[Ubuntu-US-CA] FWD: Report from FLOSS at Holiday Peace Fair (San Jose/Campbell)

[nuboon2age]

written by Cameron Spitzer (event organizer and very long time FLOSS
advocate, cls (at) greens (dot) org )

I've had a table at the San José Peace and Justice Center's Holiday
Peace Fair <http://www.sanjosepeace.org/article.php/20101108154316816> a
few times since 2003, distributing "Free Software"*.
Yesterday was the best.  Drew, Brian, Susan, and Drew's Giant Penguin
joined me.  We showed off Puppylinux
<http://puppylinux.org/main/Manual-English.htm> running Firefox
<http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/security/> on Susan's twelve year
old laptop, Ubuntu Studio
<http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=ubuntustudio> playing the
Peace Center's videos on my two year old laptop, and Ubuntu
<http://www.ubuntu.com/project/about-ubuntu/our-philosophy> on Drew's
netbook.

They gave us the best table, in the lobby across from registration.  The
Peace Fair is for holiday shopping, and our pitch is "this is a stocking
stuffer for the person who takes care of your PC."  We handed out
roughly twenty Puppies and a dozen Ubuntus.  And an aptosid
<http://aptosid.com/>.

The vibe was way up since last time.  Thanks to Ubuntu's and Android's
success, and Oracle's recent attachment to Openoffice.org and MySQL,
people who pay attention to business or technology news know open source
software is competing well against the trade secret stuff.  So we aren't
starting from zero in public outreach and awareness any more.  But the
business news never tells you /*why*/, so there's a kernel of curiosity
with progressives now.  With that out of the way, it's easier to make
the social justice connection.  All the folks I spoke with got it with
little or no explaining.

Everything worked.  We installed Puppylinux on the old laptop the night
before, and had no idea how complete it was.  I think the folks who try
it out will be impressed.  Puppy comes with its own "lightweight" word
processor, web browser, and spreadsheet, but it's also got three-click
installers for Firefox, Openoffice, Komposer <http://kompozer.net/>, and
a lot of other stuff.  Komposer is for authoring web sites.

Puppy and Ubuntu Studio connected to the wifi in the building
automatically.  I didn't take the time to troubleshoot Drew's Network
Manager, we were too busy talking to people, eating, and shopping.

-- 
/Cameron in San José/

*Richard Stallman capitalizes "Free Software
<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/>" that way.  It's to distinguish it from
Proprietary, Patented, and Trade Secret Software that's Distributed
Without Charge But You Don't Get Any Rights.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-us-ca/attachments/20101209/b7a5d6a3/attachment.html>