I met some very cool people. John "maddog" Hall, Dave Yates, Chess Griffin, Jeremy of LinuxQuestions, the tllts.org guys - Linc, Dan, Allan & Pat, Bill Husk from monsterb.org and Terry Filipas... And a big shoutout to monsterb for providing a couch for Sat. night!! I ate dinner with Jeff from California and Gary from ? at Barley's Ale and Smokehouse on Friday night then had some of the OLF cake.
I met D.C Parris of blue-gnu.biz who posted links to my pictures of the penguins on my car and laptop which reside on my personal foto blog, Richard Weait of Ontario Linux Festival, sat down at the after-party with Matt Morrisey of Oasis Systems in Ohio, and chatted with a many more folks from whom I did not get a business card. Met the guys from Ohio Ubuntu Loco group as well as The Source guy who does the cool podcast / videocast....
The first thing I did on Saturday (after breakfast with some of the attendees) was go to each booth/table to get my swag. I'm glad I did!! Most booths were all out in about 30 minutes! Yes, there were that many people there. They expected 1600 as per registration, but I think from my experience there were around 1100 actually in attendance.... just my wag.
The Ubuntu table was cool to see... it was right beside the first ballroom. Pictured below:
The MythTV talk by a Novell guy was a total blowout ... people had to sit on the floor!! I guess folks really want to get MythTV running at home.. =D. See the picture below... I stitched 2 images together with hugin to really show the huge crowd!
That laptop and bag on the floor are mine. Not until I stood up did I realize how full the room really was!The best swag? Very difficult to say but the Firefox mouse pad is cute and fits the tiny bluetooth mouse I use. I carried my backpack to put these goodies in as well as contain the laptop in suspend mode. The one bottle of Bawls, which I've yet to try is cool to have... The best swag though, really is the meeting of Linux and Open Source like-minded folks. Thats the best thing to take away from a great event like this!!
Later in the day I got to demo Virtualbox's new seamless feature to 2 guys who had thick accents from where I'm not sure. I had the laptop out at the Ubuntu Loco Ohio booth and was talking about Virtualbox being an option to VMware. These 2 were very impressed and happy to see they could remove windows and just run it from a VM. I also told them about the VMware converter and that Virtualbox supports vmx image files too. The fact this program is in the Ubuntu Repos makes it a favorite of mine. I had several people watching over my shoulder during the demo. And the only thing I had to give away were my own MGALUG cards =D.
I got to see some cool features of Gnome 2.20 and Conduit as well as a uber-cool Liquid Scale plugin for Gimp. I'm still not sure how to use it, but the effect was amazing.... link?
I tried to show off some new features in Inkscape 0.45.1 devel Sept 6, 2007, but Ubuntu updates had rolled my autopackage install to Sept 20 version. Grrr, autopackage is really a great way to get those packages you want but are unable to get the dependencies just right.
