[Ambassadors] FAMNA Report for SouthEast Linux Fest

[award3535 tds.net]

All,

My full report for the Southeast Linux Fest can be found at
http://award3535.wordpress.com/ or https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SELF_2014

Here is the text portion of the report;

This years event had changed location from the previous two years. The
event is no longer held at the
Blake Hotel but was at the Sheraton at the Airport. The venue was a little
smaller but worked for what
it needed to accomplish. The first day started on the 20th of June. I
arrived at 10am to scope out where
we were located and got signed in. Shortly after my arrival Ben & Cathy
Williams arrived and we got
the booth set up and rolling.

The booth was easily set up and got rolling at noon . We both brought the
remaining swag in our
possession. Much thanks to Tom Calloway for bringing the rest of the
material for us to hand out. We
were located next to the Red Hat table just out side the main presentation
room, of course a prime spot
for the booth to be. The first day attendees seemed a little slow at first
but by the afternoon it had
picked up quite rapidly. The Red Hat booth drew some crowds for the 3D
printing, but payed off
because we actually had some curious people ask about the OLPC. Once they
got to our table we
quickly asked what brought them to the festival. Ben and I quickly
discovered that a
lot of the user software they were using they were unhappy with. Well it
didn't take us long to
demonstrate the power of Fedora. By the end of the day we had about 100
stop by the booth. The first
day was not expected to be busy but turned out better than expected.
Although we did have a couple of
individuals ask how they could help out with the project. One in particular
was interested in what he
could do to improve his knowledge and what could he contribute to the
project. I was quite pleased to
show this person what he could do to help us out on the project. He left us
with a good feeling and
wanted to read on some more and let us know he would stop by again tomorrow.

We started the day shortly after breakfast expecting to be quite busy. The
booth was ready to go at 8:30am
with others waiting to talk to us prior to the first scheduled talk. I was
quite
enthusiastic to get started. We truly expected a much larger crowd and we
got that. Saturdays events
drew approximately 900 throughout the day. Both Ben and I were quite busy
answering various questions and handing out media. The individual that was
interested in joining out team came back I
spent a lot of time showing him where he could contribute and where to
start, and I hope that he becomes part of our team.
Meanwhile Ben was helping some individuals load the latest live media on
some laptops that needed a
little attention and some very happy people that were very pleased with our
helpfulness and knowledge.
Later on that day we met our match with a challenging issue. One particular
laptop we could not repatrician
one section of the hard drive associated with windows. Even though the
windows system
showed the drive patrician free, Fedora would not see the free patrician.
After a few different things we
tried we realized that the system was encrypted, and encrypted by the bios.
That made the system
unusable by Fedora or any other O/S. The owner of the laptop did not have
the password to unecrypt
the hard drive.. A steep learning curve for both Ben and I. We did
accomplish several USB key
creations and discussed several different media spins. I also demonstrated
the security spin features that
are included in the spin. Saturday we gave out 300 multimedia DVD's. Most
of the people that stopped
by the booth was very impressed with Fedora and already had the media or
was in the process of
downloading it during the festival.

As the day went on we noticed that there were some repeat enthusiasts
stopping by to ask more
questions and get more insight to the upcoming release. More questions were
also directed on tell me
why I should use Fedora over any other linux release. As we both explained
the four foundations and
how they related to what we do. Most of the people we talked to had no idea
how Fedora is the leading
edge (First) in the latest development of open source software and how the
software eventually
included in the RHEL releases. Also we pointed out some of the flaws in
other releases as related to
ours.

The usual flavor of promotions were there Omnibond, Linode, HP Enterprise,
FreeBSD, and
BARCAMP CHS, and Slackware. We saw a lot of the usual faces along with the
SELF Event Staff who
effortlessly got the event rolling and made it a success as always. Along
with us was Eric “Sparks”
Christensen, Tom “Spot” Calloway, Scott & Ruth Suehle.

We are all looking forward to next year in making our appearance at the
event event more appealing.

V/R
Andrew Ward
award3535 at fedoraproject.org
award3535 at tds.net
award3535 at gmail.com
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