ohio

Ohio LinuxFest 2014 Report

Blog post by jprostko on Thu, 2014-11-06 20:56
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I took the day off of work on Friday the 24th and made the three or so hour trip from Pittsburgh to Columbus. Upon arriving at the Columbus Convention Center, I met up with the Speaker Chair of Ohio LinuxFest, Vance Kochenderfer, and set up the table runner at the table that was designated to Haiku. After that, I headed back to the hotel to drop off all of my excess baggage, got some food, and then headed back to the Convention Center.

This year, the expo floor was open on Friday evening, so I decided to take advantage of that to show off Haiku on my Lenovo X120e and System76 Galago UltraPro. I got some people that were certainly interested, and had lots of worthwhile conversations from both existing Haiku users and dabblers, as well as people who were not familiar with Haiku at all. I did a quick interview with Michael Huff of MountainKernel.com (currently being built), and he was great to interact with. I haven't had time to check out this video of his yet, but I figure at the very least there is some video footage of me, even if the interview did not make the cut.

Ohio LinuxFest 2011: Another Fun Adventure

Blog post by jprostko on Thu, 2011-09-22 01:52
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Mike and Darkwyrm at the tableMike and Darkwyrm at the table

The weekend of September 9th, 2011 marked my third year in attendance at the Ohio LinuxFest (OLF). My friend, Amir, and I arrived in Columbus right around 8 PM that Friday night, and after getting our belongings put away at the Drury hotel, we decided to check out the "20th birthday of the Linux kernel" celebration at the Hyatt hotel. We didn't really know all that many people there, but minutes after arriving, we got chatted up by some people, and I was naturally asked about Haiku right away due to me wearing a Haiku shirt. There were a couple more conversations like this with some other people we met, which was great, as I got to show those individuals Haiku in action the very next day. I also got to talk to some people I knew from Pittsburgh, like klaatu, as well as my friend Vance from our Linux Users' Group, WPLUG. Seeing as I still didn't have my Haiku demonstration machines set up the way I wanted them, Amir and I decided to head back to the hotel shortly later around 9 PM. On the way out, I saw Beth Lynn Eicher (Director of OLF and former Chair of WPULG) wearing her red fedora and I made sure to say hello, not only because she has always been supportive of Haiku and its presence at OLF, but because she has been a good friend over the years.

Back at the hotel I worked on getting the demo machines ready. Initially my plan was to run Haiku natively on my Lenovo Thinkpad X61 and then run Haiku in VirtualBox via Linux Mint 11 on my Lenovo Thinkpad X120e in order to show off the Guest Additions that were done as part of Google Summer of Code 2011 by Mike Smith. I did get that running just fine, except Haiku was running on it quite slowly in virtualization, given that the X120e isn't exactly a powerhouse machine. I decided to scrap showing the VirtualBox Guest Additions on the X120e, and instead just ran Haiku off of a nano USB drive that I had imaged earlier that day. I set up both Haiku machines to basically have the same setup, where we could show off multimedia performance and Haiku-specific strengths. Assuming I have both machines around next year, I'll likely try a different configuration, where I'll run Haiku natively from the X120e and run it virtualized on the X61.

Showing a video and web pageShowing a video and webpage

After being satisfied that the Haiku machines were ready, I finally ended up getting to sleep around 3:15 AM. My alarm went off a couple of hours later, and after getting my shower, I headed off to the Columbus Convention Center. I got the Haiku table set up relatively quickly and awaited attendees to stop by to visit the table. Before things were too far along, a gentleman who was doing security at the event stopped by and told me how he used Haiku on his older machine, and that he loved it. That was great to hear, and I figured it was always good to be on good terms with one of the individuals running security. Rob Ball (Sponsorship Chair) of OLF stopped by early on as well, and made sure that we had electricity and all of our other needs addressed. Right after he left, Beth Lynn Eicher stopped by and we talked a bit, which was cool as I didn't get to talk to her much the night before.

Ohio LinuxFest 2010: Didn't Disappoint

Blog post by darkwyrm on Mon, 2010-09-13 12:15
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This weekend was my second year at the Ohio LinuxFest at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in downtown Columbus, OH. I arrived at the convention center at about 7:15am. Unlike last year, there was hardly anyone there outside of the OLF staff doing checkin and a few vendors. Joe Prostko was already there, having stayed at a hotel nearby the night before. It was good to see him again. We started talked for a bit and then started getting the table set up. I made sure that we had enough supplies for the table and each of us had brought a demo machine. Joe brought an MSI Wind netbook which was running a nightly build and I brought my Dell Latitude D620 running an almost-stock Alpha 2. Both machines proved to be valuable for demoing different aspects of Haiku that day. Soon enough we started seeing some traffic.

Most of the day itself was spent at the Haiku table talking to convention-goers. I even spoke with some people who I recognized from last year. Unlike last year, my laptop only KDLed once. Wanting to see what the sessions that were offered were like, I spent a little time in the Ubuntu on ARM session, which was quite technical but reasonably interesting. It gave me a clue about what to expect if I were going to speak at a session. I'm pretty sure that I'm going to give a session next year on Haiku. Mike Summers had managed to come, albeit later than last year. He rolled in about 3pm, but it was good to see him again. He might've been late, but his presence was felt, becoming the resident "chick magnet." All of us were surprised by that one. ;-)

The people that come to OLF are always really interesting to talk to and, being fellow open source fanatics, quite receptive to Haiku as an operating system. Many of them are intrigued by Haiku's boot times, feature set in combination with its hardware requirements, lack of an X server, and its unique features like queries and the extensive use of attributes. Joe had the Stack and Tile decorator running on his netbook and everyone who saw that were really impressed, myself included. Only those people who were familiar with BeOS or Haiku were not suprised by the number of movies playing simultaneously without dropping frames. My favorite demo was running 3 videos on one workspace, switching to another workspace to start a lengthy project build with Paladin, and switching back to show how responsive Haiku was even with the CPU maxed out. We've got a great OS here.

Some of the main questions that I ended fielding were about stability, where people could try out Haiku, and what Haiku offered in the way of an office suite. It would seem that right now, according to the conference goers, that having OpenOffice.org or KOffice or something is quite important. Perhaps someone might be willing to step up and finish the work on Gobe's Productive suite given this thought.

It was a great conference and I'm looking forward to the next one!

My Ohio LinuxFest 2009 Journey

Blog post by jprostko on Wed, 2009-10-14 18:50
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Well, after a long delay and BeGeistert 021 among us, I suppose it's time to tell my story about the Ohio LinuxFest (OLF).

My friend, Amir, and I set out to Columbus from Pittsburgh on the Friday evening before OLF, and as we traveled, I could already feel the excitement. Once settled at the Hyatt hotel, I scrambled a bit to build/install Haiku on my MSI Wind U100 netbook. I also let Amir try out a live CD on his laptop, and we shared some conversation about Haiku. He wanted to come to OLF mainly for the various talks, and naturally I was there to help man the Haiku table. As he slept, I eventually got my system set up as I liked it with a GCC4 hybrid trunk build (with additional apps/media), and then went to sleep for a couple of hours.

This was my first time being at the OLF, or any computer-related event for that matter, so I didn't know what to expect. Upon meeting Darkwyrm and Mike after registration, I felt right at home and knew the day would go just fine.

Ohio Linux Fest... What a Ride!

Blog post by darkwyrm on Sun, 2009-09-27 19:13
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Well, for not having been doing hardly anything Haiku-related in the last month or so, this kind of made up for it. It all started with almost not getting a table at the conference and then on Wednesday--if I remember correctly, that is-- suddenly having one by the power of Greyskull, um, I mean Koki. ;-) This meant a flurry of e-mails, burning what remaining CDRs I had around the house, quickly putting together a Haiku demo machine, and a host of other details.

I arrived at the Greater Columbus Convention Center at about 7:15 am to set up and was quickly met by Michael Summers, whom I've known since the first WalterCon years ago, and Joe Prostko. We had been concerned about not having a projector, particularly on such short notice, but as we found out, it wasn't really necessary. We had a six-foot table, Joe's MSI Wind netbook, my Thinkpad R40 laptop, some live CDs, a bunch of fliers Urias had sent us, a couple of chairs, and some great neighbors in the non-profit section: the Northeast Ohio Open Source Society (NOOSS) and The Linux Link Tech Show (TLLTS). Setting up didn't take long, and even at that early hour there were already a lot of people there besides the sponsors.

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