Hello GNHLUG, I told Paul I would write up a report about what happened at Hosstraders this Spring. So, here it is.
Hosstraders <http://www.qsl.net/k1rqg/>, the twice-yearly hamfest and technology flea-market, was held last Friday and Saturday (May 3 and 4). As has become a tradition, GNHLUG had a table, generously paid for by Jon "maddog" Hall. Our goals are to spread the word about Linux in general and GNHLUG in particular, answer questions, and have a good time. On Friday, I showed up with my home PC and my laptop. Paul Lussier was also present, with a goodly amount of "stuff" to pawn off^W^W sell to suckers^W people interested in such junk^W items. Paul did not return Saturday, but Rob Anderson and the UNH crowd were there in his stead, and with a nice Dell laptop to run a slide-show. Rob also had some crap^W items for the "sale" table. We also saw Rob Lembree, Ed Lawson, and a few other GNHLUGers who stopped by to harass us^W^W^W. And I would like to give special thanks to Bayard Coolidge (N1HO), who, even though I wasn't counting him in our list of volunteers, spent quite a bit of his time manning the table and answering questions for people. We had a fair amount of interest, if not quite so much as in previous years. When asked about Linux, it appeared most people already knew what it was, and almost as many were already running it, or planned to try it. I guess that's a good thing. :-) (It doesn't seem like all that long ago the average response to "Linux" was "How do you spell that?") One interesting event: A few minutes after I had setup some demo documents in KOffice on my PC, I kicked the power switch on my UPS and killed the whole thing. I rebooted (no fsck -- journaling filesystems are a beautiful thing) and reloaded KOffice. I was pleasantly surprised when KOffice told me that auto-saved versions of my documents were available, and would I like to open them instead? Score one for the good guys. We like to make copies of Free Software available to people at a nominal cost ($1 per disc). Last year, we burned a bunch of copies of things in advance, and barely sold any of them. So this year, the plan was to burn copies on demand. Naturally, we couldn't keep up with requests. Some of that was my fault, as my system had just been reinstalled the day before, owing to a hard disk crash, and I hadn't had a chance to work the bugs out yet. At first, all I could do was make coasters. Eventually, I traced the problem to the KDE "autorun" utility, which kept trying to mount the CD *as it was being recorded*. Renaming the "autorun" program and restarting KDE fixed things nicely. :-) We eventually did make several copies of Red Hat 7.2 and OpenOffice 1.0. Lesson learned: Burning on demand is good, but make up one or two copies ahead of time, so you're burning to replenish stock. Things that would be nice to have in the future: - Better organization ;-) - A banner with our name and logo on it - "Business cards" with our website address - A winning lottery ticket I look forward to doing it again this fall. That show is currently scheduled for Oct 4-5 -- mark you calendars. Maybe by then, I will have my act together in advance, and can accomplish some of those nice things. Thanks again to everyone who helped out, or just stopped by. Clear skies! -- Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not | | necessarily represent the views or policy of any other person, entity or | | organization. All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
