Aside from early in the morning and late in the afternoon, there were always lots of people in the Expo hall visiting the FreeBSD booth. I noticed we had a very low percentage of “drive-by” visitors—most people stayed and talked about some aspect of FreeBSD. I would say that we had a pretty even split between system administrators (who were interested in FreeNAS) and desktop users (who were interested in PC-BSD and Lumina).
The main difference I noticed compared to previous years was that we had very few people asking what FreeBSD was or how it was different from Linux. I can only recall about ten people asking that. Instead, a large percentage of people said they either already had a FreeBSD/PC-BSD/FreeNAS system up and running or they were getting ready to switch to FreeBSD permanently. We also had a few people who explained that they were already running their entire office with FreeBSD and were really excited with the development trends in FreeBSD.
Both Dru’s talk on FreeNAS 9.3 and my talk about Lumina-DE on Friday were filled to capacity. Sixty to seventy people attended each talk, with very little standing space in the back. There was a lot of interest in the topic of the presentations. I was asked about how to port Lumina to another OS and accessibility options for the blind. Dru was asked about ZFS configuration, boot environments, and system requirements.
There was a very large presence of people working with the Linux Action Show at the conference this year. A number of the ones I talked to stated that they were either impressed with PC-BSD or already running it at home. They also recorded an interview with me about the Lumina desktop, so keep an eye out for it in the near future.
While I don’t have any official estimates about the total number of attendees, I would estimate between one to two thousand people showed up simply due to all of the unique visitors at the FreeBSD booth. Overall, I think it went smoothly and was a very successful conference. I am already looking forward to returning to this conference next year!
Ken Moore
PC-BSD Software Developer
