Friday was another fantastic day at the conference. Started the day with a true homestyle breakfast at Cracker Barrel with my friend Jared Smith and his friend Trevor. Then it was off to the conference to show off more Fedora and OLPC.
I taught a session in the morning on “Fedora Remix,” showing off tools like pungi and the livecd-tools. Things went really well except for a brief glitch caused by my not having removed some prior work by-products before running pungi. The audience was forgiving and really appreciated the fact that Fedora makes absolutely everything we do 100% re-consumable, reusable and redistributable.
Later in the day I had a chance to talk to a few very interesting people. This gave me the idea for a new spin in Fedora that might prove to be very popular in the long run for Fedora 11. I need to talk to a few more people to see how possible the end state is, and how we can best accomplish it. But it could end up a highly compelling offering.
Of course I got to work the booth all day again, and didn’t get to see any sessions, but the payment for that was awesome, including a lot of people turned on to Fedora and Sugar, a few hopefully as developers. I also scored some sweet T-shirts including the Banshee shirt that is by far the best of show in my opinion.
I did get to see two great keynotes, one by the author of “Schlock Mercenary,” Howard Tayler. His quotes on making grizzly bear soup were priceless and memorable for people who are looking to have someone tell them how to succeed in the open source community. The other was by Novell community manager Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, and really shows how he and the OpenSuSE community are quickly learning from the iteration of other communities like Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, and so on.
In the evening we went to Tucanos, a Brazilian restaurant (read: “Death By Meat”) that had superb caipirinhas. (The garlic sirloin tips were also fantastic, as well as the grilled pineapple.) The UTOS folks once again outdid themselves and everyone had a wonderful time. By the time I got back to the hotel I was dead tired, but I stayed up long enough to update Clint’s XO machine to the latest stable build 711. This ended up fixing some of the sharing problems we had at the booth that day, which would help since Saturday was set up at UTOSC as Family Day.
More on that later!