Utah OpenSource Conference 2009

The Utah OpenSource Conference went underway yesterday. I thought I'd share my experiences and thoughts here as the con progresses.

Day 1

Today I registered, and manned the Ubuntu booth with Mike Basinger, Bryan Petty, Matthew Washburn, and James VanTassel for the entirety of the day. All the laptops demonstrating Ubuntu at the booth were mine, so I wasn't very comfortable leaving for a presentation. Tomorrow I'll just bring my desktop, it'll be a lot harder for someone to walk off with and I'll be able to see some of the ones I want to see.

The Ubuntu booth got some pretty good participation, lots of people stopped and either asked for more information about Ubuntu, or just to tell us what they already knew and liked. Lots of questions about 9.10 coming out on the 29th. During most of the day there were about 4-5 people gathered around talking.

Day 2

Manned the Ubuntu booth again. Today I got to see the keynote by Stormy Peters, which brought up some interesting aspects and some of the downsides of being paid for work on opensource projects.

I also went to Mac Newbold's presentation entitled "Why FreeBSD is the Best Linux Distro*", which inspired me to, yet again, try to install FreeBSD as my main operating system on my home desktop machine. I am compiling the x11/gnome2 port as I am typing this article. He spent most of the time presenting about how Linux is different from FreeBSD, rather than aspects of why he thinks FreeBSD is actually better than Linux. Currently, I believe that unless you're hell bent on believing that installing packages from source is the best way, the only compelling reason for me is the license. I happen to like the FreeBSD license more than the GPL. More than that, I find FreeBSD to be a fun challenge, much like Linux was when I first started using it. I'll have to see how it goes once I'm done getting everything installed - I'm pretty determined this time to figure out all there is to figure out about using FreeBSD as a desktop operating system.

Day 3

Wasn't feeling well this day, so I didn't end up going. Yes, I realize that makes the conclusion of the article a little anti-climactic. However, I did end up getting Gnome in FreeBSD working well, and I'll write up what I needed to do, how long it took, etc, in another blog entry.