We had an install fest at my LUG today. It was the first time we did that and it went amazingly well. I was promoted KDE specialist of course and I did my best to customize a lady PC. She was amazed by the transparent kicker and other goodies and I managed to achieve all she wanted. She was not interested in the HowToDo-things part but she wanted a functional and customized desktop which we got. Konqueror being so versatile impressed her deeply (file manager, ftp, ...) I appreciated better the Fr translation team work as she was not bilingual and wanted it all in French. I also learnt a few tricks here and there while others were at hands on bigger challenges.
It's nice to see ordinary people wanting to get free software and knowing about freedom. A young guy was a FSF member and it felt conforting to see young people care about freedom and about the philosophy behind the GPL. Another quite young guy arrived with a home-made PC in a small briefcase! All components in a suicase! That was amazing. He wanted to install 2 Linux distros in his home-made PC to demonstrate Linux and he succeeded. He recently started a company which sells hardware and software support and he is switching from Microsoft to Linux software support. Another guy was a French living in Mali, on holiday in Quebec. He just bought a box in Montreal and was happy about the fest as he could quickly install a complete distro on his machine. He also got some ISOs for his friends. In Mali the Internet connections are quite poor and the low bandwith does not allow distro downloads or even updates. He was also a very interesting guy. He has a website named 'Think In Order To Act' (in French "Penser Pour Agir").
I liked very much meeting such people, they open new horizons. And it also makes more sense being involved in KDE after such a day :-)
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