Fedora @ RIT BrickHack 2016 wrap-up

Along with several other ambassadors, I attended BrickHack 2016 at RIT over the weekend. It is a hackfest for college students sponsored by MLH.

(Technically I am not an ambassador yet. But I've been told that I should feel like I'm one already.)

Shouldn't the short guy (your's truly) be in the front?

The event went very well from both the event's perspective and from Fedora's perspective.

I went as a coding mentor in addition to a sponsor, but there were very few requests for mentoring (and they were very brief.) Instead, most people who came up to the booth wanted to know about Fedora!

(And they wanted stickers and case badges.)

I remember one person who had an interesting reason for wanting to try out Linux: She liked Bash after having used Git Bash on Windows.

Many student develops were particularly interested in DevAssistant. They loved its concept of easily setting up a development environment / project.

DevAssistant drew a lot of interest

There were a total of 16 projects submitted to the FOSS category, and were thus eligible for the prizes. Considering that Microsoft received 24 project submissions, and they were giving away a far more lucrative set of prizes (~$1,000 Surface Pro 4 tablets,) I'd say that people were pretty self-motivated to release their project as FOSS.

Although the FOSS category winner (an online card game in HTML5) was worthy of the prize it received, I would like to give an honorable mention to another project. They implemented an email client and server with end-to-end PGP encryption. The client is in HTML5.

There was one student, Mikhael, who completed his project early and wanted help installing Fedora to dual-boot along side OS X on his Early 2015 11" Macbook Air. Although we had to resort to using the broadcom wireless driver from RPMFusion, which involved transferring RPMs via USB key, by the time we were done he was very pleased. He also wanted basic instructions on using Fedora, so I made sure to show him how to use gnome-shell, GNOME Software and gedit with developer plugins.

I would also like to thank Ben Williams for his work on the updated live media; we used it to install Fedora Workstation for Mikhael. Also I would like to thank the liveusb-creator team; DVD drives are a rarity nowadays.

-Mike

edit: Added info on DevAssistant