Posted by: scott 16 years, 2 months ago
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Fedora booth at OLF
(Photo courtesy of Clint Savage)
I had the priveledge to go to Columbus, Ohio last weekend to Ohio LinuxFest with 12 other Fedora Ambassadors.
I arrived after work on Friday, and met Clint Savage (herlo) at the airport and we headed over to Barley’s in downtown Columbus. There we met several other ambassadors including David Nalley, Paul Frields, John Rose, John Stanley, and others. We had a chance to meet up with some other groups participating at Ohio Linuxfest downstairs after dinner.
Saturday is when most of the fun happened. I headed over to the convention center around 8am, and by that time the convention was already well on it’s way. The Fedora booth was back in a corner but it ended up being a good location as it was by a doorway to another room with more booths, so it ended up being near a lot of traffic. We had two XOs and an HP laptop up for show, as well as other laptops individuals had brought including Clint’s EeePC, which we used as a live USB creation station.
Ben Williams brought several of the 10042008 Fedora 9 re-spins, which went very quickly. Throughout the day, Ben, his son, Clint, and I were burning the re-spins for both i386 and x86_64 and they were going as fast as we could burn them. We were also pushing a high volume of GOLD media, and we ran out of pins and stickers early. One of the best marketing ideas was T-Shirts. The Fedora T-Shirts were all over the place throughout the event, and it helped to show that Fedora had a clear presence during the event.
Other booths that showed up were from IBM, HP, Sun, Ubuntu, OpenSuSE, and others, but my absolute favorite booth this year was the Columbus Robotics booth. This guy had two robots with him that used web cams and sonar to track objects and had used motors he took from drills to for motion. On one of the robots he had an arm and designed the robot to fetch him drinks. During his presentation he showed how he controlled this robot through ssh, and all his code is open source. He was able to start it and it would follow a red shirt around, and even had used a text-to-speech app to make it talk.
Altogether, I’d say Ohio Linuxfest was a success from an Ambassador perspective. We met several people that needed specific things in a distribution that Fedora could provide for them. The XOs attracted a lot of interest and I imagine we will see several people from the event looking into how they can contribute to One Laptop Per Child.
On that note, I will have a review on my first impressions of the XO coming soon!
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