by Today’s “Ohio LinuxFest”:http://www.ohiolinux.org/ was quite an interesting event. Doug and I were the only two LOPSA members working the booth, although a few local-ish members stopped by to say “hi”. Because of that, the only time either of us got out from the booth was to stretch our legs, and when I served on the panel for the “Cat Herding (User Group Administration”:http://www.ohiolinux.org/speakers.html#talk11 presentation. I also got away for a few minutes to talk with an editor from “linux.com”:http://www.linux.com. I’ll post a note if he’s able to get the interview up (it was video-taped and kind of noisy).
Although the Ohio LinuxFest is a free one-day event, it drew a crowd that appeared to be at least 1000 strong from all over. Not only did people drive in from all over the state, but I was amazed at the number of people who came down from Detroit, over from Pittsburg, and up from Tennessee and West Virginia. The conference had a map on a board asking people to mark where they were from, and I saw markings on California, Atlanta, Washington DC, Philidephia, and *Mexico*!
We had probably two hundred people stop by our booth, enough so that we actually ran out of flyers and need to have more printed before the next event we attend (at the very least the “Phoenix SysAdmin Days”:http://lopsa.org/SysAdminDays-Phoenix. I’ve already received mail from one person who signed up after stopping by to see us. If you are a new member who joined from the OLF, drop “me”:mailto:spp@lopsa.org a message. Several people also expressed interest in a Columbus chapter/affiliate. If you are in the area (whether you signed up at OLF or before) and are interested, again, drop “me”:mailto:spp@lopsa.org a message.
For being a “Linux” event, there was a lot of interest in the OpenSolaris starter kits that the Sun booth and I were handing out. We had 55 kits to hand out, and ran out by 10:30! I also signed up about 25 people who were interested in the “Columbus OpenSolaris User Group”:http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/os_user_groups/cmh-osug/. As far as I saw, there was *no* negative attitude towards Solaris, although the guy running the Sun booth did say there were one or two (literally) GNU fanatics that gave him a little issue. I even gave a starter kit and signed up for the UserGroup an “FSF”:http://www.fsf.org/ representative.