LinuxCon 09 Portland OR

Reporting in from LinuxCon 2009 in Portland OR.
LinuxCon is a new annual convention, run by the fine folks at Linux Foundation.
It is intended to fill the spot left by the O'Reilly OSCON for the Open Source community in the Portland area.

Fedora Wiki page.

The "tech showcase" area, which is what most conventions call the vendor booths, is somewhat smaller, but there is a pretty decent turn out of vendors and attendees here.

There is a fairly packed schedule of talks, including a roundtable with Linus Torvalds himself.

The showcase area is open Monday and Tuesday, 9/21 and 9/22, and the conference runs Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday (9/21 - 9/23).

LinuxCon site.

The picture was taken by John using my cellphone, since I forgot to bring a regular camera. That's me in the RedHat red hat, espousing the virtues of Fedora with a conference attendee.

Fedora 11 Release Party Vancouver WA

We had a release party for Fedora Linux 11 in Vancouver Washington on Saturday July 11.

The event was run by Kevin H., aka Crossbytes, who is the Fedora Ambassador for Vancouver, his family, and I also contributed (I am Fedora Ambassador for Portland) along with my wife.

Fedora wiki entry for this event.


Crossbytes' blog entry for this event.


I will post some of my own pictures soon.

Turnout was a bit lower than we had hoped, but there was construction on the freeway at the main exit to get to the cafe where we were located.

Even so we did speak with a few kindred spirits who were interested in Linux, on such person being a member of the Portland PC Users Group. He was especially interested in the Fedora Education spin.

Fedora Ambassadors report will return soon in...
LinuxCon, September 2009!

Lindependence Day Portland 2008

We held the 2008 Lindependence Day event in Portland, at Touchstone Technology in Beaverton, on Saturday Oct. 25th.

I was there to represent Fedora as an Ambassador, as was Larry Cafiero from CA.
The event was organized by David Kaplan, who is local to Portland, and Larry, who setup the initial Lindependence event in CA.

There were also people who represented several other Linux distributions, namely Ubuntu, OpenSuSE, Mint, Mandriva, and Slackware.

The event was somewhat small, we had maybe around 20-30 people in attendance over the course of the day. However this was the first time we had done this event in this particular location. Discussions were lively, and every distribution volunteer was demonstrating the virtues of Linux to the attendees.

I was sent a box of CDs/DVDs for this event, though the actual "EventBox" the Ambassadors had put together was not available. The EventBox contains an OLPC XO laptop, banners, signs, CDs/DVDs, stickers, t-shirts, maybe some other things such as USB flash drives. Since I didn't have this I made use of what I did have. I gave a stack of disks to Larry to bring back to CA with him after the event was over.

For demonstration purposes I brought with me 2 of my own laptops running Fedora:
* Centrino PC laptop running Fedora 9, 1.6Ghz Centrino, 1GB RAM, 80GB HDD
* G3 Powerbook laptop running Fedora 10 Beta, 333mhz G3, 192MB RAM, 30GB HDD

Larry also brought two of his laptops to show Fedora.

Over all even though the event was small everyone there said it was a success, and the people at Touchstone Technology said they would be happy to host it again.

Links:

* Lindependence main site
* Lindependence Portland
* Touchstone Technology

OSCON 2008

Well, I helped at the Fedora Booth at O'Reilly OSCON 2008, at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland Oregon, July 25-27th.

As a Fedora Ambassador, I helped answer attendee's questions about Fedora, helped pass out swag, and also talked with the others in the booth. I met Karsten Wade (quaid), Jack Aboutboul, Greg DeKoenigsberg, John Poelstra, and a few others.

I also took the opportunity to reinstall Fedora 9 on my work laptop (it had Ubuntu on it).
One nice little tidbit there, after installing Fedora, I was able to get the Compiz 3D effects working on it much easier than with Ubuntu. Even though installing the non-free ATI driver is easier on Ubuntu, in this case, the setup for Compiz was much easier, just basically involved installing the required Compiz packages.

I would say the number of visitors to our booth was good, for the time I was there.

Reopening

Well back to this blog thing, I haven't touched it in too long.

So now my wife and I are going on 3 years married.
We moved to Oregon in June of '06, and we both like it up here.
My uncle also lives up here, makes things easy.

I currently work at Portland Schools as a field tech, and she is a freelance writer.
Her MySpace has a lot more info on that...
She has a blog on here too, but the MySpace one is updated more regularly.


So yea hopefully I'll keep this more up to date.

Hurrah!

OK, well I might as well blog it, since I haven't kept up with this thing in a while.

I have a special announcement-
I have just recently proposed to my longtime girlfriend (of 6 years)!
She accepted of course :)
The date is set for October 2 2005.

If you are friend or family to one of us you should be getting the announcements soon!
BTW she has her own blog:
Robyn's Nest

It was a very romantic setting, walking along the beach at night.
We had done this before on many occasions, since we both like the sea and prefer night time.
In fact this was where I first asked her to go out with me, so it was quite fitting.

Welcome

OK so here goes, I now have a blog.

Might as well join the 21st century I suppose.

My GF created one, she is a major English Geek so this is definitely more up her alley-
yet it may be good for me as well to share my views, feelings, etc.

So welcome to my blog, let's have fun.