Yesterday I was at the first ever Ontario Linux Fest, manning the Eclipse booth together with Remy. Also hung out with a whole bunch of people from Red Hat’s Toronto office: Sami, Lillian, Ben, Andrew, Behdad, Tom and Matt. I think the conference was great. It was pretty small and intimate and didn’t feel like LinuxWorld; which I think is way too huge.
You can see some photos at Andrew’s blog post. I especially like this one
:
Eclipse Booth
We had a whole bunch of people come by the Eclipse booth, and to my surprise at least 60% didn’t even know what Eclipse was. Another 20% kinda knew what it was but never tried it. The rest knew what it was and at least have tried it once. Only a few people actually used Eclipse. That was kind of surprising to me, even though I knew that Eclipse wasn’t very well received by the Linux crowd. Andrew’s presentation was well received from what I heard, so hopefully that will help with spreading the word about Eclipse. I think that the efforts of the Eclipse linux distros project is well worth it, and will help really help people use Eclipse on Linux.
OpenMoko
I had my Neo1973 with me and was playing around with it in the booth most of the day. A *lot* of people came by because they saw it and wanted to play around with it too.
So that was fun. Yesterday I flashed the latest OpenMoko image to the phone and was actually able to make phone calls out of the box, which was very exciting. I even used the phone all day as a cell phone, and was surprised how long the batter actually lasted: most of the day. Of course I connected it to the computer once in a while because I was shuttling files back and forth. But since I always have my laptop with me anyway, that’s not a problem so I hope to start using the phone full time soon.
I think I’m also going to go to FSOSS, since it looks pretty interesting and it’s going to be a good break from school. See you there.

Igor,
Thanks for helping to man the the Eclipse booth. Sounds like it was a fun event.
Ian
I wish you had mentioned that Ian Darwin gave
the presentation on OpenMoko. I thought that
he did a superb job.