Monthly Archives: October 2008

Conferences Fedora Tech

Ambassador EventBox — Making the Rounds through North America

October 29, 2008 – 2:32 pm

With some left over funds from the Fedora booth at UTOSC, I created the first Ambassador EventBox.  Not that there wasn’t an event box before, but it wasn’t formal and was pretty trashed as a cardboard box moving from place to place would.

It turns out to be a smash hit in North America.  After only visiting 3 events so far, the EventBox is getting all sorts of publicity.  In fact, there’s a serious plan in place to purchase Pelican boxes and get more EventBoxen ready for the coming onslaught of events in 2009.

I also hope the EMEA Ambassadors will also like to follow suit with an EventBox of their own.  It would be really neat to see it in place throughout the world very soon.  The system works pretty well and provides all of the tools necessary to make a Fedora Booth look professional very quickly and easily.

To make this more of a reality, I’ve modified several pages on the wiki to make it easy to request an EventBox (in North America for now) as well as tracking the EventBox.  We’d also like to hear what you liked and disliked about the EventBox as it comes to your event.  Below is a list of pages regarding the wiki and their purpose:

Cheers,

Herlo

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Community Fedora Guru screencast Tech

Screencast: gnome-do v0.5 for Fedora 10

October 22, 2008 – 3:13 pm

Back in July, I built gnome-do from scratch, identifying and helping get a few bugs worked out along the way.  It was all in an effort to create a screencast on the future version of gnome-do for Fedora 10.  Gnome-do appears to be based upon Quicksilver from Mac, but gnome-do is bound to surpass it quickly.

This functionality is available in the rawhide repository for those daring enough to try it, but since it requires Mono, it may require upgrades of other applications, like banshee, f-spot, tomboy and others.

WARNING: If you are not comfortable with beta software, wait for this to come out in Fedora 10.

Gnome-do is a great little app to help those who really wish to use more discrete movements but like full-fledged desktops in a graphical user interface (GUI).  Gnome-do is definitely going somewhere in v0.5 and has some really cool plugins.  Now I need to learn how to write plugins…

I really enjoyed doing this screencast, and beware it’s 25MB.

Click me to see the screencast

Cheers,

Herlo

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Ambassadors Collaboration Community Fedora Guru Tech

ScreenCast: Fedora Talk with Twinkle

October 20, 2008 – 9:40 pm

If you haven’t heard, Fedora now has a VOIP (Voice Over IP) server called Fedora Talk.  Information about it can be found at talk.fedoraproject.org.

Essentially, the goal of Fedora Talk is to make it easier for use Fedorans to talk with one another, hold conference calls and accommodate impromptu conversations that need to happen over voice.  A few of the features is that it’s tied into FAS (the Fedora Account System) and authentication uses a password different than your FAS password, which is very nice.

So tonight, I was interested in getting this working because recently I was given a VOIP phone from the Fedora Project and wanted to use it soon.  However, I’m currently in Denver, and the phone was in Salt Lake.  That means it will have to wait for this weekend at least.

But all is NOT lost!!!

I decided to spend a bit of time helping get this great idea off the ground by creating a screencast to configure your machine to use Fedora Talk with Twinkle.  It took me only about 20 minutes to create and only two takes.  It’s fairly easy to set up as my screencast shows.

There are some restrictions I wish to share, mainly because didn’t mention them in the video.

  • You must have a computer with a microphone and speakers.
  • I recommend you purchase a $5 mic from radio shack, it makes the quality of your voice so much better.
  • Headphones work well also.instead of speakers, keeps the feedback down.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the screencast and join the Fedora Project.

Cheers,

Herlo

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Ambassadors Collaboration Community Fedora Tech

FAD NA Day 1

October 12, 2008 – 11:47 pm

Well, after staying up until around 4am hacking (2am with David and Cade), I finally finished my presentations slides and went to sleep for a measly 3hrs 45mins.  But that was enough to get me through the rest of the day.  And what a day it was!

When I arrived downstairs just after 8am, people were setting up for FAD NA.  Jeffrey Tadlock had arrived and was loading the food in from the car.  Bagels, donuts, fruit, coffee and orange juice.  Nice array of foodstuffs for the morning.

My presentation went pretty well, we had fun with it and I really enjoyed the gag about the Ambassador Class Starship.  Unfortunately, I forgot to grab the vga cable for my projector so we couldn’t use it but I did have pdfs of the slides online.

I brought up a lot of thoughts about how we should be ambassadors, how we should act and especially how important it is that we represent ourselves well to the community.  I talked a bit about the message we should spread and ways we can represent Fedora to the community.  I think it was well received by the ambassadors and I hope it made a good impression.

The rest of the day was very well focused, we made some serious progress in areas I wanted to see the progress as well as things I hadn’t even considered.  Pascal was gracious enough to take notes and place them online already.  I learned a ton about how FAmSCo works and what we need to do as ambassadors to make sure they will provide us with the tools we need to spread the word about Fedora.

After a good long day, we cleaned up (most of us anyway) around 2pm and started heading out, though my flight wasn’t until almost 8pm.  Brian Pepple, Jon Stanley and I headed to a coffee shop after dropping John Rose off at the airport and me shipping my projector and phone home.  It was a nice relaxing conversation.

UPDATE: Pictures are being uploaded as we speak to my flickr account

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Ambassadors Community Conferences Fedora Tech

OLF Day 1; FADNA Day -1

October 12, 2008 – 6:42 am

Well, the incrementing continues and we’re closing in on the end of our time in Ohio.  I’ve really enjoyed the conference so far and the Fedora Ambassadors are awesome!  13 of us showed up to the booth (pictures coming later) and we interacted with hundreds upon hundreds of interested folks.

As usual, the biggest hit was the One Laptop per Child (OLPC).  The kids would show up (and many adults) and play for some time.  I really enjoyed showing the kids the cool activities and items on these awesome computers.  I’m really looking forward to the updates coming out in the next update!  The kids loved the camera and voice wave activities and the adults really liked the idea of kids learning to program and do amazing things.

A good friend of mine John Weis, who lives in Columbus was at OLF too and so we met up and hung out a bit at the conference.  Still working on converting him over to Fedora, but at least he’s using Linux.

As for others, we had a run on shirts around noon, I think I gave out about 15 in a span of 10 minutes.  The rule was that they had to put them on right then so people could see the fedora on their person!  It was great fun and we have some fun pictures, which I’ll post with tomorrow’s updates.

At the end of the day, I had attended 3 presentations.  The teenage girl who uses open source, one on alsa, and the closing keynote by Jono Bacon.  I, unfortunately, missed Zonker’s presentation, I hear it was just like the one at UTOSC :)  Good stuff!

We headed out to dinner at this greek restaurant where I was able to enjoy some ‘Flaming Cheese!’  Quite a good restaurant.  Grape leaves are good as well, and I got to mock John Weis with some draft NewCastle ale (since he’s only 20) which was also quite good.

After dinner, we returned to the convention center for the after party.  We had a good time and I did the moonwalk to represent Fedora during the dance competition.  I’m pretty reserved though compared to the other distro dance representatives who shook their butts and removed clothing!  After the first round, I bowed out, but it was funny…

Apparently, there as an after after and an after after after party as well.  I heard rumors of bottles being broken and a fight that almost happened.  Hopefully nothing came out of it as it was great conference and I really enjoyed myself.  Fedora was well represented as well and I look forward to seeing another OLF in the future.

Tomorrow is FAD NA and I need to rewrite my slides again (now that I’ve the thoughts more organized in my head), and I’m really looking forward to working with these guys on some really cool projects coming up.

Cheers,

Herlo

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Tech

Ohio Linux Fest Day 0; FADNA Day -2

October 11, 2008 – 5:10 am

I arrived last around 5:30 at the Columbus airport.  Scott Williams (aka vwbusguy) was on his way, but would be another hour, so I sat down and worked on my presentation for FADNA.  Seems my training skills paid off as CMH had a fairly empty set of gates and I could practice my presentation to an empty room.  My presentation does need a bit of polishing, and probably a couple more slides, but all in all the content is there.

After Scott picked me up, we headed over to downtown Columbus.  I noticed the skyline immediately as we headed into town.  It’s kind of surreal when the art you’ve created is part of what you’ve never seen before.  Columbus is a very nice town.

Once we arrived downtown, we met up with the rest of the Fedora Ambassadors for drinks and dinner, it was great to meet Brian Pepple, Brian Powell, John Rose and Jeffrey Tadlock.  Of course, there were others I had already met before including John Stanley and Paul Frields, great fun.

After dinner, OLF had a Pre-Party bash downstairs and the first drink was free (if you purchased the supporter package).  We decided it a good idea to enjoy another beer and headed down there.  We met quite a few people downstairs, talked Fedora, guns, politics; pretty much anything you wanted was discussed.

Had a great time.  We left fairly early since the conference starts at 8am today.  Off to get breakfast now..

Cheers,

Herlo

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Ambassadors Community Conferences Fedora Guru Tech

Going to Ohio LinuxFest? Volunteer!

October 8, 2008 – 2:14 pm

In last night’s FAmNA meeting, we discussed the fact that nobody had remembered to register to help at the Fedora booth at OLF.  David brought it up and within a few minutes we had most of the spots filled.

As an event organizer, I understand the importance of having a booth manned at all times.  If you have a moment, head on over to the OLF Planning page on the wiki and add your name to a slot.  We could use at least 2-3 people in every spot.

There will be a ‘USB Creation Station’ there run by my little 7″ ASUS EEE PC as well as some XO laptops and other cool swag like stickers, t-shirts and buttons (thanks John).

Thanks to Jeffrey Tadlock for heading up the organization and it will be great to see him at FADNA on Sunday as well.  It will be great to meet all the gang and put faces to names.  Don’t forget to bring your camera!!

Cheers,

Herlo

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