Ubuntu at the Trenton Computing Festival

So, today I joined fellow LoCo Team members for the first time to advocate the use of Ubuntu LInux at a local computing expo at TCNJ.

We had barely finished setting up when we started getting bombarded with requests for the “New Ubuntu” Apparently the Canonical/Community PR machine has been doing a good job informing people about Ubuntu and its upcoming releases. We had four machines burning i386 ISO’s non-stop and they went as fast as we could burn them. Several current users stopped by and got a CD becuase the mirrors were to slow to download it for themselves.

Aside from the current users of Ubuntu (or other Linux) the people were in general VERY accepting of the idea of Linux on the desktop and, as a general rule, scared of the demise of XP and the “rise” of Vista. Of course, Joe Terranova(leader of the NJ LoCo team) dual-head compiz-enabled desktop certainly convinced all passer-bys that Ubuntu could more than surpass any other system for Beauty, as well as functionality.

In the afternoon, I headed over to watch Joe’s “Stump Speech” on Linux, Ubuntu and the Loco Team. The audience seemed quite interested, especially with the ability to virtualize windows. The speech was concluded by a general following of Joe back to the Ubuntu display to give the audience Live CD’s.

We then helped a guy get his wireless working under Hardy Heron using ndiswrapper (Bryan Quigley is the king of GUI’s… and I wish we only had ONE mouse button). This prompted him to remove his XP sticker and replace it with a shiney Ubuntu case badge. (hopefully Joe has a picture of that). EDIT: yes, he does

It started to slow down after that as people started to go home, but the Cd’s still flew off the table.

Another Large attraction was Bryan’s OLPC XO laptop…. many people simply coming by to play with this piece of equipment that is quickly becoming legendary.

On display in the center were also two monitors for sale…. that happened to be attached to computers running Ubuntu Hardy. I guess Linux is good for selling displays

All in all I had a very fun and action filled day…… and I hope we got some converts