[PLUG] LinuxFest Trip Report

[Keith Lofstrom]

(cc. Bill Wright of Linuxfest)

On the PLUG mailing list, Russell Senior writes:
> Anybody go, want to do a trip report?

I went with my wife, and gave my Dirvish/Rsync talk .  I saw Brian
Martin (who gave a VMWare talk), and a couple of fellows from Corvallis,
but it appeared to be mostly Washington and B.C. folk.  There appeared
to be about 600-800 people there;  fortunately, it was a sunny day and
folks could schmooze outside, because inside it was CROWDED.

There were big posters and street banners for the Fest all over
Bellingham.  The locals really put a lot into this.

The Bellingham Technical College was well equipped (if small) for
this event; LCD projectors, free wifi in all the rooms, ample
parking, etc.  Sort of a PCC-Rock-Creek kind of setup.   Next year,
it will probably have to move to a larger venue, though. 

The cafeteria was taken over by vendors and user groups.  I bought
some books at 60% off.  I considered buying a stuffed Tux for $10 and
didn't (give the infants distros, not plush toys, I say!), and picked
up an install disk and a 5% off flier for VMware Workstation 4.5
( referral code VMRC-BILWRI265 ).  My wife got a Seattle Linuxchix T-shirt.

Outside, there were stands set up to sell grilled salmon, hotdogs,
and misc. junk food (excuse me, programmer fuel). 

The talks were mostly good to very good, though there were only 
6 time slots and things got crowded in the 11 parallel sessions.
I missed Rasmus Lerdorf's talk on PHP, which I'm told was the best
talk.  I did see two extremely good talks, one by Chris Negus and
Tom Weeks on Fedora / Redhat Troubleshooting (these guys needed
another hour) and one by Brian Hatch on Linux Security.   I saw a
talk that was merely "very good" by Tim Witteveen about the PNNL High
performance Linux Cluster, and another by Charles Ditzel of Sun, mostly
about Java Desktop,  a Sun Linux distro with Staroffice and Java and
Netbeans built in (SunJD users in the audience thought highly of it). 

My talk was in a smaller room, but still SRO with people in the
doorway, and well received.  It was in a room designed for cooking
classes (with a noisy fridge).  If the Detroit MI area Penguicon
( http://www.penguicon.org ) isn't scheduled on top of Linuxfest
next year, perhaps Marcel Gagne could give an intimate Linux Chef
talk in that room.

My wife went mostly to the newbies sessions, and learned a lot. 
Now I can look forward to her correcting my bad habits :-)  Newbie
sessions were moved from a room for 40 to a room for 100.  In general,
small planning mistakes like that were corrected rapidly and expertly.

There were a couple of "well, here's the screen of my laptop, 
here's an xterm, what do you want me to show you" talks that I
walked out of.  Obviously, a few people had never been in front
of a crowd of non-electronic brains before.  But with 5 to 11 tracks
to choose from, there were plenty of non-bozos right next door.

Brian and I made it a point to attend different talks, so he can tell us
about the different talks that he saw.  There will be lots of pointers
to the various talks, with many of the presenter's websites reachable,
at:     http://lfnw.blug.org/fest2004/schedule.dxp .

Some audience members were VERY knowledgable, it was like 6 hours of
Advanced Topics without the beer.  The beer came later, at the Afters
party sponsored by Fibercloud.  My wife and I went to that for about
half an hour;  I argued with a system manager from Boeing for a while
(he felt that Fedora Core 2 Test 1 Rawhide wasn't easy enough to use.
Well, duh!).   My wife and I decided that shouting over an amplified
band was less fun than watching the sunset over Puget Sound, and the
mountains and valleys back to Everett and south.

We stayed with friends in Gig Harbor on friday and saturday night, so
we did not learn much about Bellingham motels, beyond the fact that
there are a bunch of them.  We also learned that the free upgrade
from rental econo-car to mini-van can be financially punishing at
$2/gallon (the trip was 580 miles RT).  Vegetarians looking for food
on Saturday should consider the Potato Burrito at Casa Que Pasa on
Railroad Ave.

Overall, one of the best Linux events I've ever seen.  If they do one
of these next year, go!  My wife the non-geek had fun, so bring your
S.O. with you.  Perhaps with some additional help they might even
have a childcare track (script kiddie for kiddies?) next year, so
this could easily become a family weekend event.  

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom           keithl at ieee.org         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs