Ohio Linuxfest almost here...

Ohio Linuxfest is almost here. October 10-11 in Columbus, Ohio. Here's the schedule.

The list of speakers is up, and it's impressive. Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier from openSUSE and our Ubuntu Community Manager, Jono Bacon are doing the keynotes. (Is it me or are these two becoming inseperable speakers at US conventions lately?)

Talks I am looking forward to attending:

• Roland Hess - Blender - this is going to be cool, if you've not seen Big Buck Bunny go watch it now.
• Mackenzie Morgan - wifi - It's always awesome to see fellow Ubuntu community members take the stage.
• Daniel Chen - Unbreaking Audio for the Unassuming Linux User - I have a feeling this one will be popular. :) Dan is one of our rockstars draining the swamp that is Linux audio.
• Bdale Garbee - Peace, Love, and Rockets - Bdale is a former Debian Project Leader, I believe he's the one who coined the term of Debian as "the universal OS" - I got to meet Bdale at Debconf8 this year and he's just alot of fun to hang out with, he's a really good mentor to listen to about all sorts of things, from tech stuff to general community building. I look forward to Elizabeth Garbee's talk as well, "Through the Looking Glass: Open Source From a Teenage Perspective", that sounds interesting.
• John 'maddog' Hall - Sustainable Computing - All of maddog's talks are always good, nuff said.
• Ilan Rabinovitch - Hacking the legislature with Geek-PAC - Ilan is one of the organizers of SCALE, and always an awesome guy to hang out with when I hit the left coast.

There are of course more talks as well, these are just the ones I'm looking forward to. I am disappointed that Richard Bowen won't be speaking on Apache this year, but them's the breaks. I am also somewhat relieved that my joint talk with Ken VanDine on GNOME was bumped - I've had the (tremendous) opportunity of speaking at OLF for like 4 years in a row, so I am happy now that the show has grown to a level where us crazy locals don't have to fill in, and we can instead bring in the heavyweights like Zonker, maddog, jono, and bdale.

Don't think that the Ubuntu machine is taking a break because I'm not doing a talk either. In addition to maco and daniel, we'll be bringing in the Michigan LoCo: greg-g, wolfger, rick_h, n0p, snapl, and the others. The Kubuntu maniacs from Chicago will be joining us as well (nixternal and crew), and let's not forget our gracious hosts from Ohio, vorian and the other OSU crazies. Simon Ruiz is coming from Indiana and I expect Andrew Conkling to bring in the guys from Pennsylvania again.

Expect serious invasion of BOF rooms and coordinated "strikes of awesome" to be doled out with impunity. Unfortunately the wifi situation at OLF is always dodgy so there's no way we can do a full blown packaging or bug jam, but one thing I've learned is that when people of this caliber are shoved into a convention center, awesome stuff just tends to happen. We can almost surely bust out the bug and packaging jam notes from Penguicon and drive some discussion there, I would also like Andrew to share with us his experience working with Banshee bugs.

Coming to Ohio? Post below and let's see what we can come up with.

EDIT: Skippy reminds everyone to REGISTER as soon as possible!

Comments

[skippy]

Be sure to tell folks to register, Jorge! Having a somewhat accurate count of how many people intend to come versus how many actually show up is extremely helpful to the organizing committee, and greatly influences sponsor interest for the following year. If you haven't yet registered to attend, please do so now!

Also, if anyone wants to pony up $5,000, we can have WiFi. The convention center uses a third party to manage their wireless network, and the non-negotiable fee is five grand. Any Linux companies that provide WiFi to the Fest would get lots and lots of love. :)

[Seth]

I'll be there definitely looking forward to hearing Jono and Zonker. Looking forward to checking out some BOF's this year. totally skipped them last year. Should be a great time!

[heathenx]

I'll be there too. This is my first year going...and I already registered. Perhaps I will see you there. Travel safely. :)

[Andrew Conkling]

To be fair, Ken Wilson is bringing everyone (including us PA folks) from Cleveland, where we're all convening the week prior for work. We'll be there in droves!