Vancouver Fedora 11 Release Party Report – Walking with the Lions

When and Where

• Saturday, July 11 2009
• 12:00 pm onwards
• Venue: Fusion Cafe
• Directions: 13503 SE Mill Plain Blvd Vancouver,WA 98684

Reports

• LinuxKnight blog post

Pictures

• A few Pictures hopefully some more to follow.

Attendees

1. Kevin Higgins
2. Tammy Higgins
3. Amanda Rasler
4. Matt McKenzie

We arrived with our table and equipment about 20 minutes early to set-up. There was already one person who was there and waiting for us. He sat and watched us set-up the 2 laptops, OLPC   the computer and of course all of the media and swag.

The gentleman has is own business and is using Fedora 10 on all his boxes. We got into a long discussion about servers, software and hardware raid. I do not know that much about raid and scsi servers I am just learning myself. I was very honest with him and let him know that I do not know that much about what he was wanting answered but I was able to direct him to the websites that could help him out.

I had my belief that letting someone know that you do not know,  but directing them to the right place or people is an invaluable asset, and is one of the core ideas around Fedora “Friends”. He ended up taking a install DVD live CD and a pamphlet.

We had 1 or 2 people come in from the Twitter account, a few that came in from the Flyers. So I have learned that even with the work on the main road to Fusion Cafe stopping a lot of the people, Internet is the way to advertise, so we have now set-up a Face Book account for CrossBytes just to ‘advertise’ the Fedora Events in our area, that with Twitter. and blogging. I think the next Event will be even better than this one.

The tattoos and case badges are really great. The construction causing problems was in a way nice since the Media did not get to us and we had to burn our own media and make some origami dvd cases, even so I think they turned out pretty good.

I ended up learning a lot having to use Scribus for the first time. I think that it shall be a great friend of mine, hopefully I will learn enough to be able to do talks at the schools on desktop publishing 101.

A recurring comment was that ….it was good to see a professional looking and organized event from Linux ..you have more than just one thing to show…

We did have the OLPC, a gaming computer, a laptop set-up with an educational spin and Sugar on a Stick. I ended up doing more talking about how Fedora has been getting back towards K-12 education … the k12linux Sugar on a stick and the upcoming Multiseat feature in the upcoming F12.

Matt M. and his wife ended up coming up from Portland OR. to help out and I am very great full for his support and help.

Just a short report for now. will right another one on things that we have learned from this Release party.

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