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Last week several Sixies (Calvin Hendryx-Parker, Jim Glenn, Lars Noldan, and Andrew Kirch) attended Indiana Linux Fest (ILF) in Indianapolis, IN. This was the first year Indianapolis hosted a Linux Fest. While named Linux Fest, it focused on all types of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software).

On Friday, Jim presented a talk on "Who is KARL? and what does he know of Knowledge Management?" During this presentation, Jim discussed items such as what is Knowledge Management, what the KMS KARL is, walkthrough of features of KARL, and how to get started with a local copy of KARL.

Friday afternoon, Calvin presented several Lightning Talks including "How to use Plone as a blogging platform", "Using landslide to create presentations using markdown", and "Augmented reality/computer vision using pygame".

During the lightning talks, Andrew presented a talk on ClearOS, an integrated web managed small/medium business management server with integrated IDS running Linux.

Saturday, Lars presented "Speed Daemons", a talk on building high performance clusters for a Fortune 500 company. He presented information on how Six Feet Up uses FreeBSD, FreeBSD networking technologies, and a full open source stack to provide high availability for customers including very large companies.

Overall, I must say we all enjoy attending these types of technical conferences where we can learn and teach best practices and ideas used by organizations and individuals deploying successful solutions using Open Source. We had some interesting conversations both during talks, after talks, in the halls, in the exhibition hall, and especially during the after party. We also got to see (and sometimes meet in person for the first time) many individuals who we work with in chat rooms, mailing lists, and e-mails. It was also a pleasure seeing many regulars from the local IndyPy meetup group.

We would like to thank the Indy FOSS group for leading the effort of bringing this type of conference to Indianapolis. We look forward to seeing you all at next year's Indy Linux Fest and other FOSS conferences and groups around the world.

Did you attend ILF this year? Did you get your questions answered? What conferences are you looking forward to going to this year? What's the best FOSS conference you attended that you would recommend?