Bubulle's weblog

...install a Babelbox, de-activate the "db_info babelbox/info" line in preseed_early and put the following in big capitals on a sheet of paper attached to the monitor:

BABELBOX CONTEST
Guess what language is used to install
that Debian system.

...and wait for the crowd to slowly gather around the box and start guessing. If you can offer stickers|pins|CDs to winners, that's even better.

Hint: do not activate easy to guess languages. Good candidates (apart from all non Latin ones which are all *very* hard to recognize for the regular French geek, except maybe Japanese) are Hungarian, Basque, Slovenian. Arabic is too easy to recognize and so is Greek. Indic languages are a great success but Dzongkha is generally the winner.

Hint 2: do not sort languages alphabetically by locales. Geeks are too smart and the geeks manning the booth will learn too quickly. Watch also people trying to switch to a console during the D-I runs and typing "cat /proc/cmdline".

Hint 3: train yourself to recognize the languages before the contest so that you look clever...

That worked pretty well during 1st day of Solutions Linux.