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.