[fusion_text]This past weekend, Ken and Dru went to Charlotte, NC for this year’s Southeast Linuxfest. An estimated 500 people were in attendance throughout the conference, which took place from Friday morning until Sunday afternoon.
Ken reported that the booth was very busy the majority of the time. About half of the attendees that stopped by were system administrators for various businesses and organizations, and most people who were at the booth stayed to ask questions, play with the PC-BSD 10.0.2 demo, and discuss ZFS. Several people made donations and the table raised $250 in total for the FreeBSD Foundation. Many happy FreeNAS users and iXsystems customers also came by to give kudos and tell us how pleased they were with their experience.
Many people were familiar with FreeNAS and were already using it themselves. There was also a lot of interest in PC-BSD and the table nearly ran out of all of the PC-BSD DVDs by the close of the conference on Sunday.
Most of the people Dru and Ken talked to during the conference seemed to have turned onto FreeBSD by the end of the weekend. The major features that they seemed to be interested in were:
- ZFS with snapshot/restore/replication – this was easily the #1 thing people wanted to discuss.
- FreeBSD jails were a big hit as well, since the current buzzword in the Linux community is something called “Docker”, which is similar to a FreeBSD jail/PBI system for Linux. This software is currently still in its early stages.
- The non system-admins were extremely interested in the Lumina project as well. Ken demonstrated his current development version of Lumina for a few of them, and they were blown away by the “intuitiveness” of the desktop and the way the file manager integrates ZFS file restore and image slideshow abilities for easy use.
Of course, a conference wouldn’t be complete without talks from industry experts, and both Ken and Dru gave presentations. About 12 people attended Ken’s talk, PBI v10: Application Management Made Easy, and most people wanted to know more about jail integration. Dru’s presentation, ZFS 101, was well attended by about 40-50 people. People were most impressed with the ZFS GUI tools, the boot environments, and the built-in snapshot browser/restorer. The slides from Ken’s talk can be found below. Jupiter Broadcasting was also there and interviewed both Ken and Dru.
Overall, the conference was deemed a success. While the conference was smaller this year, the level of interaction more than made up for it. We’ll be back next year with more freebies. In the meantime, stay tuned for the recap from this year’s OSCON!
Ken’s slides:
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