Well, another year, another Ohio Linuxfest. Man, was it great! I left home about 6:00 Friday morning to catch my flight at Richmod, Airport. I flew Skybus, quite cheap and no frills. They are all about getting there on time, I must say. They boarded us rapidly, got us in our seats and took off right on time. The flight was about an hour. They hawked a lot of good, though, along the way. Food, drinks, gifts, everything was up for sale; and it was quite pricey; as one would expect. Say $8.00 for a sausage and egg biscuit. That’s the price of a dinner!

I met up with the rest of the TLLTS crew at the Columbus airport. It was great seeing those guys again. We hopped a cab to the hotel. Check-in was listed as 3:00 p.m.; but we were in around 11:00 A.M. and trudged off to lunch at the North Market. That is a sweet place. Good food and cheap. The variety is astounding. I ate Indian that day.

We met up with Shoprat and Gorkon from the audience and hung with them all day. The old fogies in the group (Allan and Linc) took a siesta while Pat, Gorkon, Shoprat and myself went for some beers and wings at Gibby’s.

The pre-show party at Barley’s was fantastic. There was a ton of people there! Even more, we had a number of drink tickets so the beer was flowing freely. We did not run out until well after 10:00. A bunch of listeners showed up along with Jeremy Garcia (Linux Questions), Elan (SCALE), Dave Yates (Lottalinuxlinks podcast), Chess Griffin (Linux Reality) and Aron Newcombe (Source Show, Opennews). We had a blast!

OLF 2007 was slightly bigger and a lot better than 2006. Now, 2006 was awesome, so you can imagine this year. Our booth was hopping all day long. We were out of our DVD’s in a few hours. The crowd around the raffle was huge! It was a blast meeting old friends of the show and potential new listeners. Due to the amount of traffic we had I was not able to attend any talks, other than the closing keynotes.

We at dinner at the Happy Greek again. Good food, there! The post show party, hosted by Google was an excellent finish to a wonderful conference.

The downside? My plane leaves at 6:30 a.m. so I had to be at the airport early (had to wake up at 4:30, ungodly!). To top it off, I left my book in the cab; which bums me out. At least there is free WiFi in the columbus airport.

It’s 5:30 a.m. now. I hope to be home and back in bed in about three hours!

Pictures will be posted soon.

If one were to ask my opinion on the best distribution of Linux out there, hands down it would be Slackware. Why you might ask? Slackware is not known for it’s massive package repository (while linuxpackages.net is great, it’s no Debian repository), nor dependency checking package manager, nor for including bleeding edge software. Nope, Slackware is known for it’s stability, speed, and difficulty on the learning curb. Now I contest the last claim because while it might take a bit more work to get up and running when compared to Ubuntu or Mandriva, when it’s all said and done, you are going to know your Slackware system inside and out.

Case in point: Friday night I decided to update my server from Slackware 10.0 to 11.0. Not a big upgrade, but anytime I contemplate messing with the server, a system that has been running for years now, it’s always a big decision. Aside from the slackware packages I have compiled my own versions of qmail and mailman. I’m always leary about breaking those. The, of course, is the obligatory re-install of SpamAssassin because of perl updates (cpan to the rescue there).

Aside from upgrading the software I want to make sure downtime is at a minimum. I want a few minutes at most. And that is what Slackware gives me. The knowledge to update my server in a matter of minutes from one version to the next with confidence that when it is all said and done, it’s going to be running. And yes it was, flawlessly. It took about 5 minutes to upgrade all the packages (mind you this is a seriously custom install here; paired now as a server, no X); and we were back and rocking the Slack.

I’m looking to go up to 12, but the 2.6 series of kernels seem to take issue with my SCSI card. I’ll worm my way through this eventually and be up and running Slackware 12.

if you have never tried Slackware and really want to learn Linux, give this a shot. I personally think the only better way to learn Linux is doing it from scratch. Gentoo is great, but you are messing more with a package manager there than actually compiling your software from source and hunting down the dependencies on your own.

Slackware is the best!

Tonight, my wife’s company had a party at a local bar. She spent a good two hours getting ready, not including the time spent at the nail salon. We were off around 8:30, she was looking out of this world. The kids had a babysitter and we were poised to have a wonderful time. We were driving South on Mercury boulevard, on our way when a motorcycle passed us traveling at least 70 mph. I don’t know if my wife said it or I thought it, but he was going way to fast when he tried to take the off ramp onto Kings street. I saw his left leg go out as if to balance himself and less than a second later there were sparks and the bike flipped. He had hit the curb and disappeard in a dust cloud. I quickly crossed two lanes and turned off to the side of the road and jumped out of the car telling the wife to wait there. I hopped the rail and ran down the embackment. I found the back tattered off to the side, a streak of oil or gas about 25 feet, but no body. I found the man a good 100 feet up the ramp, against the guard rail. A woman was on the scene, a nurse, telling him to stay with us. He was between two rails, I remember the whites of his eyes. But at the time, all I could keep thinking about was where were his feet.

I found one foot, about 15 feet away, in the gulley, covered with a sock. His shoe a good 10 feet away. The man had lost both his legs, severed somehow in the accident. The nurse was still trying to get him to stay with us. I saw his eyes close, never to open again. I could look no longer. It was horrible. Nothing in life prepares you for this. Nothing. What could one do. I was paralyzed. His legs were gone, scattered to the four winds. I knew where one was, but the other, I never found out. There was blood all over, along the guard rail, all over him. It was tragic. This never needed to happen. Never.

He was not wearing a helmet. Not that it would have mattered in the long run.

A few minutes later I saw the first police man. His SUV was on the scene and he was shakend up. Later I learned he had told the guy to get off the bike a bit up the road because he was not wearing a helmet. The guy ran. The biggest mistake of his life. Why?

The officer never chased him, but one could tell he was shaken, felt blame.

I wrote my statement, and so did Erin. We had to stick around to speak with the investigator. We waited as people gathered. The mans cousin showed up. He was pronounced dead. The man’s mother showed up. It was tragic. Such a waste, such a loss.

We gave our statements again and then left. On the way back to the car we could see the body. Right against the railing, they had moved him. His eyes wide open, on the road, facing us, legless, dead. One of his feet was still in the gully. I told Erin not to look, but it was too late. Too late.

We went to the party. And while it was a great time, a pallor hung over the festivities between Erin and myself. I’m still shaken. This did not have to happen.