Two weeks ago a band of dedicated SLUGers set up a Linux Australia booth at the enormous NSW Education Expo. The event attracts around 8000 attendees, mostly students, parents and teachers, so it was a great opportunity to take Linux and FOSS to the masses! We have set up a booth at this event for 3 years now and are very popular. The adults want to know more about this “free software” stuff, the kids love the games and job opportunities and the teachers learn more tools for education and learning. On the booth we had Red Hat calendars that were popular, computers to demonstrate, stickers, handouts (including information specific to FOSS in education), penguins and shirts. We had Ubuntu & Edubuntu, as well as slightly dated Debian, Fedora and Suse to give away as well as some leftover lca2007 stuff.
On Sunday we had the OLPC there for one day which was vey popular. A few school girls who had done a school project on the OLPC thought this was awesome and walked away saying “Linux is cool”. Hopefully that’ll be a few more in the workforce 🙂
A huge thanks to all the volunteers that helped out:
- Sridhar Dhanapalan
- Grant Parnell
- Andreas Fischer
- Martin Visser
- Jeremy Visser
- Rodger Dean
- Richard Hayes
- Robert Morris
Also many thanks to Red Hat Australia for providing some schwag, Everything Linux for providing stickers, some CDs and shirt printing on the spot for $10, Craige McWhirter for providing two great demonstration computers, and Waugh Partners for providing loads of printing and fluffy penguins.
Below are some photos that were taken with the OLPC, unfortunately we didn’t remember to take a proper camera, but these are cool 🙂
