Solutions Linux

On Tuesday and Wednesday I went to Paris to attend the Linux Show called "Solutions Linux". I nearly missed the train to Paris as the Toulouse subway got stuck on Tuesday morning, the subway got to a halt one stop before the station and I had to run in Toulouse streets at 6:00am.
I joined the KDE booth midday on Tuesday. We had 2 PCs sponsored by Open Wengo (which also printed our flyers) plus our own laptops.
Who was there for KDE?
Several French KDE core developers (David Faure, Laurent Montel, Aurélien Gâteau) plus translators (Sébastien Renard, Éric Pignet) and KDE-France Laurent Rathle and Charles de Miramon. Gaël Beaudoin also spent some time at the booth and several other people I knew by mail came to say hello.
What were people interested in?
- KDE4: roadmap, visual preview, latest stuff
- KDE cross platforms
- some support for specific problems. For example a guy is about to open a KDE cyber café in Paris and we were able to give him precise hints on what to tweak (using kiosk) and on how to set up KDE for a best performance run on low machines)
About KDE-Edu
I did a 1 hour presentation about KDE-Edu on Tuesday afternoon which did not attract many people but the persons who attended were very interested. It was my first presentation and I enjoyed it. As it's in French, it'll be available on the KDE-France website.
I also met quite a lot of French edu-related people, people from Scideralle and Skolelinux as well as several teachers who came at the booth so I got interesting feedback. Several teachers told me how good it will be to run kde-edu apps on Windows for KDE4 as they are often dependant on what OS exist in schools. French people in general don't speak English very well so translations are very important to them.

Tuesday was Vista launch and "L'Arche de la Défense" was illuminated with Vista colors and there was fireworks. We did not attend though ;-) We had dinner in a restaurant where Benoît Jacob (Eigen) and Cyrille Berger (Krita) joined us. Needless to say how pleased I was to meet them all.
I came back home won Wednesday evening in a night train, first time I did that. I had a 2 hours wait at the station and I was reading Linux Magazine when 2 people rightly guessed that I was involved in Linux. We spent the next 2 hours chatting, he wants to set up some Free Software parental control solutions for families and seeked adequate software at the show. His assistant was trying to get familiar with the Free Software concept. When I borded the train, there was a younger woman in the same compartment than me and the compartment was so tiny we started laughing when a giant-like guy entered with ski equipment! And he had the top bunk! He laughed as well and looked resigned, in the morning he said he managed to sleep but it was really cramped for him. The girl and me chatted for more than one hour in the hallway before going to sleep, we had quite a lot of common points. It's what I like in trips, especially by trains, people relate very easily.
ToDo for next year
- have KDE posters so the booth will be more visible
- maybe sell KDE goodies
- have flyers with local French contacts as people ask about French resources and several people wanted to know how to join the translation team
- have some business cards to give to important contacts
I don't have any pics but Laurent Rathle took some. Special thanks to him as he asked me to come. He also coordinated the preparation on the KDE-France.org wiki and forum.