News: ReactOS at Linux World Expo UK #5

2005-10-08, Ged Murphy
ReactOS at Linux World Expo UK
Report of our presence at LWE UK

Report of our presence at Linux World Expo UK

On 05th and 06th October, ReactOS attended Linux World Expo UK as part of the .Org village. The two representatives for the project were Ge van Geldorp and Ged Murphy.

Equipment for the exhibition consisted of 3 laptops, one running ReactOS on real hardware, one running ReactOS in VMWare and a laptop to act as an internet gateway. We also had around 100 live CD�s and 400 flyers.
Unfortunately we had trouble holding a connection to the AP due to a weak signal, so couldn't report in real-time.

The machine running VMWare was a base install of R18230. This machine was showing off the applications which came with the base install including, command prompt, notepad, explorer, task manager and regedit.
The machine running ReactOS on real hardware was running R18189 and was used to show off 3rd party applications, including a demo of Quake 1, WinZip, IrfanView, AbiWord and Solitaire.

The first day of the exhibition went extremely well with a HUGE amount of interest being shown in the project. We did so much talking that Ge started to loose his voice. Interest came not only from visitors, but from other exhibitors at the show.
Ge made a comment that the general awareness of the project in the UK was somewhat lower than the previous year in Frankfurt. We hope to have altered that. In a way it could be seen as a good thing that so many people hadn�t heard of the project, as it made the conference all the more worthwhile.

Another pleasant surprise was the stability of the system. The system only froze once throughout the day. This happened when a visitor played around with it, generally giving the system a bit of stick. Other than that no problems at all, not a single kernel crash. We had to Tab-K to force a kernel check to show the BSOD to a visitor - which went down rather well.

People were reacting with great enthusiasm. It was nice to see them picking up a flyer rather uninterested, start to read, and then suddenly turn back to watch the demo when they realized what the project was all about.

The second day of the show was very much like the first day. Not a single BSOD, the laptop running ReactOS on real hardware hung twice after visitors played around a little bit. The general amount of amazement and excitement simulated that of the first day. Again, generated by both visitors and other exhibitors.

What have we taken away from this? The exhibition was a complete success and definitely worthwhile. General public and commercial awareness for ReactOS in the UK has been increased and some further publicity has been gained from this:
Two Linux magazines are interested in doing features on us. Linux format are interested in doing a �re-visited� feature as they previously featured us at 0.2.4
Another popular magazine, Linux User & Developer are interested in doing a full feature on ReactOS. Both magazines would like to wait until release 0.3, which gives us an incentive to get the release out, concentrating more on prerequisites of 0.3 � networking.

Also, since our return, Ged Murphy has been contacted by several organizations, one being Greater London Linux User Group (GLLUG), with a request to do a speech for it�s members on ReactOS � we will keep you posted

Ged Murphy.

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