LFNW and other event awesomeness

Just had a look at the events openSUSE ambassadors have been visiting lately. From March 1 to April 30 we're talking about over 20 conferences and meetings! That's quite impressive. I myself have only visited a few in that time - most notably LinuxFest NorthWest (in Bellingham, Washington, USA), Chemnitzer Linux Tage (my blog) and I went to Re:Publica in Berlin. And later this month there'll be LinuxTag in Berlin. I'm organizing the openSUSE booth there so if it's a mess, you know who to blame ;-)

LinuxFest NorthWest

Let's talk about LFNW now. It was Carl Symons (your most dedicated dot editor) who bugged me for roughly a year about the event, including mentally preparing me by giving a LFNW t-shirt at the last Desktop Summit. And there was going to be an openSUSE booth, with Bryen, Brandon, James and even Michael attending. At that point, there was no going back - I had to come.

ownCloud talks

I submitted a talk about ownCloud - Carl told me I had to talk to the other ownCloud presenter who turned out to be Michael Gapczynski, ownCloud hacker and fresh employee of the new ownCloud Inc. We ended up giving two successive talks, me introducing ownCloud and walking through installation, setup and basic usage followed by Michael going into the development of ownCLoud Apps. The room was loaded, quite cool. Oh and I debuted pictures of Popcorn, our dog.

If you want to see the presentation, come to LinuxTag - I'll give a talk together with ownCloud founder Frank Karlitschek and we'll most likely follow the same schedule of me introducing oC & going over installation, then Frank going into a bit more detail.

13 yo Moe Jackson in action at LinuxFestNorthwest. She had never touched a tablet before but Krita had her tied to the screen for 3 hours creating awesome things!

Booth

The openSUSE booth at LFNW was well visited. We had one of those big "what's cool about openSUSE" posters, people took pictures of it or wrote down the links. A clear hint that we need flyers with that info! We also promoted the openSUSE Summit quite a bit but for some reason folks considered it a bit far away ;-)

Other stuff

The organization organized a party with food & drinks in a museum of electronic stuff - truly interesting. Some of the visitors spend hours zapping themselves with static electricity, others admired the weirdest devices from the onset of the electrical age. Hundreds of vacuum tubes, old radio's (even a bunch of mechanic music devices), lamps, early telegraph systems and more than you can see in a mere few hours. Awesome. Oh, and good beer - if you like Ale that is (I don't).

There was good food outside, daily, a large booth area with interesting projects and lots of talks. And probably most important, a really relaxed atmosphere with many technical people. It was all about the cool stuff, not about politics or corporate things. All in all, I can say - LFNW is an awesome event and if you can manage, you HAVE to go!

I made a video of the Museum we went too, see this Youtube video:

(or click)

(thanks to KDENlive inspiring me to make this, that app is just too cool. And oh, when I say "SUSE who paid" - that's of course for ME and my time, not for LFNW (SUSE was a sponsor, but not the only one by far).

Re:Publica, LinuxTag

I'll blog about Re:Publica tomorrow and LinuxTag about a week before it starts.

Hugs!vacuum