Hosstraders Fall 2006 - Mission Accomplished

[Ben Scott]

  Well, another Hosstraders is behind us, and we survived.

  I just wanted to send out a quick "Thank you" to everyone who helped
out at Hosstraders this fall.  Partipants included Jon "maddog" Hall
(who paid for the space and tables (as usual)), Mike Ledoux (arrrr!),
Matt and Heather Brodeur (who are starting to rival Mike in the
"amount of junk brought to Hosstraders" category), Bill Sconce (who
wins the award for "Best Hat"), and Ted Roche (Ted knows he *has* to
be there).  Your efforts are all appreciated.

  It didn't rain either day.  Now that the Sox have won a World Series
recently, I'm starting to worry.  It's a good thing Windows Vista is
still late, or I'd think the Apocalypse was upon us.

  Most popular distro this year was definitely Ubuntu. Although the
age of Fedora 5 might have contributed to that, the "Live CD" aspect
was definitely the big draw.  SuSE is also offering a Live DVD these
days; I've tried it briefly and was impressed with what I saw.  You
might want to check out SuSE 10.1.  We also had a couple requests for
Slackware 11.0, which was just released this past week.  Good to see
Slackware is still going strong after all these years.

  I had a laptop with the wrong OS on the hard disk.  I booted it from
a Puppy Linux CD.  Puppy automatically copied itself to RAM disk.  I
was then able to eject the Puppy CD, and use the drive in the laptop
to burn distros served over Ethernet.  Neat.

  As noted in the past, these days, Linux is widely recognized at
Hosstraders.  People who had *not* heard of it are a small minority.
Most had at least tried Linux before, and many were already using it,
and just looking for upgrades or info on the LUG.

  Someone dropped off a flyer for a hamfest/flea market that will take
place in Londonderry on Sat 4 Nov.  While two Hosstraders events per
year is enough for me, if anyone is interested, email me and I'll
forward you the details.

  Cheers!

-- Ben