Linux Expo, London, 2001

Amazing! Our marketing plans this year included being at Linux Expo, intending to promote our Linux and open source training services. Since we couldn't figure out how to demonstrate training, we finally figured out that we should do just that - demonstrate training - so we produced a schedule of rolling presentations to give on our stand, plus a projector, some comfy chairs and a screen to project onto. This handily ensured that we didn't have to fill the stand with furniture, hoping instead that enough warm bodies would turn up to fill the space.

After a huge amount of preparation, we loaded up two cars and set off for Olympia in London - four hours or so of driving, plus a detour to buy a new printer since we had left our carefully-prepared handouts in the office (aaagh).

Arriving late, the stand got set up quickly enough, though there seemed to be no power. Naturally by 10 PM the electricians had gone home. Shinning up a handy set of stepladders and fiddling with the circuit breakers didn't help. A nearby security guard, a scion of New Zealandish stock alleged that he was a trained electrician back in the old country - he couldn't find anything wrong either, but then had the presence of mind to wiggle some of the wires going into a connector block on the back of the stand, which produced an impressive shower of sparks. Aha! The power was on, but the wire was loose. A few seconds work with a screwdriver and everything sprang into life. We retired to bed late, looking forward to the fray.

Come the morning, things started to buzz. There were penguin posters in various places plus a billboard outside to indicate to geeks, blinking in unaccustomed daylight, that they had come to the right place

There were fewer exhibitors than last year - with the notable absence of Red Hat, presumably much to the annoyance of the organisers - but a good turn out of other vendors. The big corporates were in considerable force and a range of smaller companies were there too. No real surprises, to be honest. Here is the view from the entrance doorway onto the upper floor, which doesn't show everything by any means.

View to the left of the entrance

IBM's stand

The audience was interesting. As well as the usual group of geeks-on-a-day-out, our experience was that there was a good turn-out of people who seemed to have budgets to spend, rather than just a brief to inform themselves. This is a marked difference from previous years when the bulk of the delegates were predominantly just touring to see what was going on.

The presentations - ours included - proved to be very popular. Various strategic and not-so-strategic talks were being given in the presentation hall, with commensurately large or small audiences. Borland's Kylix talks were going down well, SuSE were running Linux clinics in their own auditorium and our tiny stand got swamped during the more popular talks (clear winners were the briefings on PHP and Samba). We took a large supply of coffee-mugs with Tux images on them and to our surprise sold the lot from our stand. We should have taken more with us. Many thanks to the good-natured folk onto whose stands we overflowed!

All in all a good show - and considering the fact that the UK is way behind the rest of the developed world in adopting Open Source software - a good omen for the future.

On our stand, the Samba talk was popular ...

... PHP was popular too ...

But Kylix drew the crowds - there is seating for about 50 in front of the people in shot.