Once more the first weekend of February got me traveling to the Belgian capital for FOSDEM. Probably the largest FLOSS-related conference, FOSDEM brings together each year thousands of people who develop, maintain, use and promote FLOSS initiatives.

The Fedora candies

Same as last year, I joined the conference as part of the “Fedora Project” community. On Saturday, upon our arrival at the venue, we set up our booth with all the swag and devices we had. This year we had a Fedorator, tote bags with the Fedora and the CentOS logos on them, “Fedora <3 Python” and “Fedora <3 .NET” stickers, a few coloring books for kids, some Silverblue swag and of course the “One Laptop per Child PC”. Due to the rebranding process the community is going on we didn’t have much swag printed and we ran out of stickers pretty quickly on Saturday.

The Fedorator

As expected, Saturday was a bit busier than the 2nd day, as there were more people attending the conference and more people came by our stand. The most common questions were about Silverblue, the purpose of the Fedorator and the OL PC. The Fedorator creates bootable USB sticks with the Fedora distro with various Desktop Environments. The participants could see in real time how, within 2-3 minutes, they could have a live USB with the DE they had previously chosen at the home screen of the device. Quite to my surprise, people were very interested on trying to use the small laptop which was designed for kids when the “one laptop per child” initiative was still alive. Those PCs used to run an old version of Fedora and are not produced any more as they were replaced with Raspberry Pi-s, which are more powerful than they.

The “one laptop per child” PC

The 2nd day was a bit quieter. Same as the first day we had to take our shifts at the booth. We tried to make the shifts please everyone, as the idea was to stay a certain amount of time behind our stand but also have time to enjoy the sessions.

I would like to thank once more everyone who helped those two days! See you next year (hopefully)! 😁

The main track at Building K