Utah Open Source Planet

Well, its been more than two weeks since my last post about FUDCon.  I figure its high time I posted something about what’s been going on in my neck of the woods.  Things have been quite busy and are bound to continue at this phrenetic pace for a bit longer.

DarkIce - Audio Streaming

I’ve been working this past week on getting darkice packaged for Fedora.  Darkice is a front end audio recording tool for streaming servers like Icecast.  I much prefer it over ices and any other streaming client I’ve tried.  It does have bits for mp3/mp2/faac as well as ogg/vorbis, so I’ll be packaging it for only the latter.

It seems rpmbuild is a bit more cryptic from my last foray into building RPMs and I have to hunt a little harder for the libs and the binaries.  Its coming along nicely, now that I have my virtual machine back in place.  I’m also hoping that darkice will be easy to integrate into Fedora Talk as I’ve never dealt with the asterisk end before.

Utah Open Source Conference

This past weekend, we spent a good bit of time reviewing and selecting presentations for the Utah Open Source Conference.  I am the head organizer and founder of this all volunteer conference. In fact, our very own FPL, Paul Frields will be keynoting on Thursday evening.  Keep an eye on this blog for future updates about the conference.

A New Interest

I’ve recently started to see someone of the female persuasion.  Many of my friends have met her, and I’m guessing they like her as I do (well, not quite as much).  Here’s hoping things go well with Jennifer

There’s more here, and I’ll try to be more vocal about it as I think its good to share.

Cheers,

Herlo

So I am sitting in my hotel in Los Angeles, preparing to head back to Utah, its 2:37am PDT and I have been meaning to post the rest of my experience at FUDCon.  First off, I’d like to thank Mo and Ray for letting me stay at their home with them.  They were great hosts!  I’d also like to re-thank Max and Paul and the FedoraProject for sponsoring me out to Boston on such short notice.  I still feel grateful to be part of such a great community!

FUDCon F10, for me, was a time of realization.  Understanding what it is to get involved in projects that scratch that itch.  For providing services toward something I’m good at, into a larger community who could really take advantage of that service.  And while I am still feeling my way through the Fedora world, I think a few things are clearer now after reflecting on this last FUDCon.

I want to record and stream audio and video.

I’m thinking that along with the Fedora Talk project, I could configure and use tools to provide a non-interactive streaming server for certain events/presentations.  What I am thinking of here is things like FUDCon keynotes and sessions.  In fact, I plan to purchase a higher quality microphone / mixer combo to better record the audio at the source.

Video and screencasting in real-time seems a bit more of a challenge.  Putting that together with the streaming audio seems like a fun project and scratches several itches I’ve been experiencing lately.

I need to learn how build better RPMs

Spot taught a great session at FUDCon F9 in Raleigh about RPM packaging, and Rex Deiter talked this time about becoming a package maintainer.  I’ve got a few packages that I’d like to get into the fedora tree, and I think by the end of this year, that can happen.  I’m okay at packaging, but haven’t ever submitted a spec file to spot.  While I’m nervous about how ugly the first package will look, I’m also excited at the prospect of learning better and more efficient ways of building useful tools for the masses.

I think everyone should build their own spin of Fedora

After the 5+ hour session on Friday’s hackfest regarding the spins website and what the spins SIG has already accomplished, I’ve taken some initiative and started to create content to help the prospective spin enthusiast.  I’m a big fan of the Eee PC and am looking forward to purchasing the 901 in the winter.  Until then, I’m planning on helping improve the spin process so we don’t fail to release spins again.  The custom and official spins ‘built with Fedora’ can be so much more prolific if we just provide the right tools to build a spin.  It really should be nothing more than, here’s my kickstart, build me an iso.  This would of course have to follow the general standards for acceptable software.

The relationships (FUDBuddies) made at FUDCon are up my alley

I met Rex Dieter, Mo Duffy, Ray Strode, Dennis Gilmore and Ian Weller this time.  We had great conversations about the world and of course Fedora.  I also got to talk more to Toshio, Greg and J5 who I had met previously at FUDCon F9.  I indeed learned a bunch from Toshio about TurboGears too.  Its something I’ll treasure for releases to come.

To end this post, I’ve got some audio of the olpc session and paul’s keynote, as well as some photos I’ve posted around the interweb, enjoy.  Paul’s keynote will also be up on our new FedoraTV Miro channel, check it out!

Cheers,

Clint

Got to FUDCon today after a nice semi-sleepy red-eye flight.  I was surprisingly awake for a person who has had less than 3 hours of sleep in the last 24+ hours.  As I arrived, following Max’s instructions to the Hyne’s Convention Center, an announcement.  The spins hackfest was beginning.

I quickly grabbed some coffee and an apple and headed in after Max.  Little did I know how great this fest was going to be, all 4+ hours of it.  After a good list of goals, Max handed control over to Mo and off we went.

Discussion surrounded three main stories, one for a user wanting to download a spin, one desiring to submit a spin and one for reviewers of spins.  As it turns out, developing stories for the first two were pretty easy, and just before 11, we had a good idea of how to implement applications for these two users.

However, the third story, the one for reviewing.  Yeah, that one.  Well, I guess I just need to ask one hard question.  The question I had was a simple one, but the answer is apparently much more complex, including both technical and legal questions about third-party distributions.  And while it seems like a simple distinction, I brought this upon myself, uncovering a discussion that has been going on for 2+ years now.

The biggest problem is for those spins that include software not in the fedora repositories.  How do we treat these spins?  The discussion ended up being that while hosting these spins might not be feasible, we’d like to have a way to market the spins as built on Fedora or something similar. It seems that this is a good choice, but it needs to go through legal.

After an hour long discussion about these details (which I caused), we tabled it and came up with a good list of tasks to get the project started.  Thanks to Ian Weller, there’s a good wiki page covering much of this discussion.  In fact, I have a couple of tasks to complete this week.

At the end of the day, I ended up with some Red Hat folks at Legal Sea Foods, good wine, great company.  If I wasn’t so tired, I’d have stayed much longer.  Good times…

Tomorrow’s FUDCon barcamp looks to be pretty interesting.  I plan to attend the video tools, the getting contributors and bug triage.  In addition, there will probably be a couple that will come up tomorrow morning, so we’ll se how it goes.

Cheers,

Herlo

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2008-May/msg00007.html

Get yours today! http://fedoraproject.org

Be sure and digg it too:

http://digg.com/linux_unix/Fedora_9_Sulphur_Released

Well, usually I forget to take pictures, because either A) I forget my camera [I brought it this time] or 2) I get wrapped up in the event and forget to bring it with me.  But this release party, I plain just forgot to charge my batteries for my camera, oops!

Fortunately, I was able to snap a few pictures with some of the spare, also not fully-charged, batteries I did have on hand.  However, others took many pictures and I’ve listed them below.

• Sheri Bigelow took some great pictures.  She is a great local photographer, web designer and the local webmistress.
• Tristan Rhodes, a local Asterisk Entrepreneur posted a good blog post.
• Here’s the pictures I took.  Not nearly as many, or as good.

To summarize the party, much celebration was had with foosball, a chess game on one of the largest chess boards around, video games, air hockey and much more was provided by CodeGreene.  The FedoraProject and Utah Open Source sponsored the food and prizes.  If you’ve never had a Chipotle burrito, they are the best burritos around.

I was able to spend time with about 5-7 people myself sharing the Preview Release of Fedora 9 (codename Sulphur) including two who had never had previous success with Fedora or Linux in general.  It was very satisfying to see things work for them.

The Ubuntu folks were there in strength as well.  The Hardy Heron (8.04) CDs were being passed out, while we Fedoran’s provided LiveUSB versions.  I even saw people taking advantage and obtaining both!  Its great to see communities come together and celebrate together.

The party continued at Salt Lake Pizza & Pasta for another couple hours.  Lot’s of talk about the releases, upcoming events, and general mayhem took place including having Heartsbane shoot beer through his nose when I swore at him!

All in all, quite a successful evening and I look forward to helping others in November at our next release party.

Cheers,

Herlo

UPDATE: Another 70+ pictures have been added, check them out!

The following two articles were published in the past couple days.  When they were published and made known to me, I was saddened:

Report: OLPC may eventually switch from Linux to Windows XP
Nicholas Negroponte on Sugar and One Laptop Per Child

It appears, that Greg DeKoenigsberg responded (it appears) to these two articles with a great rebuttal in this article:

OLPC Developers are *not* fundamentalists

Thank you Greg, thank you for saying what I feel inside.  As an open source advocate, I see the value and benefit of free software and its power.  I feel good inside when I contribute and don’t feel anything like a fundamentalist.

Again, thank you Greg.

Cheers,

Herlo

As many of you may already know, Fedora 9 (codename: Sulphur) has been pushed back 2 weeks to May 13.  Being the organizer of the Utah Fedora/Ubuntu Linux Release Party on May 3, its kind of hard to push it back because Ubuntu’s release is still on time.

I’m glad though that the major parts of this release are feature complete and its just a few blocker bugs holding it back.  I’m also really happy to point out that because the folks at the Fedora Project are willing to push the date back, the release will be much better off in the end.

This also goes to show that while many businesses would consider releasing anyway.  Mainly because they promised something, and not releasing would cost them revenue and possible customers.  Open source people don’t follow the same mantra, and I’m proud to say that while I like meeting deadlines, if deadlines slips a little to make a better product, timelines should slip.

In the meantime, enjoy the preview release made available yesterday.  Utah will party with this preview.  Shortly after the party, an update will be made available via yum.  There are some amazing things coming out in a few weeks.  Keep your ear to the ground and enjoy the new Sulphur in your life!

Cheers,

Herlo

Recently, I’ve been very interested in getting involved more and more with the Fedora Project.  In fact, the latest project in which I’m involved, the Getting Involved Guide (GIG).

I started with this guide because my so-called friend Jared Smith (hi Jared!), introduced me to the original creator of this document, Paul Frields at FUDCon a couple months ago.  I started the hackfest portion, not entirely clear where I’d end up, but somehow I rolled back to hang with Jared and Paul while they were working on this Contributor Guide, if I remember the name correctly.  I got involved late in the day, and either my misunderstanding, or pure genius took over and the Contributor Guide (intended mainly for developers), quickly turned into the Getting Involved Guide or GIG, which had a much broader focus.

While I am happy to be a part of this guide, and have had a hand in changing its purpose, I’m not at all familiar with much of the Fedora Community processes.  Which, for this document to be successful, I am going to have to learn, since that’s the point of this guide to begin with, helping others get started when they want to help the Fedora Project.
Think of it this way, if you are a corporate entity, an individual, or a small non-profit group (like my UTOSF group) and want to give back to the community that has helped you so much.  How do you do that?  What’s involved in getting started?  What projects are out there where we can help?  Do we need to be developers? If not, what else is there for us to do?  Well, those are all good questions, and I am sure there are many, many more we haven’t yet considered.

I guess what I am doing here is soliciting from the general communities at large, what they’d like to see in this guide.  What confused them about joining a large project.  I’d also like to hear stories about being a contributor to the Fedora Project, and why you think its a good idea.  I want to take these ideas and integrate them into the Getting Involved Guide.  I want to take these issues and make it clear for others how to get involved, why its important, and show that value.

Currently, if you are a Fedora Project member, I have a document in gobby.fedoraproject.org called GettingInvolvedGuide, which you are welcome to modify as you feel necessary.  I may also be hitting you up to answer questions regarding particular processes in your group as well.

Cheers,

Herlo

So I’m back at work today after a very hard Sunday (fudpub was not friendly to me) at the slack^H^H^H^H^Hhackfest. However, I have to say that it was probably the best learning experience one could have at a conference. The BarCamp concept really worked well and I think it gave me some much needed information to move ahead on projects with which lately, I’d been struggling.

In addition to all of the learning, I was able to meet some really cool people there. Of course, there were my friends, Jared Smith, Evan McNabb and Derek “goozbach” Carter, and it was great to see them.

But I didn’t just come for my friends, and it was great to meet so many others.

I met Paul Frields when Jared introduced me. He quickly informed me, that Paul would be the “New Max”. After spending the last 2.25 days near or around Paul, I think he’ll be a great leader. And to be honest, it feels to me as he’ll put his own stamp on things. Not to take away from what Max has done, and will do, but I think Paul will be an awesome leader and I look forward to his friendship and leadership.

I was able to visit with Jim Whitehurst, the new Red Hat CEO. He stopped me to ask about my Eeep c and what I thought. We talked for a good 5 minutes before I realized who he was, and then I congratulated him on the job and said I expected great things :) He was quite excited to see the Eeep and it was awesome to know how passionate he was about Fedora. And to take the time out on a Saturday, that’s awesome!

A few more people I met who were awesome and friendly: Michael DeHaan, Karsten Wade, Seth Vidal, Russell Harrison,Toshio Kuratomi and another who’s name escapes me (who I helped get lost somewhere near Cary and Apex) and so many more names I cannot recall, though I’ll not forget your faces. Thank you for your valuable time and helping me get acclimated to this awesome community. I’d like to thank everyone who spent time helping us naive souls learn the way of the Fedora.

In the future, I plan to take much of what I learned and start working with it in my spare time. I’ve also started the process of joining the documentation project and look forward to helping them. My ambassador duties are simple enough that I can continue doing that as well, so this year should be a good year.

Thanks again to my company Guru Labs, for helping me arrange my schedule around FUDCon and hopefully they’ll be as accommodating for Scale next month.

Cheers,

Herlo

So for those of you who follow this blog, its not the first time I’ve done shameless self-promotion. However, in this case, its only after the fact that someone else thought I was important.

I want to say thank you to the CodeAway and their organizers (Matthew Reinbold, and others, I’m sure) for putting me on this list. I hope to prove them right and kick some tail in Utah Open Source and around the tech community this year. I’m also glad to see at least a couple of faces I recognize, which means I need to meet the others on this list and get them involved in UTOSF and the UTOSC for sure.

Here’s the article: http://voxpopdesign.com/wordpress/?p=104

Cheers,

Herlo

The charter of the Utah Open Source Foundation is to help Open Source grow in Utah. As part of this charter, we focus on the local community and especially the User Groups.

Because of this goal, we’ve been working hard to come up with some simple, yet effective ideas to help the User Groups overall. Just recently, myself and Will Smith (undertakingyou) were discussing the LugBin. The idea is simply just a big plastic bin with good stuff that User Groups might need or want. In fact, we think it might be a good idea to get others involved so we’re asking for help.

If you would take a few minutes after you read this to visit our wiki page for the LugBin and give suggestions for what would be useful inside. Keep in mind that User Groups may be about operating systems, programming languages, business organizations, or anybody that just wants to get together and talk about any Free/Libre Open Source (F/LOSS) software.

Thank you for your input. We really appreciate every comment/suggestion.

Cheers,

Herlo

As some of you may know, I am the founder of the Utah Open Source Foundation.  On November 10, we’ll be holding the Multi-Distro Release Party, and I planned on sharing Fedora (of course), OpenSUSE and Ubuntu.  Its the only Multi-Distro Release Party going on that I know of, but I could be wrong.  If you live in Utah, you should come, it’ll be a blast!

The point of this post is to ask a simple question, however.  During the promotion of this event, I’ve received suggestions beyond the three big versions of Linux that are being released close to one month from each other.  For example, OpenBSD will be release soon, and Apple released Leopard for Mac OSX, among others.  And while every operating system is welcome to participate in the MDRP, I can’t help but wonder about certain definitions.

My question is what counts as a distro?.  I mean how do you classify yourself as a distro?  Is it a Linux only thing?  Or, is it just Open Source OSes?  Maybe its nothing, and I’m just bringing this up for no good reason.

Your comments are appreciated and encouraged.

Cheers,

Herlo

Okay, okay, I didn’t get in, but it was sure fun to take a train trip down to the World Series to see the vibe. I’ve never been quite so close to a World Series game. The closest thing for me was when I got to go to watch the Utah Jazz get beaten by the Bulls in 1997 and 1998 in Salt Lake City. The World Series is much better to me since I’m a huge baseball fan.

For your entertainment, I took some interesting, pics:

I also took some pretty pictures of fall in New England. Not being from here, its amazing how beautiful the leaves can be.

Cheers,

Herlo

One of the coolest new things coming out for Fedora 8, the Gnome Online Desktop! Its an amazing device, provides a simple interface for working with the new web world in which we live.

It reminds me a bit of spotlight for Mac, but this thing has much more. With all of the web integration it has, including google docs, calendar, last.fm, digg and more, you can’t pass up the opportunity to try out this amazing desktop.

I’ve attached an ogg/vorbis screencast of some of my interaction with it in Fedora 8 Test 3. Although it claims to be just a demo, it sure looks good!

onlinedesktop-screencast - 23MB (could take a while)

Cheers,

Herlo

Want a whole bunch of free stickers with software you love to use!?

I thought this was the neatest thing in a long time. Created by obvious lovers of Open Source and art fanatics. Javier A. Albusac Jiménez holds the copyright (MIT license) so you can share these stickers, make more, etc. It sure is fun to play with these stickers!

Check them out here.  The site has instructions on how to print them and cut them out so they look professional.

http://raro.oreto.inf-cr.uclm.es/apps/stickers/

Also, you can download the book directly if you prefer:

http://wiki.opengarden.org/@api/deki/files/604

I am going to my local office depot very soon!

Cheers,

Herlo

Oh joy, I finally decided to take the plunge and upgrade to Fedora 7 on my laptop. I was really nervous because my previous experience upgrading from Fedora Core 5 to FC6 was harrowing at best. Lots of errors and other junk happened back then.

But this…. this –was flawless. So simple, so easy. My grandma could install it its that simple. I was so impressed! So blown away at the improved upgradeability that has been made in Anaconda using yum.

I upgraded using the Fedora 7 DVD. I literally chose upgrade, followed the prompts and a short while later, I was told the installation was complete and to reboot. Being the geek that I am, I poked around while the upgrade was taking place. Nothing looked strange, no errors, nothing. Just a perfect upgrade.

My fears were unfounded. In my previous upgrade, I ran into problems with LVM. No issues here whatsoever. It was just awesome!

I rebooted my machine and waited for the kernel to boot. Here is where I found the first quirk, it tried to boot FC6 and failed. Obviously they need to clean up just a little more, but this was easily remedied by choosing the Fedora 7 boot option from GRuB. And yes, I removed the option from the grub.conf (menu.lst)

Literally 45 seconds later and I was at the login screen. Wow!! That was fast! My boot time in FC6 was over 2 minutes. Fedora 7 cut more than half the time off!

Have you seen the login screen? If not, its very pretty. Here’s a screenshot:

Its just so beautiful! I love the fact that you can interact with the login window (gdm) with your mouse and choose your user. Linux on the desktop is well on its way up and love being a part of the revolution!

What about the other features. Oh, right! Let’s get to them.

After logging in, I was psyched to see that my network card, the Intel ipw3945, worked out of the box. I have never been able to regularly use NetworkManager and nm-applet, but Fedora 7 fixed that too. Boy do I love the simplicity of it all. My networking is now so easy to set up.

Another tool that has been included is the new Pidgin. Previously named GAIM but because of legal pressures from AOL, was forced to change their name. Seems odd I’d be talking about this, but I just thought the logo was cool.

I also like the fact that I can build my own LiveCD without much effort. Try out revisor today, you’ll have your very own LiveCD you can give away, tweaked the way you want.

There are many more features of Fedora 7 available, including Fast User Switching, Dynamic Kernel Ticks, new and improved NetworkManager and Multi-Display hotplugging with the new Xorg Server 1.3.

Have a look around at the new Fedora 7 today and enjoy all that it has to offer…

Cheers,

Herlo

I generally don’t recommend or (as in this case) tell people to avoid a particular vendor. Generally, my comments are kept to tutorials and simple to complex configurations, or stories about my failures so that others might learn from me.In this case, I pretty much want to rip APlus.net a new one!

So here’s the story.

A year ago, I wanted to register utos.org as a domain which is currently used for Utah Open Source and its non-profit website. Anyway, I couldn’t find my current registrar Total Online Solutions interweb address anywhere and I needed to register this site. I’d just had the epiphany about how to help Open Source grow in Utah.

Problem was, I needed to register it now, so I hastily went down the list of possible registrars and didn’t want to go with the big guys, GoDaddy.com or NetworkSolutions, etc. After perusing the list for a short time, I came upon APlus.net. I’d heard of them before, and had thought that they might be a good fit, and of course, the price was right. So I signed up for the account and registered my domain, along with an alternate I ended up not using.

This is where my trouble began…

One week or so after I registered the site all was well. The dns was resolving and everything was working well. It could have been faster, but I wasn’t in the biggest of hurries to be honest. APlus.net did a fine job letting me delegate my domain. A few days later, I received a phone call:

“Hello”, I said.
“Hello, Mr. Savage?”, in broken English, “I am calling from APlus.net”.
“Yes?”
“Well Mr. Savage, I am calling to check with you on your new domain purchases and want to make sure everything is to your satisfaction”
“Yes”, I said, a bit annoyed, “its fine”.

At this point I obviously wondered why I’d answered the phone, but since I thought they might give me a free year of registration or something, I stayed on the line.

“That’s great to hear Mr. Savage, is there anything we here at APlus.net can do for you?”
“No, I’m fine. Things are working well”
“Thank you Mr. Savage, have a nice day then”
“Goodbye”

I thought it odd, who’s ever heard of a salesman calling about a domain registration? I mean, how hard is it to delegate your domain and familiarize yourself with their tools. Everything was pretty straightforward. I brushed it off as no big deal, thinking that was just part of their service.

Two weeks later, I received a similar phone call. I won’t repeat it to you. I kindly thanked them and asked how many calls I was going to get. The man didn’t know.

A month went by before the next call came. Like I said, who calls to see if you are satisfied with your domain? I mean really? I was annoyed and asked the gentleman to have his office make sure not to call me again unless there was an emergency. He said he would and indeed, I’ve not received another call since.

But this is not why I am recommending you avoid APlus.net

My real problems started May 15, 2007. The day after I got the notice to renew my domain.

(more…)

I’ve been curious lately as to how I could print labels for my Fedora 7 DVDs.  Because I am officially a Fedora Ambassador for Utah, I would like to give out nice looking DVDs with labels on them.  Well, I found a very nice lady who’s put up eps versions of such labels and I plan to take them and print a few for myself and for those I give the DVDs/CDs.  Here’s the link:

http://www.isity.net/blog/?p=60

Enjoy these labels and send me pictures of your DVD happiness.

Cheers,

Herlo