LinuxFest NW: From Beginning To End
A couple of weeks ago, I drove myself and a couple of friends from Stumptown (Portland, OR for you out-of-towners) to Bellingham, Washington for the tenth anniversary of LinuxFest NW. LinuxFest NW is an annual event presented by several Washington-area Linux Users Groups, including the Bellingham Linux Users Group (BLUG).
LinuxFest NW “is an opportunity to share knowledge about open source software”. The conference was completely open to the public, with no charge to attend the sessions. That in and of itself was a great reason to make the trip. Add to that a substantial presence by Linux-related vendors and publications, as well as a number of LUGs, and it was a recipe for a great weekend.
As members of the Portland State Aerospace Society, Sarah Sharp, Jamey Sharp and I were invited to present a session about open source rocketry, and to have a table on the “expo” floor. Since our presentation wasn’t until Sunday morning, we had all of Saturday to hang out in the expo room, catch some sessions, and mill about meeting folks and collecting swag.
We arrived late Saturday morning, which meant we missed the Friday night social. By 10:30a, the rooms at Bellingham Technical College were already packed. The expo floor was filled with tables offering the latest stable releases of open source distros, including openSUSE (the best distro on the planet in my humble *unbiased* opinion), Fedora, Ubuntu, and PC-BSD. Amazon had a table (mostly for recruiting programmers, it seemed), Linux Pro Magazine was in attendance, KDE was well-represented, and various vendors of Linux-related products peppered the room.
The PSAS table featured a flight computer from one of our older designs, the development board for our current flight computer, some top-level system schematics, and copies of the latest Linux Journal featuring an article by Sarah Sharp on our migration to USB. (Sarah was also happy to sign a few autographs.)
Why were we there? PSAS is a completely open source project. We use open source tools whenever possible for development and design, all of the components are either off-the-shelf or designed and built by members of the group, and everything we do is posted on our wiki (and if it’s not there, it’s only because someone hasn’t posted it yet). Furthermore, we’re one of the few amateur rocket groups of our size in the world (to my understanding) working to implement the *entire* rocket using an open platform wherever possible.
PSAS was one of the few tables offering hands-on examples of “this is what we’re doing with Linux”. This was my only real complaint: I wanted to see more people showing off their open source projects that *weren’t* vendor related. For those of who with projects like this, show up next year!
We were so busy answering questions and checking out the lay of the land, none of us attended any sessions on Saturday. After failing to win a spectacular workstation in the day’s raffle, we checked into our hotel then headed to the social at a neighboring college campus.
At the Saturday evening social, we were greeted by a small band and a lot of pizza and beer. It seemed that nearly everyone from the conference hall was in attendance. The giant screen was wasted showing only troublesome login problems with the display system, but this was followed by what was perhaps meant to be the headlining entertainment. The entire room seemed to hold its breath when a few belly dancers took to the stage. Talented they were, but what did they have to do with Linux, or the Northwest for that matter? No one answered that question for me.
Sunday got off to a beautiful start. Clear weather and strong northwest coffee guided us back to the conference where we found folks waiting (!) in our room thirty minutes early for our presentation. By 10am, the room was full of people, including a young boy eager to hear about rockets. We showed slides of early versions of our rocket, and shared a few videos from cameras on the ground and mounted on the rocket during launches. The question and answer section ran late and we had to wrap things up quickly to clear the room for the next presentation.
Next, I attended Allison Randal’s “Introduction to Parrot” session. (Near as I could tell, Randal was the only other woman presenting at the conference.) My programming experience is limited to C/C++, Assembly and some Perl (if you don’t count HTML/CSS, and a lot of folks don’t), so a lot of what I heard was over my head *but* what I did understand about the Parrot virtual machine was presented very clearly. Randal is the chair of the Parrot Foundation and is a lead developer on the Parrot team. Check out the Parrot docs site for more information about Parrot.
Back on the expo floor, I noticed that there were a lot of teenagers about. It was great to see so many younger computer users coming over to the dark side. (Wouldn’t the world be a better place if more teenagers were hacking Linux rather than tweaking their MySpace pages? I’m sure it would be, but I’m a tad biased.)
LFNW quietly fizzled out on Sunday afternoon. Most of the tables were emptied before the official close of the conference, but we didn’t hear of one disappointed person at the event. We were happy to share our rocket successes (and tragedies) with folks, and are excited to attend next year. With any luck, we’ll have photos and videos from our upcoming launch!
[A huge “thank you” goes out to David Benson for the use of his great photos!]
Related posts:
- Live, From LinuxFest NW!
- Latest Linux Journal: Sarah Sharp On Rockets!
- Ubergeeke’s Projects: Open Source Rockets!
- Linux Plumbers Conference: Familiar Faces In New Surroundings
- Open Source Bridge: Wednesday Afternoon Update
May 10th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Would you give an Intro to Assembly talk at CnS?
May 12th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Wow, I’m totally bummed I missed your table. I was busy all day Saturday at our table and doing my presentation that I failed to enjoy the rest of the assembly hall. I even missed the great salmon lunch.
[I had to be in Seattle on Sunday, so missed that day, too.]
Since I didn’t get to see other tables, I don’t know more about what you commented, that you “wanted to see more people showing off their open source projects that *weren’t* vendor related.”
The main draw at our Fedora Project table were the OLCP XO laptops [http://laptop.org], which are not vendor related but I can understand how one could think they are. There is a sellable item there, I reckon, but the point of the OLPC project isn’t to make a product — it is to change the lives of children around the world.
Your point is well taken, and I’ll keep my eye out for more interesting projects that use Fedora to show next year.