Fedora 17 Release Party Report

We had a Beefy Miracle launch event in Rome, and it was a great day indeed!

The original event was actually a Fedora Online (FOL) community gathering - they are used to host this "pizzata" event from time to time - but I thought it would be even cooler to hijack it to a proper Release Party for Fedora 17 :) so after arranging details with the FOL guys I booked an hotel for the night and planned to get there by train. This turned out harder than expected, as a previous commitment I had with my children run pretty late and I arrived at the train station (with no ticket) at the same time as the train I needed to catch...

Fortunately I managed to get on just few seconds before the door closed and finally arrived at the party place, a restaurant near Piazza di Spagna in Rome.

There I received a warm welcome from the people (around 20) present and proceeded preparing a table with some swag (DVD, stickers, some printed Fedora manuals kindly donated by Robert Mayr) and a PC for the Fedora Quiz sent me from the nice Brno guys (I will never thank them enough for the great material); I briefly shown how to use it and pushed some people to break the ice and try it.

The Fedora Quiz machine

Then we started the real dinner, with a lot of pizza and beer, and when I say a lot I really mean it...

During the dinner I learned almost everybody was already a Fedora user, so no need for a real introduction to the project, but I talked to smaller groups and discussed single topics in more details (Fedora 17 features, how to contribute, lack of proprietary drivers, how to report bugs, etc); we even made a small demo of Gnome 3.4 and shown how to perform common task without the mouse for greater productivity.

Q&A with some UniRoma2 students

Final surprise: a cake celebrating Fedora and the Beefy Miracle release; after all that pizza and beer it was quite hard to attack that amount of chocolate but we managed to eat almost all of it anyway :)

The Beefy Miracle cake

Before leaving, I checked the quiz results and rewarded the best three performances with an envelope with more stickers, including the laminated laptop ones that are always a huge hit. Finally, we left the restaurant and wandered together in Rome a bit more before returning to the hotel, tired but quite happy about the night.

Finally, I would like to thank all participants, everyone involved in the organization and in particular Antonio for handling the whole logistics in Rome.

Antonio, our resident hero

In summary a great, fun release event; see you at the next one!