality cuisine. Or alternatively you can stay at Lowlander where they also serve food. Directions to Lowlander Exit Covent Garden Tube station and on your left you'll see a road (for cars!) alled Long Acre. Take a right down this road, go straight over the roundabout and carry on straight until you see Drury Lane on your left (it's also on the right). Take a left and you will see Lowlander on your left.
Car parking limited, pre book spaces by credit card in the multi storey (P3) car park or other venue parking areas by logging onto www.eco.co.uk or by calling the new dedicated telephone booking line on 0871 871 9809

5. Timetable

Tuesday 7th October 12:00 - 21:00 Exhibitors only Setup
Wednesday 8th October 08:00 - 10:30 Exhibitors only, 10:30 - 17:00 Show Open, LONIX pub meeting
Thursday 9th October 08:00 - 10:30 Exhibitors only, 10:30 - 16:00 Show Open, 17:00 - 20:00 Exhibitors only Break down

6. KDE dot news article draft

Linux Expo UK 2003 took place in London on October 8 - 9. KDE took part in the .org village along with twenty other Free Software projects ( <a href="http://jriddell.org/photos/2003-10-linux-expo-kde-stall.jpg">photo from front</a>, <a href="http://jriddell.org/photos/2003-10-linux-expo-kde-stall-back.jpg">photo from back</a>). We demonstrated KDE 3.2 alpha to a constant stream of visitors (over 5 500 were at the show, most of them seemed to be at the .org village stand) and handed out several hundred leaflets.

Several KDE developers including Jono Bacon, Chris Howells and Jonathan Riddell were joined by Debian packager David Pashley (<a href="http://jriddell.org/photos/2003-10-linux-expo-kde-stall-jonathan-david.jpg">photo</a>) and salesman extraordinaire Ben Lamb (<a href="http://jriddell.org/photos/2003-10-linux-expo-kde-stall-ben-and-punters.jpg">photo</a>) to demonstrate the forthcoming KDE 3.2 release and solicit feedback from existing users. We met several companies looking to deploy GNU/Linux and KDE on the desktop and talked to journalists from all the major UK Linux magazines.

The users have decreed KDE 3.2 looks "beautiful". Our demo machine was using the Plastik theme with the Crystal icons.

Besides the beautiful new look, visitors were very impressed with Kontact. For people who knew about KDE 3.2 it was the first thing they asked to see. However confusion abounded that Kontact only worked with Kolab and not standalone. We emphasised that even when running it as a standalone application it is possible to exchange appointments via email and publish calendars to the web.

Everyone had their own wishes. Some users asked for LDAP connectivity, another was very pleased to discover KGPG had all the functionality he needed to easily manage his encrytion and keys. Smaller features such as the new system tray applet for changing the screen resolution and TrueType font previews were universally applauded.

Almost everyone wanted to know if/when their distribution would be shipping KDE 3.2, how they could upgrade and whether we had the code available on CD. It's clear that many users do not know how to upgrade to the latest release and some are still running KDE 2. The difficulty of software upgrades and installation was one of the general GNU/Linux grumbles people kept mentioning. The others were drivers for some hardware (caused by manufacturers who do not work with the open source development process) and the integration issues which <a href="http://pdx.freedesktop.org/Software/hal">HAL</a> aims to fix.

KOffice 1.3 was also demonstrated although most of the people were already using OpenOffice.org. Several people were unaware of KOffice altogether and many did not realise that the applications have improved considerably since its first release. Kexi, the database frontend, was generating a lot of interest but sadly we weren't able to demo it. A number of people asked after <a href="http://uml.sf.net">Umbrello UML Modeller</a> which pleased Jonathan.

Criticism flowed as well, ranging from "the application names are confusing" to "the logo is rubbish". More constructively a plea, from a large corporate, for better documentation about locking down KDE desktops and possibly a GUI front-end to the kiosk framework. It is a shame when KDE has the features but they go unused for lack of documentation or publicity.

An almost continuous stream of people visited the stand on both days. Most were existing KDE users and at least a quarter had been following the progress of KDE 3.2 and would have upgraded anyway. After seeing a demo nearly everyone was convinced that it would be a worthwhile upgrade.

Our stock of polo shirts and badges sold out and almost 500 flyers and stickers were handed out. Next year we will take more.

Article by Ben Lamb and Jonathan Riddell, photos by Chris Howells and UK Linux

-  ⇤ ← Revision 22 as of 2003-10-16 16:48:50 → 
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+   ← Revision 29 as of 2003-10-17 14:01:41 → ⇥
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-Deletions are marked like this.
+Additions are marked like this.
 Line 44:
-Linux Expo UK 2003 took place in London last week.  KDE took part in the .org village along with a dozen other Free Software projects ( <a href="http://jriddell.org/photos/2003-10-linux-expo-kde-stall.jpg">photo from front</a>, <a href="http://jriddell.org/photos/2003-10-linux-expo-kde-stall-back.jpg">photo from back</a>).  We demonstrated KDE 3.2 alpha to a constant stream of visitors (over 5,500 were at the show, most of them seemed to be at the .org village stand) and handed out several hundered leaflets.  Read on for some of their comments.
+Linux Expo UK 2003 took place in London on October 8 - 9.  KDE took part in the .org village along with twenty other Free Software projects ( <a href="http://jriddell.org/photos/2003-10-linux-expo-kde-stall.jpg">photo from front</a>, <a href="http://jriddell.org/photos/2003-10-linux-expo-kde-stall-back.jpg">photo from back</a>).  We demonstrated KDE 3.2 alpha to a constant stream of visitors (over 5 500 were at the show, most of them seemed to be at the .org village stand) and handed out several hundred leaflets.
 Line 46:
-Several KDE developers including Jono Bacon, Chris Howells and Jonathan Riddell were joined by Debian packager David Pashley (<a href="http://jriddell.org/photos/2003-10-linux-expo-kde-stall-jonathan-david.jpg">photo</a>) and salesman extraordinaire Ben Lamb (<a href="http://jriddell.org/photos/2003-10-linux-expo-kde-stall-ben-and-punters.jpg">photo</a>) to demonstrate the forthcoming KDE 3.2 release and solicit feedback from existing users. We met several companies looking to deploy GNU/Linux on the desktop and talked to journalists from all the major UK Linux magazines.
+Several KDE developers including Jono Bacon, Chris Howells and Jonathan Riddell were joined by Debian packager David Pashley (<a href="http://jriddell.org/photos/2003-10-linux-expo-kde-stall-jonathan-david.jpg">photo</a>) and salesman extraordinaire Ben Lamb (<a href="http://jriddell.org/photos/2003-10-linux-expo-kde-stall-ben-and-punters.jpg">photo</a>) to demonstrate the forthcoming KDE 3.2 release and solicit feedback from existing users. We met several companies looking to deploy GNU/Linux and KDE on the desktop and talked to journalists from all the major UK Linux magazines.
 Line 50:
-Besides the beautiful new look visitors were very impressed with Kontact; for people who knew about KDE 3.2 it was the first thing they asked to see. However, confusion abounded about it only working with Kroupware/Kolab. We emphasised that even when running it as a standalone application you can exchange appointments via email and publish calendars to the web.
+Besides the beautiful new look, visitors were very impressed with Kontact.  For people who knew about KDE 3.2 it was the first thing they asked to see. However confusion abounded that Kontact only worked with Kolab and not standalone. We emphasised that even when running it as a standalone application it is possible to exchange appointments via email and publish calendars to the web.
 Line 52:
-Everyone had their own wishes, some needed LDAP connectivity and another was very pleased to discover KGPG had all the functionality he needed. Smaller features such as the new system tray applet for changing the screen resolution and TrueType font previews were universally appaulded.
+Everyone had their own wishes. Some users asked for LDAP connectivity, another was very pleased to discover KGPG had all the functionality he needed to easily manage his encrytion and keys. Smaller features such as the new system tray applet for changing the screen resolution and TrueType font previews were universally applauded.
 Line 54:
-Almost everyone wanted to know if/when their distribution would be shipping KDE 3.2, how they could upgrade and whether we had the code available on CD. Its clear that many users cannot easily upgrade to the latest release and some are still running KDE 2. The corporate users have similar problems and are crying out for a way to reliably deploy updates. If the distributions have tackled this problem they need to publicise the fact.
+Almost everyone wanted to know if/when their distribution would be shipping KDE 3.2, how they could upgrade and whether we had the code available on CD. It's clear that many users do not know how to upgrade to the latest release and some are still running KDE 2. The difficulty of software upgrades and installation was one of the general GNU/Linux grumbles people kept mentioning.  The others were drivers for some hardware (caused by manufacturers who do not work with the open source development process) and the integration issues which <a href="http://pdx.freedesktop.org/Software/hal">HAL</a> aims to fix.
 Line 56:
-KOffice 1.3 was also demonstrated although most of the people were already using OpenOffice. Several people were unaware of KOffice altogether and many did not realize that the applications have improved considerably since its first release. Kexi is generating a lot of interest but sadly we weren't able to demo it.
+KOffice 1.3 was also demonstrated although most of the people were already using OpenOffice.org. Several people were unaware of KOffice altogether and many did not realise that the applications have improved considerably since its first release. Kexi, the database frontend, was generating a lot of interest but sadly we weren't able to demo it. A number of people asked after <a href="http://uml.sf.net">Umbrello UML Modeller</a> which pleased Jonathan.
 Line 58:
-Criticism flowed as well, ranging from the application names are confusing to "the logos rubbish". More constructively a plea, from a large corporate, for better documentation about locking down KDE desktops and possibly a GUI front-end. Its a shame when KDE has the features but they go unused for lack of documentation or publicity.
+Criticism flowed as well, ranging from "the application names are confusing" to "the logo is rubbish". More constructively a plea, from a large corporate, for better documentation about locking down KDE desktops and possibly a GUI front-end to the kiosk framework. It is a shame when KDE has the features but they go unused for lack of documentation or publicity.
 Line 60:
-An almost continuous stream of people visited the stand on both days. Mostly existing KDE users and by my guess at least a quarter had been following the progress of KDE 3.2 and would have upgraded anyway. After seeing a demo nearly everyone was convinced that it would be a worthwhile upgrade.
+An almost continuous stream of people visited the stand on both days. Most were existing KDE users and at least a quarter had been following the progress of KDE 3.2 and would have upgraded anyway. After seeing a demo nearly everyone was convinced that it would be a worthwhile upgrade.