[Sussex] Promoting SLUG

[Steve Dobson]

At the last Moot those members present discussed some ideas for promoting 
the group.  Here are my notes on that discussion.  I will, in the next
day or two, post it to the WiKi at Nik Butlers place, but for now here it
is for ML digest.  Your comments please.

A proposed method for supporting and prompting the Sussex Linux User Group
(SLUG) and Linux in general.  Anyone wanting to try Linux should come
along to the SLUG meetings (or join the ML) for "free" support.

The idea is that the club "purchase" stand space at various computer
shows held in the area.  There is one every few weeks around Brighton and 
Worthing.

The stand should be populated by a minimum of four people.  The stand staff
should include both technical experts and novices.  The technical experts are
there to try and help any questions that my come from the show attendees.  It
is also important to having at least one novice on the stand--being able to
point to someone and say "Go talk with Big John (I'm not volunteering you
John) over there, he's a shop steward and drives a milk truck for a living,
he has no IT experience, but he run Linux" is important -- and will give
confidence to any waverers

The stand should provide "free installs of Debian".  This is not Debian 
trying to take over the SLUG, before Gentoo and other distro users get out
their flaming throwers.  To "sell" Linux to the doubters a clear message
needs to be presented, Debian is the best distro to provide that message
for the following reasons:

1). We are targeting home uses - Debian is a "free" distro.  Commercial
    distros do not give the same "Linux is free" message.  [Yes, I know
    Gentoo is free, see the next point].

2). Debian is a binary distribution and therefore quicker to install.
    If we are installing systems at the show then we need a quick 
    install process.  As Steve Dobson can provide a Debian Mirror 
    network installation will be available and they can be very quick
    indeed.  

    For a new user to Linux showing them a distro that you have to compile
    yourself does not project the "easy to use" message - and do we want
    someones old 200MHz laptop taking three days to build the world?

3). Nik Butler has strong links with the Debian UK group and they should
    be able to make merchandise available for us to sell - this could help
    pay for the stand.

4). We can give away (I would suggest that we ask [not demand] a one pound
    fee towards the media and publication costs) Knoppix CDs.  As this is
    Debian based it provides part of the same "clear" solution message.

5). Once installed Debian is easy to maintain (apt-get is just so powerful).

To promote that Linux is instalable we obtain (preferably by blagging) 
various computer components from the various stands at the show, build the
system and install Debian on it.  To anyone obtaining the same hardware and 
bringing it to the stand we will build their machine for them and install
Debian on it too.  Hopefully we can blag the components using the argument
that we would be advertising where we got the components from.