LinuxWorld Johannesburg 2006 reportback

Short form: Both Futurex (general IT) and LinuxWorld Johannesburg were smaller this year, and there were less people around. This, however, meant that we had an opporunity to talk to a much larger percentage of people, and the people who were visiting formed an even more interesting spectrum of interest and experience.

In terms of the conference - there was less choice of sessions, and each session was reasonably long. I suspect that may be due to people like me, who would like to talk, but were too stupid to remember to reply to the Call For Papers. And maybe, again, because the Call For Papers was not advertised on the local LUG mailing lists. I'll try remember to post the next conference I deal with's Call For Papers to the local lists (and here, of course).

The keynotes were free this year, which was a great idea. Unfortunately, they were not particularly well attended. The keynotes were reasonably well advertised, so I guess one should just blame it on the blinkered dash they call work in Johannesburg.

Jon maddog Hall was great again this year, providing a more polished and updated version of the talk he did last year. Luckily for the audience (at least in my opinion), he decided to fill time until the official talk started with some stories and entertainment, which was fun. Last year maddog had the RUCUS geeks to entertain him, but unfortunately there was no similar group of groupies this year.

Jeff Waugh and Nat Friedman were the additional geek superstars this year. Last year, the presentations were often scripted and done by non-technical people, and having these two present was great this year.

Jeff gave the story of Ubuntu, from the beginning to current, the ethos, and some hints into the plan for the future. I'm not too sure how Jeff's "Baby Jesus" reference went down, though.

Nat did a well-prepared talk on Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop, which would generally be called scripted, except he smoothly dealt with some crashes and weird behaviour that would have left me flustered. In terms of content, the integration of Beagle was the most interesting to me. In terms of style, his subtle introduction of some of the Xgl stuff was awesome, but it seems a good half of the attendees weren't too taken by it.

On to the show itself...

I hung around the TSF/Tuxlabs/Freedom Toaster/LPI/Impi stand mostly, chatting to people about open source, and fielding some questions they had about the organisations involved in the stand.

It was great to see and chat to Jason, Karien, and Jonathan from TSF again (last time was at Linuxworld last year which is terrible, since we're all in Cape Town. Hilton was also there from TSF (but he's based in Johannesburg now).

Thomas Black's venture, babelgeek, was there as part of their running of the Geek Freedom League, and I also met Thomas's business partner, Eric Andrews.

Ross Addis, Adi Attar, and Charles Majola from Impi were also at the stand, and I briefly met Gary Fortuin, their MD.

Paul Manners also helped out generally on the stand (and in more an official capacity than I was).

The other booths in the Linuxworld area weren't all that interesting to me (even with the free popcorn or free snacks on offer). Meraka managed to get a double-booth and leave it fallow for the event.

Didn't even look at the rest of Futurex, although I hear there were dancing (and even stripping) girls elsewhere, if you're into that sort of thing.

The Freedom Toaster went down well again, and there was almost always a queue. But none of the snaking multi-hour waits that were happening last year, thankfully. Jason will probably send through the number of CDs burned officially, but my guess is that it would be about 2000 to 2500. Also, a large number (1000 to 1500, I'm guessing) of Ubuntu CD sets were given away.

So, in all, it was a bit disappointing in terms of attendees of the keynotes and in terms of the lack of the heady hype of last year, but mostly it was just a great opportunity to meet people and share with them some philosophy, some information, and some free software.