This Saturday, from 11am to 6pm, the Ubuntu Georgia LoCo will be sponsoring the Atlanta Linux Fest (ALF).

ALF will be a non-distro specific event, part install fest, part demos.

Let me provide some background on how ALF came into being. Around six weeks ago, Joshua Chase, who runs the Georgia LoCo, Jim Popovich, and I were lounging around our favorite cigar store. We were trying to come up plans for a fun event.

Now, the Georgia LoCo holds real life meetings every month or so. We’ve held install fests for Ubuntu 7.10 and 8.04 at Emory University. Forty to fifty people have shown up for both.

But we wanted something more interesting. Considering none of us had any experience organizing such a thing, we thought we should start small.

A linux fest seemed like a good way to test the waters. Atlanta Linux Fest was born.

Jim works at IBM and they have large amounts of office space and conference venues around Atlanta. He secured us a location pretty quickly. Since we didn’t need money for space, there was no reason to look for sponsorship.

Next, we needed to figure out why people would want to attend. The install fest part is easy to understand. Potential new Linux users could get help with installation, current users could get help with any problems they were having. But we wanted attendees to get something more out of ALF. Powerpoint presentations can be mind numbing. So we have decided to do live demos instead. Then we started asking people what they would like to show others.

In the meantime, we needed to find ways to market the event. Since this isn’t an Ubuntu only event, we wanted to get other distributions involved. Jorge Castro suggested I talk to Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier, the openSUSE community manager, and contact Paul Frields, the Fedora Project Leader. Paul got me in touch with David Nalley, who is a Fedora Ambassador, and had attended a previous Ubuntu install fest. David will be demoing Fedora 10 at ALF.

Zonker in turn introduced me to Ilan Rabinovitch, the chairperson of the famous SCALE. Both of them provided great advice on how to get the word out there, especially using existing news outlets. I didn’t realize how easy it is to get published on Linux Today, Linux.com, and Linux PR, simply by filling out web forms on the respective sites!

David passed on my information to Dave Yates, host of the lottalinuxlinks.com podcast, and he interviewed me about ALF. Jon Reagan, the hardest working member of the Georgia LoCo, got ALF mentioned on the Linux Action Show. Jon and Carter Sills did a marvelous job posting about ALF to lots of Linux-related forums.

After all that, we also settled on a set of demos:

• Dual booting (Carter)
• Fedora 10 (David Nalley)
• Virtualization (Joshua)
• Privacy and Encryption with SSH and GPG (David Tomaschik)
• IBM Symphony (Jim)
• Gaming (Bill, aka compiledkernel)

We will also stream video (and record for posterity) from ALF. Keep an eye on the website for more details if you can’t attend. With the ever increasing use of Twitter and Identi.ca, we’ll try to use those tools to keep everyone up to date once it kicks off (twitter.com/atllinuxfest and identi.ca/atlantalinuxfest).

You can’t hold an event like this and have no swag. Thanks to Zonker and openSUSE for shipping us goodies to hand out.

It slipped my mind that we could get a conference pack from ShipIt. I hurriedly put in an order, hoping that it would arrive in time. It did. In 3 days. Don’t believe me? Check out the tracking number.

Dan Trevino and members of Florida LoCo will also be joining us to celebrate Software Freedom Day. Several folks from the Alabama LoCo will be attending as well.

After doing these few things, ALF has gotten to be a considerably larger than we expected.

And we are excited!

Hope you all can attend.