LinuxFest Northwest 2018

Linux Fest Northwest 2018 (LFNW2018) has wrapped up another weekend (April 28-29 of 2018).  Among the many Open Source groups and Linux distributions, Fedora was well represented.  We had myself, John, Mike and Nichole at the table this year. We talked with students, instructors, career people and all around Linux aficionados.

Actually, this was my first year organizing the booth as an Ambassador.  Previous years I helped Jeff Sandys with set-up, talking with patrons, and tear-down.  This year I was on my own.  My approach was to have my daughter, Nichole, do live art on Krita.  This was to be kind of a hook to draw people in to talk Fedora and Open Source.  I went with that plan and had some additional support from a couple of guys very familiar with Fedora and LFNW2018.

Guests

Michael

The week before LFNW2018, I was contacted by Michael Hrivnak of Red Hat.  Michael planned on speaking Saturday about Kubernetes.  His talk was called "Orchestrating Multi-service Applications on Kubernetes." Michael helped out at the booth when he was free from speaking and catching up on his itinerary of sessions.

Michael also took some pictures for us to show everyone we were actually there:

Used by permission.  CC BY Michael Hrivnak (michael)

Used by permission.  CC BY Michael Hrivnak (michael)

Used by permission.  CC BY Michael Hrivnak (michael)

Also, to show Fedora's capability, Michael did some photo editing on an application called Darktable (readily available for Fedora).  Below were our three guests showing the flexibility of the Fedora platform.  Michael was in the middle, John to the right, and Nichole to the left.

CC BY Jeff Fitzmaurice (steelaworkn)

John

When Nichole and I arrived on Saturday morning,  John Dulaney (who is not a stranger to Fedora or Red Hat) was there to help at the booth.  I was grateful for John's help in set-up and the complex side of Linux I personally was not skilled with.  John helped me with burning Fedora 28 discs for our patrons throughout the weekend.  He also was the Subject Matter Expert (SME pronounced sum-mee) with command-line and coding.  It was simply great to have him aboard.

Nichole

As I mentioned above, my daughter, Nichole, did some live, digital art on Fedora 27 and the Krita application (which is also readily available on Fedora).  The purpose of this was to show how flexible an end-user Fedora operating system could be.  Nichole used a Waccom Intuos tablet and Krita.  Fedora had no problem communicating with the tablet.  Patrons and seekers were surprised to see such a capable digital art application available on Fedora.

Nichole used a simple Lenovo T-410 laptop with an external monitor:

Used by permission.  Copyright 2018 Nichole Fitzmaurice

Used by permission.  Copyright 2018 Nichole Fitzmaurice 

Used by permission.  Copyright 2018 Nichole Fitzmaurice

Used by permission.  Copyright 2018 Nichole Fitzmaurice

Used by permission.  Copyright 2018 Nichole Fitzmaurice

Summary

Over all, the LFNW2018 weekend was a success.  We handed out sized Small T-Shirts to young Fedora Patrons.  Both John and Michael were awesome and valuable to the success of our weekend.  Nichole was fun to watch.  She handled questions very well, being here first time at a Fedora booth.  Between the four of us we were able to hold conversations at most any level with Fedora patrons as well as Fedora seekers.

Used by permission.  CC BY Michael Hrivnak (michael)

Used by permission.  CC BY Michael Hrivnak (michael)

Used by permission.  CC BY Michael Hrivnak (michael)

This year, the speakers talked on a variety of subjects common to the daily workings of the average IT person as well as Linux and Open Source end-users. They talked on everything from security to Containers (aka Docker and Kubernetes).  There were a variety of booths representing the usual suspects (Ubuntu, OpenSuse, and FreeBSD).  Also, Jupiter Broadcasting people made their annual trek to cover the weekend.

CC BY Jeff Fitzmaurice (steelaworkn)

CC BY Jeff Fitzmaurice (steelaworkn)

CC BY Jeff Fitzmaurice (steelaworkn)

CC BY Jeff Fitzmaurice (steelaworkn)

CC BY Jeff Fitzmaurice (steelaworkn)

CC BY Jeff Fitzmaurice (steelaworkn)

CC BY Jeff Fitzmaurice (steelaworkn)

CC BY Jeff Fitzmaurice (steelaworkn)

We gave several t-shirts away to youth showing interest in Fedora.  And, as always, we had quite a variety of Swag available.  Based on the amount of Swag given, we estimate we had 330 visitors to the Fedora booth.  All in all, it was a busy weekend.  Can't wait for next year.

For further information about Fedora and what we do, visit Fedora.  To see some of the LFNW2018 highlights, check out  LFNW2018 Youtube Playlist.

Feel free to leave comments below.

Upgrade to Fedora 17

For those of you who were wondering, I did do my upgrade to Fedora 17 a few days before Father's Day weekend.  I used Pre-Upgrade and everything worked great except for the Kernel. 

I had to manually upgrade the Kernel from F16 to F17.  What I did was remove the Kernel manually and then manual install it.  First I did "#yum list *kernel*".  And then I looked through the list and found the appropriate ones to remove by using "#yum remove *".  A more dangerous way of doing it is "#yum remove kernel*" using that notorious wild-card.  Then, while you have the terminal up do "yum install kernel*" with the wild-card.  As soon as it is done type "#reboot".

So, as my story goes, I rebooted to the F17 Kernel and all was good.  I also got to purchase 8 gigs of ram and a nice monitor from LG.  With the added memory, was able to really make us of Oracle's Virtual Box with a MS Windows XP VM.  What is really cool about the new RAM ....oh and did I mention I got a much nicer video card...anyhow, the new RAM and graphics allowed me to allocate 128 megs of video and 2 gigs of RAM to the VM.  Now, I can watch Netflix via the MS XP VM with zero lag time. 

I know, MS is not Open-Source, but I purchase that XP years ago under my old business and just had it laying around collecting dust.  So, why not use it?

So, what did I add this season?  Fedora 17, 8 gigs of Kingston RAM, a 2 gig Nvidia style graphics card, and nice LG monitor.  Looking forward to Fedora 18 and refusing to drink the Kool-Aid of Windows 8.