On April 24th & 25th, the Bellingham Linux Users Group (BLUG) ran LinuxFest Northwest '10 (LFNW10), the eleventh annual free and open-source conference in the Pacific Northwest. LFNW10 hosted 32 exhibitors, including Linux application providers, distributions, open-source projects, and user/enthusiast groups. 70 discussion sessions were presented on topics ranging from brewing beer using open-source recipes to digital forensics. As a free, no-registration-required event, total attendance numbers are only estimates, but the consensus is that about 800 people attended Saturday, and about 300 on Sunday. Brandon Fouts of Puget Sound Novell Users Group (PSUG) and I ran a booth for openSUSE Linux for both days; we were graciously assisted by event volunteers including an openSUSE user from Virginia (about 2000 mi away)! We handed out ~400 openSUSE 11.2 DVDs, ~50 openSUSE 11.1 DVDs, as well as the very popular cable tidies, and zypper cheat cheets (printed from the PDF). Saturday was an extremely high-traffic day (as you can see from some of the linked photos), making discussion difficult. Sunday was much quieter, and I was able to take the time to do installs on six laptops at the booth, make some live USB drives on request, and actually have discussions with users. Board should expect at least one, if not two new Ambassadors and Member requests from the event. A common theme from visitors who use openSUSE was the longevity they've had with the products; many users had been running since S.u.S.E 8.x, 7,x; even a few 6.x users! We were able to demonstrate openSUSE Linux 11.2 running on a variety of hardware in different configurations; the photos below show a Panasonic Toughbook running Gnome desktop; the integrated GPS and Wacom touchscreen tablet are both fully functional. The other is an HP SUSE-certified mobile workstation with discrete Nvidia graphics running KDE4. Here's some more LFNW 2010 pictures, by CrossBytes (staffing the Fedora booth): http://picasaweb.google.com/CrossBytes/LFNW2010 I printed up the "Community", "Choice", and "Freedom" posters from http://en.opensuse.org/Artwork/Miscellaneous at 20"x30", and 8"x10"; if anyone wants these for a future event please let me know; otherwise I'll hold onto them for next year ;-) - James Mason 'bear454'
