LinuxFest Northwest 2024

Introduction

LinuxFest Northwest is an annual gathering of open source enthusiasts held in Bellingham halfway between the major cities of Vancouver, BC and Seattle, Washington. Sadly, the last proper event was held in 2019, then during COVID they tried running a virtual event with limited success and then when COVID ended they were going to startup again, but there was a major structural calamity at the  Bellingham Technical College campus which caused it to close and LinuxFest to be canceled. Finally, this year, 2024, enough of the college is back open that the organizers were able to start the conference again. The main big building on the campus was still closed, but LinuxFest was able to spread across three of the smaller buildings to operate. It poured with rain for the entire conference which made people get quite wet when crossing between buildings.

This year I attended the conference both as an attendee and a speaker. 

Most of the presentations were recorded and are now available on LFNW’s YouTube channel.

RISC-V

There was a lot of interest in RISC-V, people are interested in getting hold of RISC-V development boards to play with. My session on RISC-V filled the room, so the monitors had to close the door when the fire department capacity was reached.

Judging from the questions, many in the audience have been playing with RISC-V already and getting quite far into it. Also nice to meet my readers as several people said they already have my RISC-V book.

Later, I chatted with the folks from Rocky Linux, who had a booth in the expo hall. They were given ten Starfive Visionfive 2s which they are going to use to set up a build farm to build native RISC-V versions of Rocky Linux. This is pretty cool, but they would really like beefier hardware, in that it will be quite slow to build everything from GCC, Linux, all the utilities and bundled programs to completion. But still nice to see more Linux distributions providing native RISC-V builds.

MiSTer

MiSTer was started as an Amiga/Atari ST hardware emulator using an Intel FPGA. Since then, the project has added hundreds of computer and gaming console hardware cores. Last time I blogged on my Tang Nano 25K and mentioned using it to emulate a SuperNES system. This is actually a port of just one MiSTer core over to the Gowin FPGA platform. There was a two hour talk/lab on MiSTer at the show presented by Scott Dowdle which showed real MiSTer hardware and he had three systems setup to play with.

It’s really amazing all the different computers that can be modeled on the FPGA along with all the classic software that can be run.

To run MiSTer properly, you need a Terasic DE10-Nano Kit along with a RAM add-in module. This board includes an ARM CPU along with an Intel Cyclone® V SE FPGA (110K LEs).

Ham Radio and Open Source

I attended Steve Stroh’s presentation on the parallels between the open source computer community and the amateur radio community. It was a good overview of all the things happening in amateur radio and how so much new radio technology is being developed by hobbyists in an open collaborative sharing manner.

Other Stuff

There were a lot of sessions and often multiple sessions I wanted to see were on at the same time. Now that I’m back home, I can spend some time watching the sessions I missed.

I did catch NextCloud’s session on AI, on how they are trying to do everything OpenAI and Microsoft are doing, but all running locally. Plus how to promote open source AI models so you know what you are running and have some control over it.

I attended Lomash Kumar’s presentation on IoT security. It is interesting on the extra security requirements on IoT due to the amount of communications and discovery between devices.

I attended Mumbling Hugo’s presentation on Linux gaming distributions. Hugo is actually quite a good speaker and not a mumbler. I think my main takeaway is that gaming distributions don’t add much and you may as well use a main line distribution.

Besides the sessions, there was the trade expo where quite a few vendors were present. The people manning the tables weren’t just sales people and were quite technical and interesting to talk to.

Thanks to System76 for sponsoring the hotdog bbq on Saturday. Always appreciate a free lunch, even if it means eating it in the pouring rain.

Summary

All in all, LinuxFest Northwest was well worth attending. I had a great time and learned a lot. Now I’m enthusiastic to attend SeaGL, the Seattle GNU/Linux conference coming up Nov. 8 and 9.