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Exhibition: Interim Summary



Hi,
up to now, the booth is a great success. We attracted many people,
got much attention, and broke some stigmas (a.k.a. "stingas" - Adi
Neuman :-)
Everything works perfectly (including KDE, Samba, Gimp, Internet
connection, 16bpp rather than 8bpp we had before, and even VNC -
when something is going wrong with VNC and the visitors say: "Hey,
we thought it was a stable OS", we answer: "Sorry, it is Windows,
not Linux..."

The location of the booth and the timing could not be better: Linux
is so hot and "in" now, and everybody comes to see what is this
"best" OS. The booth is nice, with the impressive penguins Shachar
and Nir printed, some surprising banners, and many prospects (half
are colored marketing brochures, and half are avocacy - "Linux:
Myths vs. Reality". All in Hebrew).

Except for some quiet times, most of the time the booth is crowded.
The big managers that I used to meet in previous exhibitions don't
visit us, but many other famous people, especially teenagers, are
coming and staying for 20-30 minutes. For example, the famous 13
years-old genious who developed a cute and safe GUI for Windows 95
for kids (called "Vilonot 95"), Roy ("BillySoft Ltd."), visited us,
demonstrated much knowledge, and looked very pro-Linux one. Another
famous teenager was the "Analyzer", who came with his father, and
the only thing that I could learn from (after more than 20 minutes
talk) was that he didn't use any buffer overflow (he *claimed* that
he didn't know what was "buffer overflow"). BTW: He prefers
Slackware over RedHat.

Burning CDs was not a good idea - although we didn't have many
alternatives. We could not order RH5.1 (Cheapbytes is beginning to
burn then only on 15). After I finished my invoices (I didn't have
many) and after installation problems with one of the buyers, I
decided to stop the selling, and to start a list of interested
people - I'll rearrange a batch order after the exhibition, in a
very low price, of RH5.1. It is much easier to exhibit without
making packages all the time and writing invoices. You cannot make
marketing and sales together - and marketing is more important;
Our interest is not to sell CDs, but that everyone will have,
install, and use Linux.

The three most important things that visitors lack, are easier
installation, support for their critical applications (especially
MS-Office + Hebrew) (let's hope that Insignia will agree to port
its cool SoftWindows to Linux), and Hebrew support (you can blame
me for this one).

The following will be done AFTER the exhibition:

1. Posting invoices for people who donated money or sponsored the
   consultant's list (as you probably understood, I finished my
   invoices, so I have to wait till new invoices will be printed).
2. A big import of Linuxes for all the people who wanted to buy
   and couldn't.
3. Credits and thanks to all the people who contributed time/money
   /prints/etc. for the success of the booth. I don't have the
   complete list, so I'll publish a version 0.9 of this list, and
   let you fix me or adding names that I missed.

Hoping to see the rest of you tomorrow (sorry, today :-O  ),
-- 
Eli Marmor
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