Linux at Windows World/e-XPO, May 10-11th, 2000.
by Donncha O Caoimh, donncha@linux.ie

Introduction.
The Irish Linux Community was asked to host a stand at Windows World, or e-XPO as it is now called by Mark Egan of Scope, sponsors of the event. If you'd like to read more about the build-up, take a look at the original Linux at Windows World article I wrote last week.

I sat wondering what I could write about this. Could I just tell you what happened at the show over the two days in a chronological manner or should I write this differently? I decided a chronological essay would be boring and anyway, I can't remember everything that went on!

Our Stand
We had a 3x2m stand in the IIA section of e-XPO. In the stand we setup two PCs from PCPRO. One had Suse 6.4, and the other ran Red Hat 6.2, probably the most popular distributions in the country at the moment. Both PCs worked flawlessly, hardware such as video, sound and network cards were all detected easily. Numerous posters were hung up, a few from Red Hat as well as sponsors. Flyers were laid out on a table in front of the stand for people to look through. Along with the base Linux install, we also installed Star Office from Sun Systems to show people what a Linux office suite looks like and to run a small presentation myself and Con Hennesy wrote for the event.
John Looney installed the great looking "Helix Gnome" RPMs on the Red Hat box as a demo of bleeding edge desktop software.
I produced a small php3 web app to record names and email addresses to a text file. It was accessible from a web browser, but I don't think we used it at all. Still, only 10 minutes work.
As Dave Wilson pointed out, it's doubtful any other stand installed their operating system, presentation software, and downloaded their presentation from the Internet the night before and during the first morning of the show!
Thanks PCPRO for the hassle-free machines!

What I saw and heard.
Put simply, there was a whole lot of interest in Linux at the show.
There was 2 to 3 people visiting our stand the whole time, sometimes people were actually lining up outside waiting to talk to one of us! Visitors to the stand included people from all walks of life.
An NT admin asked me about Linux training because a relative was earning $90,000 in the USA doing a Linux job.
A priest asked about DTP and Linux, and although Linux does have a Frame Maker beta it's probably best left to the Mac right now.
People from the Office of the Ombudsman told us they're using Linux in their office as a server.
One man wanted to know how he could make the Linux community aware of the Linux ERP software his company produces.
A French man wanted to know if Linux could help him connect the PCs in his Irish office to the PC in his French office.

A number of Linux developers called to the stand as well. Many are working in Internet related jobs but a few were developing software in other fields too. I only heard about them from others and don't recall the nature of their businesses.
Despite the apparent lack of visible Linux stands in the show map, a number of other vendors were using Linux in their products.
Midland Computers are marketing the "E-Com" server from E-commerce Europe here in Ireland. It's a very nice looking web based suite of applications, with email, contacts, tasks and other goodies available through a secure, encrypted connection to your web browser. I have a demo which I can't wait to install..
Zoom, a company from India had a small ISDN TA with a couple of ethernet jacks. It's smaller than a paper-back novel, and best of all runs Linux! It runs a version of Linux called "Lightning Linux" which has been in development for 2 years according to the brochure I got off them.
Griffin Software are a training company in Dublin and their stand sported a large display which flashed "Linux" up there as well as Tux and other Linux logos. They had a very good show, with lots of interest in Linux training.
Corel were at the show in force! I'd guess there was at least a dozen staff on-hand to show off Corel Linux on any of 4 PCs, each positioned at corners of the stand and on a large screen for demos. I had a glimpse of Corel Office 2000 and it looked very impressive from both the quick showing on the Linux PC by one of their support people and the demos later on. With all the financial trouble hanging over Corel, I wish them luck.

Borland/Inprise were in force at the show. They were giving out evaluation CDs of their products! The ones written in Java work in Linux I'm told, must try them out soon!

One thing that struck us at the stand was how much money could potentially be made here in Ireland by supporting Linux based systems and products. Managers have heard about Linux and want people to install Linux for them and provide "Linux solutions". That became very obvious at the show.

As an aside, I'd like to draw a comparision between the Microsoft and Corel stands. From my description above I hope it was obvious how visitor friendly and "interactive" the Corel stand was. People could go and play with Linux on the Corel stand and get guidance on how an application works from someone who knows the software. The Microsoft stand couldn't have been more different. It was impressive, very impressive actually. They split the stand in two and provided seating for people to watch demos of Windows 2000 on a screen comparable in size to the screen Corel had. Only problem was, it was like being back in school. Feedback wasn't possible. People did attend the demos Microsoft laid on, most of the time the seating was filled during the demos, but outside of the demos? Empty. You might see a Microsoft guy jotting down some notes but otherwise visitors had nothing to see. I wonder why they wouldn't let attendees play with Windows 2000 boxes?

Personal Highlights
The following were posted to the ILUG mailing list over the past few days. Links to the original emails can be found below.

Niall O Broin

Talking to a man from a CD/record distributor who's considering where to go next with an internal database application - they're currently running something on an NT server. I was saying that a big Linux point for me was reliability and stability. I mentioned a box I manage which has been up for a year, and was last down 6 months ago for a new hard disk, and is next scheduled for downtime sometime over the next couple of months for yet another hard disk. I then asked him when his NT server was last rebooted to which he answered - "Well, it did go down once or twice last week, actually"
Stepping onto the Microsoft stand wearing my T-shirt and getting really filthy looks from some of their suits (I didn't realise where I was - I just stood on the stand because it was between me and where I wanted to be :-) )
The Microsoft demonstration where a "This application has executed an illegal instruction . . ." dialog box appeared. Fortunately, I only heard about this - if I'd been there, I'd have ruptured something laughing :-)

Dave Wilson

Realising that we were one of the busiest stands our size at the whole expo. *Definitely* one of the coolest.
The fact that everyone we talked to was quite positive about linux, with a good number taking it very seriously after talking to us.
Taking that picture at the Microsoft stand
Standing in a circle around Brian Lalley wondering who'd volunteer to be interviewed for RTE radio (Saturday 11:30 -> 12:30 by the way - am I right, Kate?)
Demonstrating fantastic remote-maintenance capability by SSHing to a work machine from the stand and running an encrypted Electric Eyes session back to the screen on the spot. Nothing special to you or me, but it knocked people out.
Handing people a Corel/SuSE CD and having them ask "How long is this good for?"

John Looney

Standing in front of the microsoft stand, with a large inflatable Tux, with the microsoft employees (and some visitors) staring at us, wondering what we were doing, and Dave shaking a lot with nervousness, as it was quite likely we'ed all get chucked out.
Talking to the nice men from Aladdin, about their little "16/64k EEPROM on a USB dongle" thing, that they were giving away. And the fact that they would send me an SDK, and some extra info, to judge the scope of writing linux drivers for it (SSH and PHP private keys on a keyring people!!!).
Talking to a nice man from a courseware group, about Him writing linux courses (they already have some written), then giving them to ILUG for free, to be taught to members, and the us being paid to give feedback, for the next version of the courseware.
Checking out the kit Zoom were selling: 10cm by 3cm by 6cm box, with an ethernet port, ISDN port, and power port, running embedded linux, a webserver for configuration, DHCPd, with 128bit stuff for VPNs, NAT, IP chains....for Ł250!!! (and loads of more high end stuff, but nothing you could put in a shirt pocket).
Talking to a nice man about finding loads of linux contractors that would do some development & support of a commercial product. And then seeing him squeal in delight when I beamed him my business card from my Pilot (his pilot was just bought the day before!).
Talking to the really nice (and some were quite pretty) Corel people, who gave us about 150 CDs to give away - and as we were leaving, gave us as much again, for people to bring home. If anyone knows a good way of putting these CDs of Corel Linux to use, drop a mail to the list. They gave me and Ronan Kirby a great big inflatable Tux too.

Donncha O Caoimh

2-3 or even 5 people at our stand all the time while other stands had to hire famous actors or grab people for attention, and a few people said they came to the show because they heard Linux was going to be there.

Related messages:

Behind the scenes
Organising anything requires commitment and help from many people. This event was no different.
I must thank the following people for their help in making the Linux.ie stand at Windows World a success.
Proinnsias Breathnach, Peter Flynn, Con Hennessy, Owen Kelly, Ronan Kirby, John Looney, Fergal Moran, Niall O Broin, John O'Donovan, Christian Van Den Bosch, and Dave Wilson.
Everyone who could make it to the show did a great job on the stand. Most of us hung around for the day. I'd like to mention a few of the things that had to be done "behind the scenes" to get our stand and presentation ready:
John O Donovan organised sponsorship for tshirts and actually had them printed.
Peter Flynn printed 2,500 flyers for the show. We still have quite a few left which will be very useful for our next show!
Con Hennessy wore a shirt and tie to the show, going way beyond the call of duty! He also wrote more than half the presentation we had rolling on one of the PCs and picked up Suse CDs from Suse UK from Griffin Software on Tuesday afternoon.
Owen Kelly printed a great big poster which I'm certain caught the eye of more than one visitor.
Ronan Kirby saved the day on Tuesday by transporting our two PCPRO machines to Dublin in his car. We left it too late to send them via any 3rd party until Wednesday morning which would have set us back a few hours! He and I also organised sponsorship with PCPRO.
John Looney volunteered to do an interview with Radio 1, which I unfortunetly missed :(
I wasn't up on Tuesday night, but I think we have Dave Wilson, both Johns and Niall O Broin to thank for setting up the PCs so well.
Proinnsias was kind enough to drive myself and Peter Flynn to the train station just in time for the train back home!
Thanks must go to Chalkmore Trading for providing us with GPL copies of Red Hat and Suse CDs early on Thursday morning. They didn't last long!
Thanks to Colm Buckley for the Blu Tac and Velcro stickers!
John Foley and Conor Lynch were up from Cork at the expo on Thursday and John solved the not-so-minor problem of taking our machines back to Cork! Hero of the day John!
What did I do? Tried to organise everything and act as a liaison between the people in Scope and other media and the Linux Community. Difficult work, and very tiring!

Pictures

John O Donovan, me, John Looney and Colin in front of the Microsoft stand!

Brian Lally talking with John Looney.

John and Tux are just friends!

Great tshirt eh?

A quiet moment at our stand


John really was attached to that blow up Tux..

Advice on organising your own Linux stand

The internet makes communication very easy, and it's possible to organise something like this over great distances. Unfortunetly there's logistical problems if you're far away and need to transport expensive/fragile computers. Source locally if possible.
Get things organised early. Make sure everyone knows what time they're due to be at the stand. Swap phone numbers and buy a Palm Pilot!
Take the train/plane and get taxis if you're not sure about the city you're visiting. If it's a long journey, don't even think about driving, you'll be too tired to be of any use to anyone at the show, and you might be dangerous on the road if you're tired driving back on the same day.
Communication is very important. Set up a mailing list or CC everyone who's immediately involved with the project. Give each email a distinctive subject so others can filter it into a different folder. Communicate each and every event to these people, and if an email requires feedback, give it. Don't let email wallow in a black hole if possible.
Don't act stupid at the show. Don't insult others, or make yourselves look bad.
Do wear tshirts with Tux and Linux written in big letters and walk around the show. If someone asks you to look at something, ask them if it runs on Linux.
Have fun at the show, but remember you're representing the Linux Community and are the face of Linux to many people who'll only have heard of Linux in news articles, if at all.

Links
Linux at Windows World
Sponsors:

PCPRO

Voyager Internet
Companies mentioned:

e-XPO

Corel Ireland

Slide show in Staroffice format by Donncha O Caoimh and Con Hennessy.

Copyright Donncha O Caoimh, 2000. Copyright of messages quoted above remain with the authors.
First 4 pictures taken by Dave Wilson, last 4 taken by Ronan Kirby.