The first edition of LinuxCon Europe was held in Prague last week. Red Hat as a sponsor jumped in quite late and the event ownership in Red Hat ended up on my shoulders. As a Fedora ambassador, I also wanted Fedora to be present at the event. Unfortunately, there was no space left for community projects. Fedora was present and visible at LinuxCon Europe after all. We organized a shared booth – Red Hat and Fedora – and it worked very well.

 Jaroslav “Rezza” Řezník at Red Hat/Fedora booth

The official number of attendees was about 900 which is really nice regarding the fact that admission was $500. There were 40-50 redhatters and many of them are also involved in Fedora Project. Our booth worked as some kind of hub. We were receiving many technical questions and just forwarding people to other redhatters if we didn’t know the answer: “Hmm… file systems? Can you see that guy in the blue T-shirt on the other side of the hall? File systems are his domain, go ask him, he’ll surely know the answer”. To help people find the right person to ask I organized “Ask an Expert“. I made a schedule with specific areas (Xorg, storage, developer tools, security,…) and people could come to our booth at given times and ask our experts that “were on duty” there. We were also making contacts. One company decided to deploy Fedora as a guest system option in their cloud service after a conversation at our booth. Last but not least: we finally showed off our new rollup banner. The artwork was done Gnokii and together with our promotion agency we produced a working print PDF. So if you’d like to make the same rollup banner just let me know.

Our new Fedora rollup banner.

The next edition of LinuxCon Europe will be held in Barcelona (it was my personal tip and wish). And I hope Red Hat and Fedora will be present there again because LinuxCon is on its way to be the most important and interesting European-wide Linux conference.