iXsystems Attends Ohio Linux Fest 2016

I just returned from Ohio LinuxFest 2016, and it was another amazing conference! This year was quite busy with nearly 600 attendees and 6 tracks of presentations over the course of 2 days. Dru Lavigne, Marty Godsey, and myself attended this event and staffed the FreeBSD booth in the Expo area.
I spent almost all of my time in the “hallway track”, with a constant flow of people coming through the Expo hall (even before its scheduled opening) and stopping at the FreeBSD booth. We had a TrueOS demonstration system at the table, plus all sorts of stickers, pamphlets, coloring books with crayons, beastie horns, bottle openers, USB sticks, and more. People constantly stopped by to check out the booth and talk about FreeBSD. There were many discussions, ranging from the upcoming FreeNAS 10, the about-to-be-released FreeBSD 11.0, documentation, and the new SysAdm. We even had a surprise visit from Groff the BSD Goat, as he made a quick stop at OLF on his way to MeetBSD in California next month! In addition, $150 was raised for the FreeBSD Foundation.

The booth was busy the entire conference, with people interested in hearing about FreeBSD for the first time, discovering and trying “TrueOS”, and learning about the new Lumina desktop. The demonstration system was generally a stock install of TrueOS, with a few additional packages installed to highlight how FreeBSD uses almost all the same applications as Linux (such as LibreOffice).

We also installed the Windows version of Steam (+ some offline games) through the “PlayOnBSD” utility. I think seeing a FreeBSD system seamlessly running GPU-intensive games was a big draw in enticing traditional Linux desktop users to check out FreeBSD/TrueOS and helped dispel the common myth that the BSDs are “just for servers”.

Similarly, people could actually try out the new Lumina desktop environment on TrueOS, and overall were very impressed with its functionality. In fact, a number of people actually mistook it for KDE at first glance and immediately dismissed it because they “preferred GNOME”. They quickly changed their minds when they tested out Lumina on the demo unit and realized how responsive, lightweight, and customizable it is. The other big thing that attracted Linux users to FreeBSD was ZFS-based boot environments. Once they heard about how they could instantly create backups of their operating system (and roll back in no time flat), they could instantly envision how useful that would be on their production/home systems.
Dru gave a presentation on using Sphinx for documentation (slides are here) and my presentation was on using the SysADM API to simplify FreeBSD administration (slides are here).
Overall, I had an amazing time at this conference (and almost lost my voice at the same time) due to all the interaction with people within the “hallway track”. Once you consider all the great talks which were also going on at the same time, you really need to consider Ohio Linux Fest as one of the “must attend” conferences in the eastern United States.