LinuxFest NW 2009

The third annual LinuxFest NW was held at Bellingham Technical College again this year. Denise and I manned the FreeBSD / PC-BSD booths and had a great time demonstrating the new Galileo Edition of PC-BSD. I was surprised at the amount of BSD enthusiasts that came to LinuxFest NW. I wonder why so many shows are Linux-centric. LinuxWorld caught on and renamed their show to OpenSourceWorld; let’s hope to see more of that in the future!

Our booth was next to the folks behind Mer Linux, a linux distro for mobile devices based on Ubuntu. They also demonstrated Linux on the Wii for fun. Everyone came to our booth for the horns, but left with a DVD, a t-shirt, and some stickers as well. We passed out all of our horns, Galileo Edition DVDs, and even some Fibonacci Edition DVDs.

The first day of the show 778 people were in attendance, which means we will need far more DVDs and horns for LinuxFest next year…

I met up with the KDE folks and we discussed KDE 4.3, the new Amarok 2.1, and what to expect in the future. They had a great booth set up with laptops demonstrating different versions of KDE 4, which was nice because I know what to expect in PC-BSD’s future. They were also kind enough to hand out PC-BSD Galileo Edition DVDs at their booth. The more KDE devs we have running PC-BSD, the better!

After day one ended, we headed to Whatcom Community College for the live band, the booze, and the belly dancers… It was a little odd to see belly dancers at a open source event, but apparently one of them uses OpenOffice and another knew about open source software in general. Everything was free (as in beer) so I enjoyed a couple of nice Stouts on tap and hung out with some really cool people.

Day two was a little slower, but I had the privilege to speak with two very interesting people: Tobin, a Canonical employee, and his son Justin, a teenage videogame programmer. Justin is behind Open RPG Maker, an open source clone of Enterbrain’s RPG Maker 2K/2003/XP. He also showed off a platform game he made and the engine behind it. I thought it was interesting that he was given an engine to use for a class project, but scrapped it for one he wrote by himself, amazing. We took a group photo right before they left with some peeps reppin’ PC-BSD, woot.

I had a great time at the show and think we’ll see some new PC-BSD users in the near future! Next up, BSDCan in Ottawa, Canada, May 7-10. Thanks goes to my employer, iXsystems, for sending us to tradeshows to help spread the word about Free and Open Source Software.

GPL, BSD, Linux… we’re all on the same team. It amazes me how our communities co-exist to drive the open source movement to greater heights.

More pics on flickr