P1080543 Janet Swisher and Anne Gentle

give a presentation "Documentation Needs? How FLOSS Manuals Can Help." In one of the slides, a Programmer Barbie says: "Documentation is hard. Let's do programming!"

P1080546 Chris Aniszczyk

gives a presentation "Open Source from the Trenches: How to Get Involved and be Successful". The keys are: find a newbie-friendly open source project (not all of them are, by far), find a mentor, and brand yourself.

P1080548 Katherine Druckman

gives a presentation "The One Woman Web Team", in which the Linux Journal Webmistress advices people on how to handle big web projects alone, with only open-source software and community expertise to help.

P1080556 Eric Evans

a developer on the Apache Cassandra project, and a Systems Architect in Rackspace's Cloud division, gives a presentation on Cassandra database. I found his presentation a bit lacking in context: when or why would I need this, as opposed to traditional SQL

P1080557 Monty Taylor

gives a presentation "Drizzle: A Database Designed for Operations". His talk was peppered with nuggets of cuteness-- such as an admission that he didn't know what a crying bunny would look like.

P1080563 "Rackers to the core"

(as proclaimed by their t-shirts) congregate around Rackspace table in the Texas Linux Fest lobby. At times they were hard to tell apart from TAMU Linux user group -- both wore maroon t-shirts. :-)

P1080565 Thomas Cameron shows Fedora tattoo

Thomas Cameron from Red Hat shows Fedora Project logo tattoo on his back at the Texas Linux Fest.

P1080561 Richard Kreuter presents MongoDB

Richard Kreuter, a software engineer at 10gen, company that sponsors open source project MongoDB, gives a presentation on MongoDB. This NoSQL database, and its cool JSON query language, looked to me the most interesting of the three that were presented.

P1080567 Texas Linux Fest lobby

P1080569 Janet Swisher, and Linux Journal publishers

Janet Swisher, and Linux Journal publishers Carlie Fairchild and Mark Irgang at a booth at Texas Linux Fest.

P1080570 Carlie Fairchild and Mark Irgang

Linux Journal publishers Carlie Fairchild and Mark Irgang at a booth at Texas Linux Fest.

P1080574 World Wildlife Fund drawing

HP people held a World Wildlife Fund drawing of cute stuffed animals. No penguins among them that I could see, though. So I don't see a Linux connection here. But how would my feeble techie's mind understand the intricacies of corporate sponsorship?

P1080577 Katherine Druckman and Linux Journal publishers

Katherine Druckman, Linux Journal webmistress (left), and her husband chat with Linux Journal publishers Carlie Fairchild and Mark Irgang.

P1080585 Amber Graner - A Year NTEU

Amber Graner gives a presentation "A Year NTEU* (pronounced In-to) Ubuntu and the Open Source Community". She told us about her journey from a Linux newbie (NTEU=Non-Technical End User), to becoming a Ubuntu User Magazine contributor in 1 year.

P1080587 Randall Schwartz talk and prize giveaway

Before Randall Schwartz (left) gave his keynote talk, there was a prize giveaway. The guy with the microphone (I'm not sure what organization he represented) asked questions of the audience, and gave O'Reilly books to those who answered correctly.

P1080588 Prize giveaway before Randall Schwartz's talk

Before Randall Schwartz's keynote talk, there was a prize giveaway. The guy with the microphone (I'm not sure what organization he represented) asked questions of the audience, and gave O'Reilly books to those who answered correctly.

P1080590 Randall Schwartz gives his keynote talk

He didn't say much new about open source, only listed the old reasons why open source software is better than proprietary. But that was like preaching to the choir. I guess maybe the purpose of this talk was to motivate us all to get involved.

P1080595 Randall Schwartz openly sides with Linus Torvalds

"I've partied with RMS (Richard Stallman), even danced with his girlfriend. I've partied with Linus, he regularly beats me at pool. Linus is more fun to party with. Hence, please... on behalf of Linus, I assert: it's Linux, not GNU/Linux. End of stor