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 -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
