When I was at LinuxFest the other weekend (Sept 30), I got the chance to find out about and talk to some of the people from Free Geek Columbus. They are an non-profit organization who provide computer training as well as hardware to people who are not able to afford it. Also one of their biggest projects is accepting donations of old hardware and either refurbishing or recycling it.

I am very excited to find an organization like this because I have been accumulating old hardware for some time now and I have been looking for a good place to donate it. I always tell my friends and family to not throw out the old computer, because it still has some life in it. Besides after reading some of the facts on their website a computer and/or a CRT monitor can be quite harmful to the environment.

From reading through the information provided on their site I would recommend that everyone look into recycling over trashing. They provide general information about what types of places take old computer materials and where. The information on their site is based mostly in the Columbus area but I image it wouldn’t be too hard to find a local recycling plant no matter where you dwell.

The organization in Columbus is modeled after the original Free Geek out of Portland, OR. Other useful information on donating and recycling is available on their site.
http://www.freegeek.org

The main website of Free Geek Columbus is as follows.
http://www.freegeekcolumbus.org

LinuxFest last weekend was a great success. This year there was more than 1000 attendees, and I would say it seemed a bit crowded. We were in the same space in the conference center as last year (and we almost filled it then) and the exhibition floor would get quite crowded between the talks. They had fewer tables in the ballrooms for people to sit at and some of the talks became standing room only. Which on the whole is an awesome thing, but they will just have to reserve a larger space for next year.

As for me; it was a lot of fun to work the check in table through the morning. I was quite sad that I had to leave the conference at the lunch break. However I was able to go to the first couple of talks in the morning and I have to say that I really enjoyed the talk about the Apache web server. I definitely picked up some good pointers to use at work.

The only thing I wish they would have done differently is that they really didn’t organize the talks into different levels of technical prowess. In 2005 they had the same three ballrooms and at any given time they would have at least one talk that even the casual computer user could follow. This year I brought two people with me who were not even Linux users and they found themselves struggling to keep up with most talks.

They have already made September 29, 2007 the date for next year’s LinuxFest, so mark your calendars now.

You can read more about the event at their website.
http://www.ohiolinux.org

I also made it into one of the event photos.
http://www.ohiolinux.org/about_photos.html