As usual, come from 11:30am-1pm at BetaLoftSLC (357 W 200 S #201)  - http://betaloftslc.com

This month, I thought I would share a basic git introduction.  In my opinion, the best Source Control Management (SCM) system out right now.  I’ve been using it for nigh on a year and I have converted a few systems over to it from svn.  This is more of a work session than a presentation, so come on down and learn how to use git.  It is recommended that you bring your laptops with you as that will benefit more if you do.

Some suggested topics I can cover:

• Local and remote git repositories (different workflows and other fun stuff)
• Using git-svn to ‘convert’ from svn
• Comparing Distributed Revision Control with Traditional (non-distributed) Revision Control
• Git hooks, why they are valuable and when to use them
• Other basic git discussions

See you all there.

Cheers,

Herlo

Everything Just Works(TM).

I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to have a system working with great sound, awesome graphics and very usable GNOME and KDE desktops.  I really like the new NetworkManager features and the ability to tether any device, vpnc and other easy-to-configure options.  KVM support is much improved with the new libguestfs improvements.

Fedora 12 media should be available on December 3, if you are a Fedora Ambassador in North America, start requesting media* for your events (and ambassador kits).

You can get your copy today!!

Cheers,

Herlo

*NOTE: This request page is not for the freemedia project. You must be a Fedora Contributor to request media.  Join the Fedora Project today and help us continue making Fedora the best operating system!!

21:37 <herlo> did you say you were willing to cook breakfast for us during UTOSC ??
21:37 <herlo> :-P
21:37 <herlo> I couldn’t remember if you agreed, or balked
21:37 <Jennifer> I did. I will make sure I don’t work so I can do it properly.
21:37 <Jennifer> 5 people, right. Plus us, of course.
21:38 <Jennifer> ?
21:38 <herlo> yeah
21:38 <Jennifer> Yep, for 3 days? I can do that. :)
21:38 <herlo> so far, I have Ian, Scott, Larry and Mirano and possibly Scott (from LA)
21:39 <herlo> it does mean that it has to be ready kind of early though…
21:40 <JenniferDean> Yep
21:40 <herlo> kk, grerat!
21:40 <herlo> or just great!
21:40 <JenniferDean> That’s what prep the night before is for
21:40 <herlo> lol, yeah
21:41 <JenniferDean> The only rule is: stay out while I’m cooking. Lol

So as you can see, I just had to comment about it right now!  Jennifer is awesome!

Looks like our guests will be well taken care of during UTOSC 2009!!

See you all there! October 8-10, 2009.  Register today!

Cheers,

Herlo

I’ve been a bit quiet about the SLLUG Daytime SIG meeting this month.  That’s because I’ve been trying to decide whether we should continue to meet at the Salt Lake Public Library.  While the library is a nice place to meet, I learned about a great new business opening up this month called BetaLoft.  Last Tuesday, I visited BetaLoft and its founder Andrew Tyler has put together quite a nice facility for the first coworking location in Salt Lake City.  Located right downtown near traxx and the Gateway, it’s very convenient (and free) parking on the streets to the east and west, make this place a great location for our SLLUG Daytime SIG meeting.

Due to this change, and the short notice of the change, I will try to send out a few reminders between now and Wednesday.  Our normal meeting time 11:30am-1pm is still set.  BetaLoft has some great conference facilities, plus they have a big flat screen tv for Rock Band.  So it should be a blast!

So where is BetaLoft, you ask?  Here’s the information:

BetaLoft
357 W 200 S, Suite 201 (in the same building as Aculis) (map)
Salt Lake City, Utah 84101

Now that the new location is decided, please come on down to our new digs and learn about IPTables.  Kevin Benko has prepared a presentation on the basics of IPTables.  For those of you who were discussing this on the mailing list, this is your opportunity to come and have the discussion.

Cheers,

Herlo

Last year, we started a project called utos-conman.  This project in about 3-5 months became the system that ran the speaker approval process, speaker listings, sponsor display, etc. for the Utah Open Source Conference 2008.  In 2009, we’re looking to make some improvements that will take us one step further to the ultimate open source conference management system.  Whether that statement is true or not, I want to push forward some goals for utos-conman.

To start off with, I worked this year with the Southern California Linux Exposition (SCaLE) to get their scale registration system open sourced and available.  It is now available, thanks Lei, and it can be checked out using svn from the google code project site.  This is exciting, and I’m happy to have the SCaLE code available because it provides a very powerful registration system, which includes the ability to create tickets, coupons, promotions, add-ons, reporting, check-in and much, much more.

Goals

The goals for this year’s Hack Night are going to be two fold, because now we have two projects.

First, let’s talk about scalereg:

• Porting to Django 1.0 (completed, patch coming)
• Adding back the validation and form management that was removed to get to Django 1.0
• Adding a new theme for UTOS, we hope to make this generic enough to let anyone add some css and images

Next is utos-conman:

• Working toward reusable app status.  Making it easier to integrate with apps like scalereg
• Adding volunteer management
• Adding better room management
• Adding upload feature to the sponsors admin section
• Integrating video and audio links

I’d like to take a moment to thank all the folks who’ve worked on these projects over the years and I look forward to having an awesome code base.  There are many many more features that we’ll be looking at in the future, including reporting, auditing and off-line capability.  For now, I’m more interested in making things work and getting it up and running.  In the next month or two, I hope to have a full-fledged registration system in place for the Utah Open Source Conference 2009.

Cheers,

Herlo

Here’s the email from Marc Christensen:

The Salt Lake Linux Users Group started its humble beginnings sometime in May of 1994.  A few weeks later we officially incorporated as a non-profit on July 28, 1994. That makes this month our 15th year soft-anniversary with the official one coming up in July.  It also makes SLLUG one of the oldest and most established Linux user groups in the world!

Congratulations to everyone one for making SLLUG a success and contributing to such a great Local Linux community.  We have members of our group that have greatly influenced and contributed heavily to Linux over the years.  We make up a diverse group of individuals of varied backgrounds and depth of knowledge.

We rock!  :)  Thanks to everyone who has helped make the Salt Lake Linux Users Group such a success over the years and here’s to many many more!!!!!

–
Marc Christensen
http://www.sllug.org

Again, congratulations to the Salt Lake Linux User Group and all of its members for 15 great years.  Here’s looking forward to 15 more.

Cheers,

Herlo

What is Puppet?  (for the curious and uninitiated)

Puppet is an open-source next-generation server automation tool. It is composed of a declarative language for expressing system configuration, a client and server for distributing it, and a library for realizing the configuration.

More information is available here: http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/FrequentlyAskedQuestions

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We meet in conference room A on the lower level of the Salt Lake Library.  Head down the stairs, make a left turn.  The conference room  is directly under the foyer area (the area with all the shops on the 1st level)  If you aren’t clear, ask the information desk.

Also, our meetings should be posted on the Electric Signs by the entrance to the library on the first floor.

Cheers,

Herlo

Essentially, the new idea is that we’re going to let the presenters be flexible with their schedules.  Thus presentations can happen any time in a 24-hour period (from 00:00 to 23:00 UTC time) this Sunday, May 3.

It looks to be a much simpler thing to make work for everyone.  Presentations will be available afterword on our Fedora Classroom Archive as well, so if you can’t stay up to watch it live, at least you can live it afterwards in the logs.

So you ask, who’s presenting.  Well, check out the Fedora Classroom wiki page and find out.  It looks to be fun and there should be something for everyone.

See you all there!!

Cheers,

Herlo

Now: Life has been hectic, but there’s still some silver lining

I’m currently sitting on a plane headed to Seattle for the Linuxfest NorthWest, where I will give my Fedora Remix presentation again. I’m hopeful that many people will desire to build their own remixes of Fedora. I am certain that there are many potential ideas out there. I’m still working on a kiosk system :)

I’m also interested in meeting with the folks who organize LFNW and talking about some new programs I think will be very beneficial to all Linux/Open Source community conferences. This is where I think the value of collaboration will really help us grow our respective regions into a much bigger/better way to promote free software.

One idea I have going is better collaboration on a conference management system. I sure hope the everyone at LFNW are as keen to helping as they were at SCaLE (hey gang!). This is something that I will be announcing very soon and hope to get a good sized community around.

OLPC: Starting a hacking group

This past Wednesday was the first UTOS-XO hackfest. We spent about 2 hours discussing the new partnership between Utah Open Source, Fedora and the One Laptop groups. The plan, set in motion by my good friend, David Nalley, was to obtain a bunch of XO’s, distribute them across North America to those who would volunteer a few hours a week to develop a fourth grade math curriculum.

We had 11 attendees, with 2 new who volunteered to spend some time developing activities along these lines. To be truthful, I think the UTOS-XO group will really shine and bring forth a good set of activities. We were able to identify 3 different activities to develop with a goal to bring the code back next month so we could ’sugarize’ them and include them in the XO for fourth graders.

I wanted to mention that two of the volunteers in the room were quite young. Christian is 14 years and Ethan is 11. These two seemed quite capable of creating activities. Before we separated for the evening, Christian already had one component built and was showing me how he had written an activity to add 5-digit numbers together. How exciting!

Feel free to check out the pictures.

UTOS: Growing the Community

In addition to the OLPC hackfest, my role at the Utah Open Source Foundation has been expanded to focus more on the community. I’ve been able to hand off much of the conference planning to a trusty fellow, Will Smith. I’m excited to see what ideas he has in store for this year’s conference.

Because of this change, my role has started to become more involved with marketing and budgeting areas. I’m also very interested in growing a few of the programs UTOS has been doing for a while. For instance, I’m interested in streaming screencasts of the meetings (both video and audio) in the very near future on a limited basis. This is experimental, but should be great.  I’ve been able to get gstreamer to stream vnc connections and audio mostly working and streaming to our server.  It should be just a matter of time before I have a fully working application to show off.

This past week, three of the great folks who run the Utah Open Source Foundation and Conference were interviewed on Technometria, a podcast by Phil Windley.  It’s among the highest rated podcasts on IT Conversations.  We spent a good chunk of an hour talking about the Utah Open Source Conference and just building a community in general.  It was really exciting being interviewed and sharing our opinions.  I look forward to the feedback.

Another great component is the Utah Tech Events Calendar. As of March, I’ve been sending out an email near the beginning of the month with all of the tech events on our calendar. I’m excited to see this grow and continue. One highlight I’ve been seeing is the Geek Lunches and Geek/Blogger Dinners. These once a month activities give those who don’t have a ton of time otherwise, an opportunity to participate in the Utah tech community.

If you are interested in helping out the Utah Open Source community in any capacity, we’d love to have your help, desire and excitement. Please send me an email (clint@utos.org) explaining your desire and we’ll get you working on the things that interest you the most. It’s always a good resume builder even if you will learn how to be a good system administrator, programmer or designer. We need your help!

Cheers,

Herlo

Looking forward, I’m thinking a lot about the tracks we’ll be having at UTOSC 2009.  I’m wondering what others think, but I want to have at least Developer, Business and Beginner tracks.  I know that Laura Moncur and I have are already been discussing the beginner track, so that’s very exciting.

So here’s my thinking, if you want to see a particular presentation at UTOSC 2009, comment here, or on one of the blog posts on utos.org.  In addition, when we put the call for papers out, we’ll try to do a similar thing to other open source conferences, like open source bridge, linuxfest northwest and others have done.  We’ll show you all of the presentation submissions.  We’re also hoping to alter our voting system to allow anyone who has registered for the conference to vote for or against a particular presentation.

I’m getting really excited about the Utah Open Source Conference 2009.  I hope you all are too.

Cheers,

Herlo