[Ambassadors] Ohio Linux Fest 2006 Summary

[Jeffrey Tadlock]

The Ohio Linux Fest held this past Saturday, September 30th was a great 
success!  The booth came together very nicely - we had Fedora T-Shirts, 
Stickers, Core 5 DVDs and informational handouts available at the booth. 
  There were three of us primarily working the booth - Joe Connelly and 
Brian Pepple.  Tom "Spot" Callaway was also there, originally to hang 
out with us at the Fedora booth, but ended up working the Red Hat booth 
right next to us - though he was still a great help to us.

The announced crowd was just over 1200 people, between presentations the 
aisles were quite packed.  Our booth saw lots of foot traffic with 
people ranging from new to Linux to having used it since Red Hat 6.x or 
earlier and wondering what Fedora was up to.

Nearly all comments were favorable to Fedora, many people were running 
Fedora in some fashion - either on their own PCs or on servers for 
businesses they worked for.  There were a few recurring questions 
through the day, some of which where:

* Yum is slow was one of the complaints we kept hearing.  It was a 
pleasure to let people know that there was an updated yum in Core 6 that 
was aimed at taking on any speed issues.

* I had several questions regarding the Fedora Directory Server - mainly 
in regards to features it offered.  There certainly seems to be interest 
in this.

* We heard what I thought to be a number of comments alluding to an 
animosity between the Fedora Project and Red Hat.  I am not quite sure 
why that thought is out there.

* There were several questions about who we worked for, etc.  It was 
nice to reply with we were just members of the Fedora Project community 
helping out.  I think it really helped reinforce that there is a lot of 
room for community involvement in the project.

* And of course there were lots of when is Core 6 coming out and what 
new features will be in it.

Later in the afternoon we also had a "Birds of a Feather" session.  Tom 
Callaway was there and was an excellent and knowledgeable speaker and it 
was great to have him there.  Some of the items brought up were Fedora 
and multimedia (mp3's, DVD playback, etc), Xen and virtualization and 
new features and improvements in Core 6.

All in all it was a great show.  Lots of fun for everyone involved I 
think.  I was very happy with how the booth turned out and I think 
Fedora was very well represented there.  I want to thank all the people 
that helped get me the materials and information I needed for this event 
- including Max and David Barzilay.

And last but not least, here are some of the pictures from the show (I 
may be adding more as I receive them from the others):

http://www.elfshadow.net/ohiolinuxfest2006/

--Jeffrey