It is that time of year again, the fourth annual installment of the Ohio LinuxFest is set to take place at the Greater Columbus Convention Center on September 30, 2006. It is one of the larger annual conference/expo events entirely dedicated to the Linux and Open Source communities.

I think it is a great experience for anyone in the technology industry as well as anyone who interested in the world outside of ‘conventional’ software. The day is filled with lectures by individuals from all realms of experience; and the topics range from the highly technical to the very non-technical userspace concepts. Regardless of whether or not you know much about Linux or the idea of Open Source technology, you could easily enjoy and benefit from this conference. On top of that the conference is entirely free to the public; so the only investment you risk losing by attending is your time.

One thing that a really liked about last year (my first experience) was that they had the lectures setup up so that no matter how much or how little you knew about Linux or other Open Source technologies, they always had at least one lecture going on the you could still understand and/or benefit from. Maybe in the one ballroom they would be talking about performance tuning for MySQL or secure shell command line tips, but in the others they would be having a business lecture on how to successfully implement Open Source software into your Microsoft dominated business or one of my favorite lectures from last year on how educational organizations can save money and expand technical capabilities through Open Source solutions.

Last year I got to meet a lady who knew nothing about computers outside of casual PC use (internet browsing, email, etc) who just heard about the event the on the day before and decided to see what ‘this Linux stuff was all about’. It was really fascinating to see that diverse realm of people all at the same conference.

This will be my second year going and I am very much looking forward to it. I, unfortunately will not be able to stay for the whole event, but I am signed up to help with morning registration on the expo floor. I am very excited to be able to be involved with the event this year and hopefully in the years to come I can expand my involvement to point of leadership in the conference. My ultimate goal would be to give a lecture at LinuxFest, but I think that might be a few years away.

Here is the link to the conference website, so you can find out more information.
Ohio LinuxFest 2006

I would highly recommend going, it is a great experience. Plus it is free.

The new Firefox beta just came out and I have been playing with it a little and to be honest with you I am not that impressed with the changes over the last beta.

The visual enhancements that you can clearly see (ie, shadowed mouseovers on new sleeker icons), are really not that impressive. Personally I think the new icons and such look pretty cheesy, hopefully they will be cleaned up more by the time the browser comes out.

I didn’t really test out the anti-phishing alerts because I am not really sure where to go on the web to get solicited. However I do think the idea is a good one and I hope they pull it off well. Only time will tell here.

As far as enhancing the search bar in the top right corner; the suggest feature appears to be nothing more than a drop down of terms you have previously typed in. It doesn’t seem that intuitive. I do however like the idea of offering search extensions from a web page, much in the same way a developer can advertise to a browser an rss feed or a favicon. But, I couldn’t really test this out to see how it worked.

Also being able to resume your browser session is a nice feature, but it is one that I really don’t much care to use. The only reason I got to experience it with this beta is because it crashed a couple of times. But I am sure they will have that fixed up before they release it though (it is just a beta after all).

The new add-ons manager looks promising but you really can’t tell if it is any good because you can’t install any extensions. This is because of the compatibility restrictions and the lack of 2.0 extensions (this is just because the browser is not out yet). I have also always thought that it would be nice if you could search and browse the themes and extensions within the context of the options menu; instead of it just launching a new window.

The bottom line is that Firefox 2.0 is going to be a great step of improvement from Firefox 1.5, but this beta is nothing to get excited over.

Here is a review I read that inspired the post.
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS3852026030.html

Here is where to get a copy of the beta to try for yourself. Just be careful, it is not a finished product.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/bonecho/all-beta.html