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| Welcome to LFNW! |
April 26 and 27,
Bellingham, WA turned its nerd factor up to 11, and
openSUSE was there,
sponsoring,
presenting, and to make sure everyone had a lot of fun!
This was the
15th anniversary of LinuxFest Northwest, and the both the organizers and attendees made it clear why this event keeps growing every year. At last count, there were
1500 attendees; and for the first time openSUSE had a wealth of enthusiasts volunteering in the booth to make sure we could help everyone get in touch with their
inner Geeko.
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| Big Geeko |
Adrian Klaver and
Caleb Gebhart, local advocates, were on hand in the booth most of the weekend, showing two very different sides of openSUSE: Adrian is an avid Python and Qt developer, and has no problem walking anyone through a problem. Caleb brought his gaming laptop, and made the point that gaming on openSUSE, especially through
Steam, is as fun as it is easy to setup.
Carl Symons, of
Community Tech NW stepped in when we needed an extra smiling face in the booth.
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| Hangin' with Jon 'Maddog' Hall |
Taking a more professional turn,
Peter Linnell, Technical Specialist for SUSE, and
Bryan Lunduke, SUSE's social media manager (and all around ridiculous guy), fielded questions, shared swag, and made sure 'Big Geeko' got lots of love. Bryan and I collaborated on "10 things you'd love about SUSE if you only knew..." which drew an audience of about 150! Peter was able to attend as well, and help out with Q&A, and
Michael Miller, SUSE's VP of Marketing and Global Alliances joined the audience as well. Michael hung out at the booth after for a while, where we all got so spend a little
quality time with
Jon 'Maddog' Hall, Executive Director of Linux International (and grumpy grandpa to all of us Linux users). Peter Linnel wrapped up our presentation track with a
deep dive into OBS on Sunday, to another full room.
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| Presenting with Bryan |
Speaking of the "booth", that just really doesn't do it justice. The
openSUSE Lounge was a
popular place, what with the
comfy chairs, lots of
friendly people, and
free Lime JeOS for everyone! When it came time for
Jakob Perry, long time LFNW organizer, to give an
interview to Slashdot, they couldn't find a more comfy spot to hang out!
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| Even Ubuntu folks get hugs here. |
When it was all said and done, we handed out
100 openSUSE 13.1 promo DVDs, gave away a dozen
SUSE USB sticks to the
World Famous Raffle, and made countless origami penguins and chameleons (including special orange, blue and red ones for those other distro booths ;-)
We're already looking forward to
LFNW2015, where we're sure to have even more fun than before!
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| Everybody loves openSUSE! |
