Run a Booth, Increase Awareness of openSUSE

The openSUSE community is filled with tons of volunteers, professionals and hobbyists who contribute to the project and want to see it thrive.

One of the ways of doing this is to organize an openSUSE booth for an event.

Recently, security engineer Paolo Perego did this at an event in Rome called RomHack Camp. Perego learned quite a lot at the event that took place Sept 23 - 25 and shared his experience about the hacker camp on the openSUSE Project mailing list.

Perego wrote that people at the conference were surprised to see an operating system vendor having a booth and was able to let them know that openSUSE is also a project full of tools for open-source development.

“The people who previously heard about us thought that we produce a ‘derived’ distribution,” Perego wrote in a report to the community. “I explained that we use rpm, that we started back then like Slackware fork in the very early stages..

“Now (we) have our own identity, brand and added value services.”

In addition to Perego encouraging community members to reach out to contact newspaper, tech journalists and youtubers to promote openSUSE, he encouraged community members to take action.

“Most of the people who came to our booth were not aware of the existence of… openSUSE,” he wrote. “Perhaps if we participate in more events like this (it) can be the first step in changing that.”

Members can learn more about organizing an openSUSE booth on the project’s wiki page.

Along with its many distributions, openSUSE has several open-source tools like YaST, Open Build Service, openQA and several more for open-source developers and hobbyists.