29 September 2007 - Ohio LinuxFest

Topics

Ohio Linuxfest (not a TALUG event)

Presentation Resources

Pictures

Sponsor booths	More sponsor booths	NOOSE podcasting live	Keynote presentation room 30 minutes before the start
Test your linux cli knowledge and win prizes!	Ubuntu Ohio Loco booth	FSF booth	More NOOSS podcasting action
Heading to presentations after the morning keynote	Using MySQL to crunch 5GB of baseball stats	Tux was a hit with the ladies	Conclusion of Ubuntu presentation
Everything you ever wanted to know about Openoffice.org	Openoffice.org presentation	Gaming on a water cooled linux box? By a GIRL?!?1	Afternoon keynote about FSF and the Software Freedom Law Center
Afterparty entertainment Dual Core and Notacon	Afterparty entertainment Dual Core and Notacon	Google afterparty	Max Spevack (Fedora) at Google afterparty
Dual core presents a second time at the Google afterparty	More dual core	Who's slide is it anyway (game)	Who's slide is it anyway (game)

Friday At Barley's

Friday night was the Fark.com party at Barley's. The bar was packed, and the music was loud which made conversation rather difficult, but kept the party atmosphere going. It was a good way to meet people, as most of the attendees were associated with OLF as either volunteers or presenters. There was good food, cake, and of course plenty of beer (although not free). There were also a few "celebrities" in attendance, including Drew Curtis (of fark.com), and Jon "Maddog" Hall (of Linux International). I ended up being able to talk to several people who were presenting on Saturday, which helped me decide which presentations to attend. The party was slated to go until 12:00, but I ducked out around 11:00 to get some sleep.

Saturday: The Main Event

Saturday got off to an early start at 8:00 with registration. Because the conference didn't start until 9:00, there was an hour to mill about, talk to other Linux enthusiasts, check out sponsor booths, and collect free swag (of course). Luckily one of the first booths was handing out Mountain Dew, which helped get my morning off the ground as I was already a bit sleep deprived and there was a long day ahead of me.

Checking out the sponsor booths revealed some cool products on display, including rugged, handheld, wifi computers with gps by SDG systems, and a cool network capable multimedia box by Neuros. In addition to displaying their products, several sponsors were recruiting for employment. Among the sponsors, there were some major companies in attendance including HP, IBM, Red Hat, Silicon Mechanics, Digium (Asterisk), and Sun Microsystems. Nonprofits such as the Free Software Foundation, FreeGeek, Ubuntu Ohio, and Gnome were also present. In addition, the Northern Ohio Open Source Society (NOOSS) was podcasting live throughout the entire event and afterparty. Swag collected included magazines, Frisbees, mouse pads, T shirts, and lots of stickers. Additionally, sign-ups were out to win a 500GB server, a Nintendo Wii, and a wireless router.

At 9:00 the morning keynote speech started. The speaker was Max Spevack, the leader of the Fedora Project, who gave an excellent speech about open source and how it relates to economics, life, and the internet. Max gave some insightful examples as to why open source is better, and how he sees open source succeeding. The opening keynote was video recorded, but I can't find a link to the video anywhere.

There were two more presentations in the morning session, with the highlight being the Linux Media Center presentation. After that it was on to lunch at the North Market, and preparation for an intense afternoon of learning.

The afternoon sessions was where OLF really came alive. My afternoon started off with the Openoffice.org presentation by Andrew Pitonyak, where he presented a lot of cool things that openoffice can do, the new features of openoffice 2.3, and security advantages of openoffice.org over others. This included an example of pulling meta-data out of a MS Word PDF and being able to see a history of the documents revision.

The afternoon continued with a Joomla presentation, where we learned how to install, setup and use Joomla, and some of the extensions available. During this presentation there was raffle for a book and a year of free website hosting. I thought Joomla and Community Builder would be perfect for the TALUG website. I'll give it a shot when I get some free time together.

Next were two great presentations, unfortunately offered at the same time. The first was Jon "Maddog" Hall (of Linux International), and the second was an intro to python presentation. It was reported that the Jon "Maddog" Hall presentation was excellent, however the intro to python presentation ultimately drew my interest. Catherine Devlin constructed a graphical, moving model of our solar system in python as a live demo, and then we got to destroy the solar system by crashing all the planets together.

Next was another tough choice, MythTV or Debian packaging? During this presentation our group split up and most went to the MythTV demo, while I went to the Debian packaging presentation. Debian packaging was interesting, as now I finally understand how those debs work. The crowd favorite however was the MythTV presentation, which I hear was excellent, and included some really cool demos. The presenter was from Novel, was a very good speaker, and kept the audience well beyond the 50 minute limit.

Finally, the closing keynote consisted of an entertaining presentation by Drew Curtis (Fark.com), followed by Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Law Center, who gave arguably the best presentation of the day and really put some perspective on the software freedom movement, as well as providing some history from his experience working with the GNU project and Richard Stallman. Particularly interesting was the legal insight into the SCO / IBM lawsuit, and the legal future of the GPL and open source code in general.

Google Afterparty

Finally, it was time to head to the Google afterparty. While waiting to get in, I drank my last Mountain Dew in a futile attempt to keep myself awake. The afterparty was well attended, and had free food but not drinks. The food was essentially "heavy" appetizers for lack of a better description. Music and entertainment was provided by NOTACON with a DJ mixing tracks live. Additionally, a Wii was set up on a projector for some gaming action. At 9:00 PM Dual Core took the stage and provided some live music.

After Dual Core, it was time for some games, starting with "Who's slide is it anyway", where a person selected from the audience has to give an openoffice impress (you thought I was going to say the "P" word) presentation that they have never seen before. Of course, the innuendo in these presentations was running wild, and it somehow seemed that the more drinks the presenter had, the more coherent their presentation.

Next was more games and more partying, but I was having trouble keeping my eyes open and with plans for Sunday I decided it was time to get some sleep. The party kept going, and at 12:00 the Google room closed, and the party moved across the street to Barley's, where someone posted a message to the OLF page at 3:00 AM.

Final Thoughts

Of course, this write-up could go on for pages, but you have to end it somewhere. This being my first OLF experience, I was very impressed and will definitely be attending next year. Hats off to the OLF volunteers, as the amount of organization that went into pulling off an event like this was huge. If you missed OLF and still want to squeeze a Linux conference in this year, check out Ontario LinuxFest.

My only complaint was a lack of post-conference information organization. It would have been a good idea to host all of the presentations on Ohio LinuxFest, and maybe have a page on the website linking to OLF related content.