Our Linux Demo Week took place from the 29th of November to the 4th of December.  Many people attended and much information was exchanged both verbally and over the internet.  Blackwell's didn't look like it was the place for this sort of event but we quickly realised that we were on to a winner.  The only problem that we suffered from was that in the last three days the weather turned to freezing cold rain outside and high winds (which does dampen the spirits a bit ? )  Anyway, things were pretty much unaffected by this inside the store and we were able to get on with our event.

Although Red Hat did provide software for the event which was installed into a PC specially built for the occasion from hardware that was supplied by the PC Shop at 140 London Road we were extremely lucky in that SuSE made up their minds to attend the event in force in the shape of Mr Ruediger Berlich who is the MD of SuSE Ltd here in England and his colleague who is the Senior Analyst at SuSE GmbH in Germany.  Any suggestions that we were lacking in the tech support department were quickly crushed.  Transtec also turned up for with two server machines which had Red Hat and SuSE Linux pre-loaded on their hard disks.  In all we had three PCs (one with Definite Linux )  two Transtec servers, an IBM server from SuSE and and Alpha system from Alpha Processors Incorporated
We also had a desktop PC running in the corner so that people could see a working demonstration of SuSE 6.3 being installed.  The Definite Linux system was one of the pleasant surprise of the week.  It was everything that we thought it would be.  Compusys also were around and about with odd bits of hardware which were brought in by SuSE.

After a couple of days the visualisation software people arrived and we got into several sessions with PV-Wave from Visual Numerics and Iris Explorer 4.0 for Linux from NAG Software.  I even tried out a demo version of Mathematica for Linux which is just superb.  We were able to prove to ourselves that Linux is just as good for R&D work as any other operating system.  And at a lower cost ?  Although, you must realise that some of the commercial applications for Linux are still in their beta testing stage ?

We were also blessed with the presence of Rob Miller from Wrox Press who very kindly gave us the full bit about Wrox books and how good they are.  That's Rob a bit further down the page on the right hand side (red t-shirt).  His main interest is in finding new ways to replace expensive software with something that's a bit cheaper (such as Star Office). He's off to India to sell Wrox books and Linux over there.  You can imagine how tough that is in a country that doesn't have any money ?  One of the other pleasant surprises was that Simon came over from O'Reilly books.  Both O'Reilly and Wrox produce superb publications and we are privileged to be able to review their books on our web site :-)  We hope that O'Reilly will turn up for future events and that they continue to produce top quality Linux books (which we know they will).

The final blessing came from the pope of the British Linux community himself (apologies to our Catholic friends ? ).  None other than John Winters of the Linux Emporium turned up for a whole day to chat to everyone and to hand out Red Hat CDs and promotional literature for the Linux Emporium.  That's John on the left hand side below.  He's just put his jacket on at the end of the day and he's about to leave for the train.  No, we didn't turn the heating off to save electricity :-)  Click on the picture to go to the Linux Emporium.    Everyone who came over from Sheffield University and Sheffield Hallam University were very impressed.  The quality of the technical support and advice was something that they were not able to get from anywhere else.

Finally on the Saturday afternoon before SuSE went home Al Hudson turned up with his Mandrake laptop.  Al lives at Dronfield.  I opened a bottle of Champagne and we stood around having a rather glum office party while Al gave someone some tech support from his laptop.   How else could such an event come to an end ?  The final session ended up in the Hallamshire Hotel pub next door followed by a trip to the Nirmals just along the road. That's one of the better Indian restaurants.  Crawling out on our hands and knees was something of an experience :-)

All in all it was something of a trip to Jerusalem for us Linux people and we may not be able to do another one like it once again ?  Who knows we may just get it together this year ?  Maybe not ?  But if you do hear of one of our demo days then please do make sure that you come over to see us.   You may well be in for some pleasant surprises ?
 
 

Have fun !!