Round one of the great LinuxCon Goose Chase contest ends this week at LinuxCon North America. But it’s not too late to enter! Round two begins now with more prizes in store for participants heading into LinuxCon Europe in October.

Today we’re announcing the winners of round one, which kicked off July 24. More than 80 contestants have entered since then, sending us hundreds of photos through the Goose Chase app to complete their missions. The three contestants who earned the most points are walking away from this round with prizes.

Razvan-Costin Ionescu, “bobim6,” is the grand prize winner of a $500 Amazon gift card with 17,700 points. Ionescu is a security engineer for Intel OTC in Bucharest, Romania and contributes to the Yocto Project by testing it on various x86 platforms. 

The first place, $200 gift card goes to Donnie Roberson, “roberd13”, with 12,300 points. And Artur Myszka, “devLNX,” wins second place, a $50 Amazon gift card, with 7,700 points. Congratulations!

Along with new entrants, any entrants who didn’t win in this round will keep their points and stay in the running for the chance to win one of three Amazon gift cards in round two. Grand prize will earn a $500 Amazon gift card and the opportunity to be interviewed on Linux.com, first place a $200 Amazon gift card and  second place will win a $50 Amazon gift card. Round 2 winners will be announced at LinuxCon Europe in Edinburgh, Oct. 23, 2013.

Round two will include new missions and several opportunities to earn bonus points. New entrants take note: this is a great way to catch up! Be sure to follow our Twitter account for occasional announcements on how to earn extra points.

If you’re ready to play, here’s how it works.

1) Download the GooseChase app from Android or iTunes.

2) Choose the Great LinuxCon Wild Goose Chase game. (Search ‘Linux’ if it doesn’t appear right away.)

3) Select and complete Missions to earn points. Missions consist of small, fun tasks for which you take a picture with your phone and submit it for points.

4) The most cumulative points by LinuxCon Europe wins!

To see some of the best photos submitted in round one, visit the “Best of LinuxCon Wild Goose Chase Photos” slideshow.

We’re live blogging from LinuxCon and CloudOpen in New Orleans at 9 a.m. Central, Sept. 16-18. See yesterday’s coverage and follow today’s keynotes here and on the live video stream.

 9 a.m.

Dirk Hohndel, Intel, “The New Frontiers.”

Linux Kernel Developer Panel: Linus Torvalds, Sarah Sharp, Tejun Heo, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Ric Wheeler, moderator. 

 What is a black squirrel wake-up call? What do the letters in UEFI stand for? We asked LinuxCon and CloudOpen attendees to give us their best answers to these and many more Linux trivia questions on video. They played along and came up with some great answers — some more correct than others. The video was then shown on the big screen in front of hundreds of Linux professionals who laughed appreciatively, and knowingly. Thanks to all of our participants for helping to make this a fun conference!

The CloudCast hosts Aaron Delp and Brian Gracely are recording their podcast on site at LinuxCon and CloudOpen this week in New Orleans, sponsored by Citrix and Linux.com. Today they talked with Thomas Hatch, founder and CTO of SaltStack about DevOps and SaltStack architecture; Kyle Mestery, Chris Wright and Brent Salisbury about OpenDaylight, SDN architectures and OpenStack integration; Lars Kurth about Xen on ARM and the differences between Xen and Xen Server; and Brandon Philips, CTO for CoreOS on the reason he’s building a new operating system for massive, scale-out applications.

Listen to the episodes, below, or visit www.thecloudcast.net for the full show notes. If you’re attending the conference, be sure to catch the hosts on Wednesday at their booth on the second floor for impromptu discussions on the open source cloud!