Hi, We have been offered a free booth at the Linux Forum Brussels.  The forum will take place on October 26 & 27 th, 1999, at the AUTOWORLD, in Brussels, Belgium.   Linux-Forum 99 is the prime venue for interested computer professionals and manufacturers.  The event is organized in a double fashion.  See also http://www.linux-forum.net/ First I thought that I could run the booth myself but unfortunately this is in the middle of the week which makes it difficult for me. Thus, I'd like to have one or two people who can help run the booth (one maintainer will be there anyway).  So if you would like to go there, please contact me immediately. Running a Debian booth requires at least one box for demonstration. It's fun most of the time. Waiting is,         Joey

Running a Debian booth requires at least one box for demonstration. It's fun most of the time. and it was true. Here is my story as the 'official Debian man' Time is a scarce resource and I started to worry about what to do when Martin said he was unable to be there i.e. late. I don't live in Brussel. I don't have a car. The booth required one box - at least one box. This promised to be fun. So I spent sunday and monday sending mails asking lots of people if I could borrow them a box. Without much success. Finally I received a mail from the president of the Brussel LUG (now referred as bxlug) who offered me a few little boxes (486s and p75). Better than nothing. And tuesday arrived. I managed to reach the right building (despite I don't know anything at all about Brussel streets) and looked for our booth. Nothing. I ask someone for the Debian booth: I know it was there (pointing to an empty corner of the room). It promised to be fun. I supposed the problem was that since I was unable to phone to confirm we'll be there (nobody answered my phone calls) they removed the booth. Happily a guy from an other booth came to me and said he is the bxlug president and that we'll share the same booth. That said everything began to run fine. I opened my heavy bag to take the box I finally decided to take. And that box was a real success: it was a Mac SE/30 (running S_link_, why bother asking?). I also installed my hard disks in an other box and voila. People could come, we were ready. I answered lots of question about 'that what??? mac?', spoke about Debian and why it was better than the other distributions (with lots of _object_ive arguments), installed s_link_ over nfs in a few minutes, answered general Linux questions, talked with bxlug members, upgraded the newly installed s_link_ over http, ... [On wednesday I also met Filip Van Raemdonk who has applied to become maintainer and we exchanged our keys] And voila. We had nothing to give/sell (I pointed interested people to websites where they could buy Debian CDs) but were a popular booth (we had not our names written on the walls so people were forced to ask us who we were ). It was not a huge event but I had fun and convinced the bxlug to use Debian The conclusion is that nobody should miss an easy way to meet people and talk about our lovely system... Regards,         Frederic [PS: you're not supposed to reply to this post but if you do please cc me since I'm not subscribed to debian-devel]