Note for french-speaking readers: a probably more complete version of this post is available in french.

The Journées du Libre de Montpellier were organized at the end of last week. This is the first time I went there and I must admit I think I'll go there next year ;-) It was well-organized, with really nice and helpful organizers and interesting speakers.

Fabrice and I held a booth about GNOME and Ubuntu:

I also made small demonstration sessions about GNOME and Ubuntu. As the demonstration for GNOME was aimed at companies and most people already knew GNOME, I showed Sabayon and some accessibility features. It went mostly okay, but I had some difficulties due to my computer running dapper...

In the second session, aimed at home users, I wanted to demo that all the usual things you do on a computer (surf on the web, read mails, listen to music, etc.) was easy to do with a distribution like Ubuntu, and this wasn't to hard to demp ;-). I also tried to explain the ideas that are behind Ubuntu and to show that, with the launchpad integration, Ubuntu tries to involve users in the development in some new way. People were interested in this last item: enabling users to be easily active in the development is a really strong point, and I believe this will be even more important in the future.

As you can see on the photo above, we had some GNOME & Ubuntu promotion materials. Thanks to Canonical for sending all the Ubuntu material (CDs, but also leaflets, stickers and t-shirts): this is most useful in such events. I only regret that the leaflets were in English ;-)