Feature: Demo Day at Border's Bookstore., by Kara Pritchard
Thursday, December 21, 2000, 12:34 PM

Paul Gray wrote to us letting us know about a Linux Demo Day that CedarLUG and QCLUG held at a Border's Bookstore back in November in Davenport Iowa. Follow the "Read More" link to read a summary of QCLUG member Ray Sander's report, or visit QCLUG's site at http://www.qclug.org/demoday/ for the full write-up with photos. Someone send me the recipe and directions for these cookies that were served at the event, ok?

Quad-Cities Linux Users Group
"Linux Demo Day" Nov. 4th, 2000.
Border's Bookstore, 53rd. Street, Davenport Iowa

By:
Ray Sanders (QCLUG)

After months of planning, and a couple of false starts, QCLUG was able to arrange a "Linux Demo Day" at Border's Bookstore on Nov. 4th 2000. The delays, and false starts paid off in the end, as the all the hard work put in by myself, and QCLUG paid off in a tremendously successful event, thanks in part to Jim Fisher and WOC 1420 AM allowing Dan Beckwith and Myself to promote the event during the last hour of Jim's Talk Show.

For some, the day started at probably 5:00 a.m, as we had some help from a neighboring LUG (Cedar Valley Linux Users Group - CedarLUG) for others, the day started at 7:00 a.m, so we could have at least a couple of hours to set up and unpack.

Everyone arrived to set up between 7:30, and 8:30 a.m, and lo and behold, when I arrived I saw Paul Gray, and Tony Geerts from the CedarLUG with a pile of lumber and a reciprocating saw!!!!!

Turns out Paul had to build a quick rig for the four Dell monitors that were attached to his Matrox G200 four head video card system.

Our hardware consisted of a wide variety of systems, Paul Gray and Tony Geerts from the CedarLUG brought a Matrox G200 Four Head System, as well as a Sun SparcStation. Dan Beckwith (QCLUG / QLITech) Brought a Desktop system running Storm Linux, as well as a QLI Advanced Multimedia System with a few suprises. Dave Helton (QCLUG / Real World Computing) brought a 2U Rackmount System, as well as a Laptop Running Mandrake 7.2, and to round out the list, Ed Billingsley, and Tom Starbuck (QCLUG) brought a 486 system and a nice hot-rod multimedia system.

After running power and network cables, and two rolls of duct tape later, we were ready to start at about 9:45 a.m, at which point a few people started coming up to our area asking questions, and getting GPL CD's....and then.... it happened...

About 10:15 A.M we were mobbed by at least 50 people.. we were so swamped it was diffucult for the 7 people we had to answer everyone's questions and hand things out... as a matter of fact, we had forgot to set out the GPL CD's and other giveaways, we had people just digging through the boxes (OOPS!) Once we realized what was going on, and when the crowd dissapated slightly, a couple of us were able to break away and get the CD's and brochures set out.

Judging from the turn out, and the questions that everyone had for us, the QCLUG "Linux Demo Day" was a huge success!!! We handed out all of our TurboLinux, Corel, and Caldera GPL CD's, along with the T-Shirts, and product Literature from Corel, Stormix, and Red Hat. (We started with about 100 of each distro).

Also, to our suprise a local Sun Microsystems sales rep dropped off some StarOffice 5.2 CD's which were snapped up very fast. Our only setback was that Tom's system had a drive crash, and that Stormix, MandrakeSoft, and RedHat were out of stock on GPL CD's, but Stormix, and Red Hat did send some product literature, T-Shirts, and other freebies.