Southeast LinuxFest (SELF) 2017 : Joe Maloney and Josh Smith’s Reflections

Last weekend, the iXsystems team headed down to Charlotte, North Carolina for the Southeast Linuxfest (SELF 2017) to spread awareness about FreeBSD, FreeNAS, and TrueOS. As sponsors, we had a tremendous time at the event, and it was extremely rewarding engaging and speaking with the Open Source community there. It was a pleasure to speak with all the people who approached our booth at the event, even if it was just to answer a simple question. iXsystems Team Members Joe Maloney and Josh Smith detail their individual experiences at the event below.

 
Joe: This year’s Southeast LinuxFest was very productive. I recall that last year we were passing out PC-BSD 10.3 images, and asking people to check back on items like the improved graphics and improved wireless support in TrueOS. This year we were able to install the latest TrueOS stable release for several interested people who brought laptops to our booth. We were pleased to see for each install we did not run into any compatibility or usability issues with the latest 6-month stable image.
On Saturday, I gave a talk about OpenRC in TrueOS. Immediately after the talk, I met Doug Goldstein, one of the developers involved in the Gentoo Baselayout 2 project, which was the origin of OpenRC. On Sunday, I assisted Josh Smith with a Q/A session after his talk on TrueOS.
Many visitors were excited to hear about virtualization in our upcoming FreeNAS 11 release. We had several good conversations about the upcoming updated plugin system with iocage that sparked a lot of interest. In particular, people were very interested in how the iocage plugin system will pull the latest packages from a trusted source, and simply run post install routines to configure the plugins.
Josh: Last weekend, iXsystems sent Joe Maloney, J.T. Pennington, and myself to SELF to help spread the word about FreeBSD! We met a ton of really awesome people who were excited to hear about FreeNAS, FreeBSD, and TrueOS. As always, the staff at SELF was friendly and welcoming. They welcomed our BSD based software at their Linux conference. The staff was engaging and always willing to jump in and help anytime.
We had several hundred visitors at our booth! There were many questions asked about the release of FreeNAS 11, hardware support in FreeBSD, how TrueOS compared to Linux, and the addition of OpenRC to TrueOS. We gave out tons of schwag to both the attendees and even a few animals! Diamond the dog (pictured below) was a big hit around the conference and happily sported our daemon horns during the conference.
Joe and I were scheduled to give a joint talk this year, but a speaker canceled at the last minute, giving me my own time slot for a different talk. We split our talk into separate slide decks and were very busy adding more slides during the conference. Joe’s talk centered around the OpenRC integration with TrueOS, while mine discussed how TrueOS compares to Linux and the differences between the BSD and GPL licenses. Both talks were warmly received and we responded to many questions during the Q&A sessions at the end of both talks.
Thank you to all the attendees and organizers for making SELF a successful conference this year! We can’t wait to see all of you again next time.