Last week, we did a little roadtrip to Slovakia, went all the way to Košice and stopped in Žilina. It was a long, but pleasant trip during which we did a good job promoting Red Hat and Fedora.

First day, we went from Brno to Žilina which is about 200 km away. We did Afternoon with Red Hat at University of Žilina last year, so we weren’t completely new to students. This time, we focused more on bachelor and diploma thesis topics. We started this program with University of Žilina last year and we already have several students there working on their theses with Red Hat. Hopefully, we’ll get even more students this year. As usually, there were 4 talks:

Thesis with Red Hat (general introduction of Red Hat, how to get involved in Fedora, working on RHT thesis projects,…) – me
BaseOS and Desktop Thesis Topics (FreeIPA, GNOME, KDE, SELinux,…) – Jaroslav Rezza Řezník
Kernel Performance Testing (filesystems etc.) – Adam Okuliar
JBoss Thesis Topics – Robert Balent

After the presentations, we had a beer (alcohol-free in my case :-/ ) with university teachers discussing general Linux topics and further cooperation between the university and Red Hat. Then we jumped in the car and continued another 300 km to Košice.

We were really surprised by the level of organization in Košice. When we arrived to university’s library building where we were going to have our talks our posters were everywhere, including university’s LCDs. We came with red fedoras on and literally everyone was turning to us and looking the way “those are the guys from posters”. We didn’t know what to expect in Košice, neither Red Hat, nor Fedora had ever been there. The audience was pretty large, about 100 people.  And we as speakers could feel the listeners’ passion which you don’t feel any more in cities such as Brno where Linux events take place often. Some of us were really surprised by expert questions, so there are quite a few skilled Linux users in Košice. After I spoke about Fedora release parties, local organizers got an idea to organize Fedora 17 release party in Košice. First Fedora release party in Slovakia? That would be cool!

Our talks were:
Red Hat and Fedora Introduction – me
Fedora Project (governance, how to contribute,…) – Jaroslav Rezza Řezník
Kernel Performace Testing – Adam Okuliar
JBoss Forge (demo – quick and easy app deploying) – Robert Balent

We also gave away a lot of swag (mugs, stickers, 120 DVDs of Fedora 16, hats,…).