LinuxFest 2007 (Toronto)

I'm a little slow posting, as I have been too busy to post (read catching up on sleep from 5 days of too little sleep). I attended the inaugural linuxfest last weekend, well, the conference/fest was on Saturday with a early-bird party Friday night. I couldn't make it, as I was visiting with family and had been driving half the day.

I wasn't trying to get to too many things, as my expectation level was not very high, this being a first conference and everybody being new to it. The slow to update website probably had a lot to do with my expectation level. In fact, it went off much better than I expected and I'll be going back next year.

I went to two sessions on Joomla! (one was a community meeting and the other was a practical hands on install session with basic configuration). After that I spent some time at the mini trade show (the BSD folks were there as well) which was pretty good - open source projects as well as companies such as RedHat and IBM. You can see the full list at the website.  I also went to an Open Source Advocacy Town Hall type meeting which seemed to be mostly about how do we get the word out (my opinion would be more how do we fight the apathy of end users) and had to leave early - the LPI people were putting on an exam and I was getting my proctor training.

After that, I went to the closing Keynote by John "Maddog" Hall. I believe the distilled essence was something like "We make too much crap that uses too many resources. We need a better way. Let's all do something about it" I'm probably missing an item or two, as the presentation was about an hour long and had a lot of slides. It was pretty interesting and I'd like to get my hands on a copy of the presentation. There was a post conference reception an hour or so later that I also skipped.