Fortunately, I was able to snap a few pictures with some of the spare, also not fully-charged, batteries I did have on hand.  However, others took many pictures and I’ve listed them below.

• Sheri Bigelow took some great pictures.  She is a great local photographer, web designer and the local webmistress.
• Tristan Rhodes, a local Asterisk Entrepreneur posted a good blog post.
• Here’s the pictures I took.  Not nearly as many, or as good.

To summarize the party, much celebration was had with foosball, a chess game on one of the largest chess boards around, video games, air hockey and much more was provided by CodeGreene.  The FedoraProject and Utah Open Source sponsored the food and prizes.  If you’ve never had a Chipotle burrito, they are the best burritos around.

I was able to spend time with about 5-7 people myself sharing the Preview Release of Fedora 9 (codename Sulphur) including two who had never had previous success with Fedora or Linux in general.  It was very satisfying to see things work for them.

The Ubuntu folks were there in strength as well.  The Hardy Heron (8.04) CDs were being passed out, while we Fedoran’s provided LiveUSB versions.  I even saw people taking advantage and obtaining both!  Its great to see communities come together and celebrate together.

The party continued at Salt Lake Pizza & Pasta for another couple hours.  Lot’s of talk about the releases, upcoming events, and general mayhem took place including having Heartsbane shoot beer through his nose when I swore at him!

All in all, quite a successful evening and I look forward to helping others in November at our next release party.

Cheers,

Herlo

UPDATE: Another 70+ pictures have been added, check them out!

While at work today, setting up test environments for Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10), I needed to check something with the ubuntu.com DNS entries. So I ran the following:

# dig -t ns ubuntu.com

And got something very interesting and entertaining. Can you see what it was? Yes, the mythic-beasts are definitely alive and well within Ubuntu! Now that you are having fun, try these commands immediately afterward:

# dig -t ns mythic-beasts.com

And

# whois mythic-beasts.com

Note the other nameservers. Quite an entertaining 5-10 minutes of your life.

Enjoy,

Herlo

My plan is to install the other two major distros of Linux (OpenSUSE and Ubuntu) and compare them with Fedora, my favorite distribution. I’ll be comparing them on installation, features, tools and any other thing that I regularly use in my day-to-day life. Once the distros are all installed (in a triple-boot, no less), I’ll be keeping each one for a week at a time over the next few months.

Over each week, I’ll write down things that are awesome, good, bearable, or just plain bug me, and each will get a score. To be fair, I’ll make sure to rank them with a maximum of +5 and a minimum of -5. Its possible that a negative score can happen, but I expect that this will not be the case for any of the distros.

Anyway, wish me luck on my triple-boot installs and my future blogging with these comparisons. I also hope this will enlighten others about the options available in each of the distros and encourage the developers to continue to improve the usability and functionality of their particular distribution.

Tonight, I’ll be installing and setting up OpenSUSE 10.3 and running it for the next week. During the holidays, I’ll be taking a bit of a break, so blogging might be a bit slower. In early January, I’ll install Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) as well. See you all on the flip side.

Cheers,

Herlo

The point of this post is to ask a simple question, however.  During the promotion of this event, I’ve received suggestions beyond the three big versions of Linux that are being released close to one month from each other.  For example, OpenBSD will be release soon, and Apple released Leopard for Mac OSX, among others.  And while every operating system is welcome to participate in the MDRP, I can’t help but wonder about certain definitions.

My question is what counts as a distro?.  I mean how do you classify yourself as a distro?  Is it a Linux only thing?  Or, is it just Open Source OSes?  Maybe its nothing, and I’m just bringing this up for no good reason.

Your comments are appreciated and encouraged.

Cheers,

Herlo

Cheers,

Herlo