This past weekend, Dru Lavigne and Josh Smith went to Austin, TX for this year’s annual Texas Linux Fest. Afterwards, they generously took the time to give us a recap of the event. TXLF went very well for the FreeBSD booth! Our table was one of the most popular exhibits (as always) because of our trademark FreeBSD horns. A number of people stopped by to talk about how much they love FreeNAS/BSD. Some of them were were very familiar with PC-BSD and Josh was able to get some good QA feedback from them.
Josh reported that we ran out of almost all of the promotional freebies we had sent. The last of the horns disappeared by late afternoon on the first day. Saturday was busier than Friday and the rest of the schwag steadily trickled out as the conference went on. We nearly ran out of the donation based swag as several attendees made donations to the FreeBSD Foundation or signed up for the certification test. By the end of the show, we had raised $190 for the FreeBSD Foundation.
Josh’s talk, “Introduction to PC-BSD”, had about 50 people in attendance. There were a good number of questions about the different types of encryption offered in PC-BSD. The Lumina project was probably the most popular topic of conversation after the talk. Josh received several compliments for his presentation and made several connections with new users that are going to join the forums and try out PC-BSD.
Dru’s talk, “Graphical ZFS Management Tools”, was on the last day of the conference and drew a crowd of about 40 people. As always, attendees were impressed with how easy it is to use snapshots for backups and restores, especially with the snapshot browser built into Life Preserver. One attendee had a question about how ZFS restores from a replicated snapshot if the size of the original snapshot is 0 bytes. Dru updated her slides to address that question for the upcoming presentation at SELF on Saturday.
Both Dru and Josh were impressed with the organization of the TXLF crew. It looked like there were more attendees this year than last.
“The new venue was awesome and it is great to see this event continue to grow,” Dru said. “There is a lot of IT talent in the Dallas and Austin areas and it is encouraging to see so many talented people interested in and using open source.”
Dru and Josh were impressed by the effort the organizers put into the details, like providing enough power outlets and having a dedicated audio & video guy for the BSD certification tests and their respective talks. With nothing but good feedback, we’ll definitely be back next year. Stay tuned for our recap from SouthEast LinuxFest, happening this weekend!
