I just returned from Edinburgh where we represented Fedora at LinuxCon Europe 2013. It was great three days. I arrived to Edinburgh Sunday evening and was welcomed by a typical Scottish weather – rain. Our local contact and host was Keiran Smith, a longtime Fedora ambassador and packager. Another ambassador representing Fedora at LinuxCon was Jon Archer who arrived in the middle of the first day, and Tony, a longtime local Fedora user who helped us fill the last position after one of ambassadors cancelled their trip to LinuxCon. There were much more Fedora contributors at LinuxCon: Tom Callaway, Ruth Suehle, Matthew Garrett, Thorsten Leemhuis, Daniel Veillard and others.

Our booth was between BlackDuck and oVirt&Gluster booths and was well attended. We prepared stickers, case badges, upstream community sticker sheets, badges, and Fedora Cloud flyers for LinuxCon attendees. They could also check out Fedora 19 and 20 on two laptops we had at the booth. We also wanted to showcase a Wayland session of GNOME in Fedora 20, but had problems with input devices, so the showcase was over very quickly 🙂

LinuxCon is not an event to present Fedora to new end users although we met a lot of people who said that would try Fedora after visiting our booth and DVD ran out very quickly. LinuxCon is mainly about presenting Fedora to other open source projects, people from all kind of companies that are interested in Linux, and also about networking. For example, a director from one of very well known IT company (I don’t want to name) came to our booth and asked how they can cooperate with Fedora because so far their development only targeted Ubuntu, but they don’t like the direction Ubuntu has recently taken and would like to stick with someone who stays in the Linux pack. We were also recruiting new contributors. Eilidh McAdam, a developer of Lanedo, showed her interest in contributing in Fedora and she is already in the process to become an ambassador. And hopefully, she’ll be a valuable packager or developer, too.

Apart from LinuxCon, I really enjoyed Edinburgh. Keiran took us to several nice places in evenings including a really good Indian restaurant. I was really surprised how cheap Scotland had become for us. When I was there 9 years ago, 1  GBP was 55 CZK, now it’s only 30 CZK, so everything is almost twice cheaper. And beer is still only around 2.5 GBP 🙂 I was also surprised how many Czechs I met in Edinburgh. The receptionist in my hotel turned out to be Czech, so I checked in speaking Czech. The dealer at our roulette table at the LinuxCon party was also Czech. The weather was not that bad after all. The last day was even sunny.

I’d like to thank Fedora Project for sponsoring accommodation and dinner for booth staff and the Linux Foundation for providing us with a booth and tickets for booth staff which are otherwise very expensive.

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