RSSCloud is an open protocol which creates a loosely-coupled Twitter-like network of people and 140 character status messages.  In plainer language, it enables real-time status updates on anything that can be pushed via RSS.  Why should you care?  Come to the SLLUG daytime SIG meeting to find out.

More information can be found at http://rsscloud.org/

So why not come down to BetaLoft next Wednesday, November 11, from 11:30am-1pm and learn about RSSCloud.

Cheers,

Herlo

Location:

BetaLoft SLC – 357 West 200 S, Suite 201, Salt Lake City
Map

See you all there.

Clint

The reason I’m posting is that I have been accepted as a speaker for Ignite Salt Lake 3 at the Murray Theatre on August 20.

I’ve thinking about my presentation and I think I’ve got a good idea for what I am going to do, but I am just fleshing out my ideas here.

My talk is entitled: Utah Open Source – Free Software Abounds

I plan talking about the basic concept of free software, the culture and how we do open source in Utah.  I intend to close out the presentation showing off the Utah Open Source Conference and it’s benefit to the community.

I’m planning on having some real fun at Ignite Salt Lake.  I sure hope you all will come and join me on August 20 at the Murray Theatre.

Cheers,

Herlo

This month’s SLLUG Daytime SIG meeting is this coming Wednesday, July 8, from 11:30am-1pm at BetaLoft.  I apologize for being slow getting this out, we’ve been working through a big datacenter move this past week at work.  Now that is over, it’s time for SLLUG Daytime at BetaLoft, (357 W 200 S Suite 201 Salt Lake City, UT, 84101).  Here’s a map if you need directions.

I’d like to let you all know that I (Herlo) will be presenting this month, and the topic is: Cobbler, the powerful, installation, dhcp, dns and repo server!

If you have ever wanted to setup a system with pxe, dhcp, customized repositories and more, then cobbler is for you.  Feel free to read up on the cobbler website before the meeting.

I should mention that cobbler supports several distributions of Linux, and will soon support Windows remote installation (using Linux RIS).  Albeit, I’ll focus on setup of cobbler, a simple installation server with just one distro, using kvm and koan (kickstart over a network) with some basic networking and showing the gui tools as well.

Bring your lunch and your brains and learn all about setting up your very own install server in under an hour.

See you all on Wednesday!

Cheers,

Herlo

Cooking with PAM

Thad Van Ry will cover the basics of Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM). If you’re a Sys Admin who wants to know how PAM can help you or hurt you, this meeting is for you. Thad will go over the different stacks available as well as how to call modules and their control flags.

Thad is a Linux System Administrator for the LDS Church. He has been using Linux in his work life for the past 12+ years.

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.  A map is available of all floor plans of the library.

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

• Legal: The largest change was to the legal section, previously there wasn’t one mainly due to the fact that when Paul presented it at UTOSC 2008, the Fedora Remix secondary trademark was not yet available.
  • For instance, one can now create a Fedora Remix and label it as such without asking permission of the Fedora Project or Red Hat
  • There are now clear guidelines as to the distribution of such Remixes, which will make it easier to protect the Fedora trademark.
• Artwork: The new Fedora Remix art allowed me to update the slides to include examples of some of the Fedora Remix logos (and one at the end with the four foundations) on every page as an OpenOffice.org Impress master slide set.  Maybe I will make these into templates one day if I decide to learn how.
• Approach:  When Paul did his presentation, I recalled he built an install DVD using pungi, but I felt it more appropriate to show a LiveCD being built which then let me reboot into a LiveUSB after converting it with livecd-iso-to-disk.
  • An additional thought I considered with my approach here (after I was done presentting, of course) would be to add the impress or pdf presentation loaded up in the Live Image.
  • Also, a true Fedora Remix would be nice with packages that I’ve created (or someone else’s repo that’s FOSS) to show the actual proof in the pudding.

I felt it went very smoothly and was quite useful.  I expect that the recorded version (I think they recorded it to video from what I recall) will be out in a short while.  I expect that a few folks will take these very simple tools and get some cool Fedora Remixes in the works.

I look forward to seeing more Fedora Remix presentations in the future.

Cheers,

Herlo

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, as I have been thinking about it for some time.  I’ve been working really hard on this presentation for tomorrow afternoon at the Southern California Linux Expo this weekend.  So I’d like to discuss what I’ve been working on and provide my links to slides (odp and pdf format) for those who wish to download them.  I’m guessing I’ll get asked where my slides are at least once, so here they are, right here, on this post.

Anyway, I’d like to discuss a little about the presentation’s concepts and tools here.  That way, if you did attend my talk, you can refer here to some of the points I’ll make.

First off, I’m going up against the Ubuntu Community Manager, Jono Bacon.  I wish him luck though, as I will swear less in my presentation :)  But I digress, I’m in the theater, so that should make room for the large crowd I’m expecting.  If you were worried you might not get into my presentation, don’t!  There’s plenty of seating.

Okay, now to my real points, I’ll be talking about three technologies used to build a full distribution.  Built and maintained within the fedora application space.  I think that’s great:

1. livecd-tools – This toolkit provides the building blocks for creating your own spin (or remix).  We’ll discuss how to use livecd-creator and livecd-iso-to-disk out of this package.  In fact, if all goes well, I’ll build a new Fedora LiveUSB right in the presentation.
2. pungi – This application is used for building Installation Media.  It can build CDs, DVDs or even provide for a network based install.
3. revisor – Revisor provides both of the above tools in one configurable GUI.  However, it also has a very powerful and flexible GUI.  In fact, the Fedora Unity group creates an updated ISO and makes it available about 3 months after each release using Revisor.

I hope this little review page can provide some answers to questions, plus access to my slides and any other resources you might need.

Cheers,

Herlo

Just wanted to give you all a quick reminder that the first SLLUG (daytime SIG) meeting will be this Wednesday, Feb 11 from 11:30am-1pm

The first meeting I will present ‘Fedora Remix: Custom distributions based upon proven design’

I should also mention that I’ll be bringing some swag to give away.  I have some cool computer bags and a copy of the latest openSUSE 11.1 boxed edition to give away.

I’ve included the details about location again below.  For particulars inside the library, read my previous post.

If you have questions, feel free to email me directly <herlo1 AT gmail>.

===================================================================
Salt Lake Public Library:
210 E 400 S, Salt Lake City, UT‎ – (801) 524-8200‎
Google Map: http://tinyurl.com/slcpubliclibrary

See you all there.

Herlo

The topic I submitted, Fedora Remix.

It turns out that it’s a remix of another presentation from the Utah Open Source Conference by Paul Frields.  But things have changed since that presentation was given. Here’s a couple I’ll mention:

• First, Fedora has now approved a secondary trademark called ‘Fedora Remix’.    I’ll talk a little about how this can be used and what the benefit is to downstream groups and Fedora.
• The spin-kickstarts rpm created by Jeroen van Meeuwen provides over 30 kickstarts you can start with to make things better.

In preparation for this presentation at SCaLE 7x, and if you are in Utah, I’ll be presenting it (hopefully) a couple times at the Local User Groups (LUGs).

Cheers,

Herlo

8:35am: Arrive at MIT for the FUDCon bar camp, grab a muffin, some juice and coffee.

8:50am: Complete set up of audio equipment, quickly down my juice and muffin.

8:55am: Head out to get some more food, but I only found some morsels left.  I snagged a small bit of bread left, and begin my return to the audio equipment.

9:05am: Streaming has begun, or so I think.  Darkice won’t start, giving a strange error that the device wasn’t there.  It turns out I’ve forgotten to plug in the usb cable from the mixer, so the first few minutes of Greg DeKoenigsberg’s talk are missing.

9:08am: Plug in the usb cable and restart the stream.

9:30am: Pitch a session on the Fedora Classroom.

9:40am: Vote for my favorite sessions and hope others want to participate in the Fedora Classroom session.  As I we are voting, I chat with Dave Nalley, Ian Weller and Ricky Zhou about recording audio in whatever room they are in each hour.  It seems to be a good plan.

9:50am: Paul asks me to help get sessions scheduled, so I grab chalk and start crossing out sessions that have been scheduled.

10:15am: All the sessions are scheduled, because I am recording the audio of many of the presentations, I choose to stay in the main room, also the largest room.

10:30am: I begin streaming the Filesystems session, Chris Tyler is also in this room recording the video for posting later on the web.  The session did not start off all that interesting.  Near the end, I learned a bit about the transition from ext4 to btrfs for the future of Linux in general.

11:30am: This was my favoritest hour of the entire bar camp.  Luke Macken and John (J5) Palmieri presented on Moksha.  Moksha is an application built upon Turbo Gears 2, orbited, jQuery and about 10 other technologies to bring together a simple interface for making real time applications on the web.  It’s much more than a simple AJAXified application and has benefits to allow one to write a simple connector to communicate to the browser.  Watch for another post on this in the near future.

12:15pm: During the Moksha talk, I recalled that I desired to head over to the Marriott hotel and take pictures of the Fedora window posters.  Because I hadn’t brought along my camera, I first asked Mairin Duffy to see if she had a long range lense, She did not.  John Stanley informed me he had one with his Canon Digital Rebel XTI, and that he would happily lend it to me.  However, he couldn’t leave as he was covering for others during the lunch hour.

12:30pm: Jennfer came over and spent about 20 minutes with me while I ate my lunch.  Then we found John together and headed out *quickly* to get the pictures of the hotel.  We talked about what she was going to do that day, visit some older churches in the area and such.

As we arrived at the hotel, we saw several windows with the Fedora window posters.  I pulled out the camera and fired away, catching several good photos.  After taking the first photos however, I noticed that the camera was reporting that it did not have a CF card.  It turns out John didn’t know he didn’t have a card in his camera, which means no pictures from the hotel experiment (unless others have some, here’s hoping).

1:33pm: After hurrying back from the failed photo shoot.  I found myself running behind the schedule just a little.  It turns out the Puppet session was next and Jeroen van Meuween wasn’t too interested in waiting on me.  As luck would have it, everyone seemed to be in this session and Ricky Zhou saved the day by recording the first few minutes on the stream for me.

The puppet session was good, but I wish I had seen a bit of a demo of advanced features.

2:30pm: The desktop session was started recording, however, I was asked to come out and do an interview with my good friend Dave Nalley about the progress of the Ambassadors with Colby Hoke.  We spent a good bit of time talking in front of the camera about the awesomeness that is the new AmbassadorKit, the new Media Box and some other initiatives coming soon to the Fedora Project.

2:55pm: Headed over to the remaining bits of the Git Basics session run by Paul Frields.  I really enjoyed this session.  While I know quite a bit about Git, I was able to help teach others about a few things and even learned a thing or two about git-reset.

3:25pm: Returned to the main room to finish up the streaming for the Desktop session.  There was a lot of discussion going on about the new feature in the GNOME (I think?) desktop, but coming in at the end, I wasn’t certain.

3:30pm: After starting the recording for the KVM session, along with Kevin Fenzi, I headed over to the session we were holding on Fedora Classroom.  I was saddened to see that there were only 6 people (including us) in the session.  But that’s what you get when you compete against KVM and other blockbuster sessions and your topic is really, really new.

Even with the small audience, Kevin and I were able to come up with some positive plans for the future from the group.  I anticipate we’ll see more basic topics for the #fedora and FedoraForum.org crowds.  We talked about how a lot of the folks we’ve seen in the #fedora-classroom sessions over the past two months were those who really could become great contributors with just a bit of opportunity.

We also discussed ways to get more presenters and topics into the curriculum.  Part of what is keeping this from blooming quickly.  Hopefully the things we discussed were useful for the future of Fedora Classroom and its future does look bright.

4:30pm: As everyone gathered into the room, I learned that we were going to be having a hackfest in the evening after FUDPub.  The goal of the hackfest was to get the videos and audio uploaded and shared as quickly as possible.

5:08pm: Paul’s final remarks for the bar camp, thanking many of the contributors.  I was grateful for everyone who put in effort today.  The MIT folks were very gracious for letting us hold FUDCon there this year.

Paul announced the FUDPub at Flat Top Johny’s and that the OLPC folks were sponsoring the food and one drink.  Very nice of them as well.

Part 2 will be coming shortly as it is another day unto itself.

Cheers,

Herlo