Armed with our good spirits, laptops, CDs and flyers for handout, we managed to talk to a lot of people, and hand out a lot of CDs and info flyers.

Photo by: Kim

Especially the Eee Top touch screen with edubuntu installed was a hit with the kids. And when parents saw their kids doing basic arithmetic training while playing games, they were very easy to start a conversation with.

In general it was not hard to start conversations with people, and after mentioning the price and the general lack of viruses, most people were very interested. My rough guestimate is that we managed to hand a CD and a flyers with more info to 100 people and that we managed to talk to quite a few more.

This is definitely a thing that we can do again, and it doesn’t have to be linked to a release. Any weekend will do, and I really hope that we can manage events like this one again soon. Now that we know what is required, it should be fairly easy to plan and run events like this anywhere in the country. All we need is an agreement with a local mall (or similar), CDs, flyers and 6-8 people (with computers). This may be done with the help of a local LUG or similar, if need be.

Photo by: Kim

After talking with ‘ordinary’ (what ever ordinary is) people about Ubuntu yesterday, my feeling is that People and Ubuntu are ready to be introduced, and we just need to go out there and do it!

As an added bonus, we actually had help with the CD handout all the way from Romania yesterday. Manuel from ubuntu-ru.org came down to help out. Of course he didn’t come all the way from Romania just to join us, he is an exchange student living in Århus, but still, I thought it was very brave of him to show up (and I hope the birthday party he was attending later turned out great).

Kim took a lot more pictures and Carsten also has pictures (and a description of the day, in Danish).

After the event a few of us went to the local PROSA office, where we were allowed to borrow their canteen and have some pizza. We also shared opinions about what we wanted to do about the next Ubuntu Live! – Ubuntu Release party here in Denmark. The next one, 10.04 is a LTS, and as such really invites for a grand celebration. We haven’t make any final decisions, but if only half of the ideas we talked about yesterday get carried out, it is going to be Big!

Thanks to Søren for pointing this out to me.

There were a few comments to my latest blog post about the lack of 64-bit CDs in the LoCo CD box, and the reduced number of Kubuntu CDs compared to the number of Ubuntu CDs.

I don’t agree with this critique. As I see it, the CDs are for handing out and passing on to people who are completely new to the Linux / (K)Ubuntu game. These people don’t necessarily know what hardware is in their computer and a question like “Do you have at 64 bit processor?” won’t make sense to them. Worst case scenario the question will make the user feel stupid (not a good starting point for a great user experience with the new software) or the user will answer incorrectly, and will end up with a CD that doesn’t work with their hardware.
Sure, support for huge amounts of ram is nice, but I still think it is rare that the average user has and needs this (yet). And the user who does need it will be aware of the difficulties, and know to either ask the person who hands out the CD or do the research of how to get 64 bit support.

As to the number of Kubuntu vs. Ubuntu CDs I know this is a issue that a lot of people feel very strongly about. But the fact is that the average user who has never used anything else than Microsoft Windows doesn’t know the difference between Gnome and KDE (or the difference between Thunderbird and Evolution or the difference between Emacs and Vi…). The big strength of FOSS is the choices. But that is also one of the weaknesses. When you come along as a new user you are in no way qualified to make the choice between several different software packages, if you have no idea what the differences is. So you need someone else to make that choice for you. And if you find out you prefer another program than the one installed by default, the solution is often not further away than Synaptic or a link on the web: install kubuntu-desktop
(This link installs kde on a Ubuntu system. If I remember correctly it needs to fetch 100MB or more and will make KDE your default desktop environment. If you don’t know what that means, you don’t need to do it.)

That is why I think it is fine that Canonical has chosen to ship more plain Ubuntu CDs than Kubuntu and no 64-bit CDs at all. It limits the number of choices that the use can’t be expected to make anyway. And if you are well informed enough to make the choice you should also be expected to know what to do to get the system you want.

The CD box contains 250 regular Ubuntu 9.04 CDs, 75 Kubuntu CDs and 75 server CDs. All i386, there are no 64-bit CDs this time. If you have 64 bit hardware and want a 64 bit OS, hopefully you know how to download that your self.

EDIT: Søren points out that the server CDs are in fact 64 bit.