Ohio Linuxfest 2009 Review

OLF 2009 was another great success this year as we celebrated 40 years of UNIX. Kudos to the all the organizers and volunteers who made the event happen! Although it seemed a bit scaled back this year, there was actually more content than previous years including a Friday track which included a number of sessions, gatherings and even a wedding.

There was also opportunities to get some free training all day Friday as well as paid training. One of the classes ($250) walked you through building your own PC, installing Linux and then you got to keep the computer at the end of the session.

The Friday night pre-party was great as always and gave a bunch of Open Source enthusiasts a chance to meet new people and talk about projects they are working on. The free drinks provided by Zenoss didn't hurt either. Thanks for the cigar Alan!

Saturday was the main event with 4 tracks of talks including keynotes from Shawn Powers of Linux Journal and Doug McIlroy one of the founders of the UNIX OS. Unfortunately, I missed most of the talks as I was busy getting interviews for the next episode of "the_source" which will be out soon. :)

The post-party was also a lot of fun with music by Dual Core and more free drinks and appetizers provided by IBM. If you are into nerd rap you should check out Dual Core and grab some of their CDs.

The only downside that I could see this year was a lack of sponsors. Let's hope that the economy will improve over the course of the next year so we can get vendors like Sun and HP back into the mix. I can't wait to see what happens next year!