GNOME-nl activities
Today, we had our first official GNOME-nl bum. Four of us, being Erik, Vincent, Reinout and me left early in the morning to the east for a congress organized by Novell resellers. Lotsa businessmen, managers and other dangerous species in ties. Not only us, but also the folks of KDE-nl, Nedlinux and the dutch Linux User Group were there, along with a whole bunch of resellers, service companies and such. Both us and KDE-nl had been announced as there to “promote the image of Linux on the desktop”. We had a special corner in the halls and were right in the picture. Not bad!

Honestly, it was great to do. All four of us were rather new at this so we weren’t quite sure how to get started, but we managed to grab attention with our shiny laptops with modern Linux-running laptops with the best of breed of applications (mostly stock GNOME-2.8), available for general trying pleasure by the audience and for answers to any questions. Some people have already used it – and their quesitons are thougher than the real new ones, who really just barely dare to touch the stuff (“will it explode?” – “Yes :)”). Good to do for a change. Let’s not forget, this is our intended target audience.

Some of the other resellers were rather helpful towards us – one even mentioned interest in sponsoring small bits and pieces in our future efforts already. That’s great, because it’s not like we care for the EUR 25 that we spent on posters and flyers, but you don’t want to do that each time. Getting refunds for travel expenses would be even better, buyt let’s not chear too early just yet.

Especially interesting were the encounters with the KDE-nl members. We ended up doing some sort of a pillow-fight, for fun of course, and (now on to the serious part) we had an incredible amount of success in trying to set up some shared efforts. Obviously, setting up is not the same as doing it, but clearly the intention to work together on certain things (like organizing local hacker meetings and such) is definately there – and face it, we’re too small to do such things alone. Special thanks to Fabrice from KDE-nl for being a great help here. Well done, dude! The sponsorships mentioned above would definately help here. Let’s hope we can get this going in a few months. I’d love to have a small hacker meeting with some Dutch (and neighbours) KDE-/GNOME-hackers.

I’ll see if I can post some pictures tonight. I’ve been up from 6:30AM this morning until now (midnight) and I’ve had a headache for quite a few hours now. Enough. :).