Northwest Linuxfest report

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

Howdy all,

Just wanted to give you the output for the Northwest Linuxfest, about 8 days ago.  NWLF was a pretty cool conference, located near the border of Washington and Canada.  The crowd was pretty mixed, since the conference was free we had a lot of families, plenty of kids, teenagers and wives etc.  So it was nice to see a diverse crowd of non-techs attending as well as technical people.  My talk went fairly well.  I didn't get a lot of questions and certainly nothing that would be construed as controversial.  I tried to get in front of any controversial topics and discuss them before hand.  Overall a pretty nice experience.  I'll be doing another talk at Open Source Bridge in Portland and possibly one at Linuxcon in Vancouver.

A couple of issues:

I need more screenshots.  What I had wasn't enough.  I need screenshots for:

1) the old GNOME 2 desktop

2) screenshots of overview/workspaces

3) screenshots of login screen

4) screenshot of rhythmbox controls (persistent notifications)

5) screenshot of evolution

6) screenshot of rhythmbox

I could do this myself, but I think there is a particular process to make them look good I think, right?

Some feedback from the talk:

1) No clear delineation of what GNOME 3 in comparison to GNOME 2.  It didn't have a particular feature comparison.  My wife said she didn't really know enough about GNOME 2 to say why GNOME 3 is better.  A summary of features of GNOME 2 what it did right, what it did wrong.

2) More screenshots to give context

3) some of the screenshots had stuff at the bottom that most people could not see.

I think that's pretty much it for now.  The talk was recorded so you can see how I did. :-)  I will be putting up my slides lgo so that others can also talk about it.  I hope that people will add to it so that it can be used as a standard for discussing the design for GNOME 3.

Here is the link to the videos at Northwest Linuxfest.  The two relevant ones are:

 1) What's New in Fedora (15) by Adam Williamson

 2) GNOME 3, What to expect with the next generation user friendly desktop by Sriram Ramkrishna

Feel free to critique.  Adam did a nice talk and that ended up giving a demo of GNOME 3.  So if you attended both our talks you get a design view of GNOME 3 and then a practical view from Fedora end.  The Linuxcon one is going to be a collaboration between myself and Adam and we'll discuss the design and then the outcome from a distro point of view.  For instance, how much problems did people have with graphic cards and what not.  I think there are some logistical issues that we can work on once GNOME 3 is released on fedora that we can present.

sri