It takes a pretty good event to make it worthwhile to cross the country to attend, but LinuxFest Northwest lived up to the challenge this weekend. The last time I made the trek to Seattle it was to see Robyn Hitchcock and the Venus 3 at the Crocodile Cafe, and I have to say that LFNW was almost as much fun — but it lacked Peter Buck on guitar.

LinuxFest Northwest took place at the Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham, Washington — which is about an hour and a half from Seattle, assuming traffic is good. Apparently, that’s a faulty assumption, though, as it took me about an hour and a half just to get a few miles out of Seattle on Friday after I landed at the Seattle-Tacoma airport.

But it was well worth the trip. I had a chance to meet a lot of Linux users — and openSUSE users in particular. Dave Herman, Wesley Taylor, and James Mason showed up to help staff the openSUSE booth, as well as Novell’s Frank Rego.

Thanks to Dave, Wes, and James the booth was very well covered during the entire fest — I hope we can continue to draw great volunteers like them at other shows.

I was impressed by the number of attendees that showed up for LFNW this year — the “official” count is, I think, about 750 people — but that is only based on the number of people who came by and took a schedule each day, which is sort of a lossy measure for the number of attendees. I am pretty sure the actual number is closer to 1,000 or more attendees.

The show was chock full of awesome — there were plenty of sessions going on most of the time, the exhibit floor was laid out really well so that people had plenty of space to get around and see the various vendors and projects exhibiting at the show. The organizers also leveraged the location, and had the culinary students at the college put on a nice salmon BBQ on Saturday that was very good — and absolutely stellar when compared to the standard convention food.

The facility is excellent for the fest — it has plenty of classrooms that are well suited for technical presentations. The location is very nice as well — and Bellingham is an inexpensive city to travel to, though it is a bit of a haul from Seattle.

The crowd that showed up for LFNW was really fun and I enjoyed meeting and talking to openSUSE community members and potential community members and users.

Sunday, at the end of the conference, we had a room to host a birds of a feather for openSUSE users — and I’m really pleased with the turnout, considering that it was the final slot of the day on the second day of the fest. (The turnout for Sunday was lighter than the first day, but still a good crowd.) We talked about a lot of interesting topics — pain points with openSUSE, what we could be doing better, and how to help promote openSUSE. I am really glad to see strong interest in promoting openSUSE by the community, and that so many people turned out to talk about openSUSE.

I’m really sorry that LFNW isn’t a longer show — the atmosphere of the show was really laid back and fun, and I had a lot of great conversations. I also really enjoyed meeting all of the fest organizers, and talking to them about how the show comes together and the tools that they use to organize the show. We also discussed how to spread those ideas, and you’ll be hearing more about that in the near future. There’s a lot of collective wisdom (and beer drinking, but mostly wisdom…) among the LFNW folks and other fest organizers I’ve been talking to over the past few years (notably the Ohio LinuxFest organizers and the SCALE group) that needs to be shared so that other groups can benefit from their experience.

Sitting in the Seattle-Tacoma airport now waiting for a flight, I’m wishing the weekend hadn’t flown by quite so quickly. I look forward to being here again next year.

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