We threw out the playbook. Karsten Wade and I spoke in Professor Tim Budd’s junior level Open Source development class at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Rather than give presentation after presentation, we both got up in front of the class and tag-teamed. Karsten talking about open source and Red Hat’s perspective on things, and me on the Fedora side.
The class was attentive and rather than talking at them, it was more of a give and take. There was a lot of discussion about open source, possible projects, how to get involved (both in Fedora and other projects, if need be) and, in one instance, how Fedora stands out.
Professor Budd was an excellent host, to the point of taking the girls out to the quad to find some items using geocached clues while Karsten and I got introduced to Beaversource and OSWALD. The former is Oregon State’s social networking system with a huge amount of potential and the latter is the Oregon State Wireless Active Learning Device, a ARM-driven handheld device with huge potential. Both Karsten and I are giving these machines a testdrive.
Later in the evening, Karsten addressed the OSU LUG in their new digs on campus, a huge room filled with comfortable couches and some nifty hardware. An interesting talk and several pizzas later, we ended up with adding a significant number of disks and stickers to the LUG’s collection and with a new ambassador on campus (thanks, Mike, and hopefully the “paperwork” will go thorugh quickly).
The trip to Bellingham started inauspiciously around 10 a.m. and we arrived around 7 after picking up a couple of folks at the Seattle Airportt. The evening was somewhat uneventful, and while I should probably work on my presentation, I think I’m going to wing it.
NOTES: The wireless at the Hampton Inn tends to be less than impressive. Hopefully this will improve during the course of the weekend.
OSWALD is pretty impressive. You can find it here,
A trip to OSU would not be complete without a trip to the FOSS mecca known as the Oregon State University Open Source Lab. Thanks, Lance, for the tour.
My daughter Mirano is also blogging about the trip. Her blog is here.
As serendipity would have it, both Mirano and Saskia had to go to the barthroom and we found ourselves at an exit where there was no readily discernable facilities. But there was a middle school in north Portland where we imposed upon them to use their girls’ room. While talking to the principal in the hallway, she asked what I was doing in Portland and I told her I was on my way to LinuxFest Northwst, and she informed me that the school had a Linux lab. Cool. So off we went to the lab where it appeared they were running an older version of RedHat (7.3 maybe?).
More to follow tomorrow.
