Tag Archives: fad

Community Conferences FAD Fedora Guru LUGs News Tech

Fedora Activity Day at SCaLE 9x: Sysadmin Study Group

February 23, 2011 – 10:27 am

I believe it’s a very common desire to improve your skillset as a tech geek.  I believe there are many people out there who just want to learn how to do a few things so they can get their job done.  I also believe that many people would like to make more money at their job, either as a System Administrator or to become a sysadmin.

The question is, how do you gain the skills to become a better sysadmin?

In my opinion, one of the best ways to gain experience quickly, is to participate in training classes, such as the amazing classes run by Red Hat.  But sometimes, those cost a ton of money, and the current company doesn’t want to foot the bill.  Of course, you are trying to save your pennies to get to there, but that can take time.

However, there are cheaper alternatives.  I believe the community is the best way overall to gain this knowledge. While it takes a bit more time to get there, over time, you can learn a major portion of what it takes to become a skilled sysadmin.

Local User Groups

I suggest attending a Local User Group that specializes in Linux administration.  These groups take one topic per month and can educate you (usually) for free.  I really enjoy my LUGs and have gained tons of knowledge over the years.

Conference Events

Many conferences, like SCaLE, offer space to communities to run day long activities.  The Fedora Activity Day at SCaLE is a good example of where you can quickly gain skills as a system administrator for a very low cost.  If you are looking to improve your system administration skillset, I highly recommend attending the FAD at SCaLE this year.

Sysadmin Study Group at SCaLE 9x
When: Friday, February 25, 9am to 5pm
Where: Los Angeles Airport Hilton, Century B

The study group is about helping you become a better system administrator and there will be experts on hand to help you study.  We will also be providing an installation server with Fedora 14, which will be used to build your virtual or physical machine and give you real hands on experience with the sysadmin tasks.

Machine Requirements
KVM capable system with approximately 20GB of disk space free
or
Physical Laptop with ethernet and PXE (preferred), USB or CD/DVD  booting capability
Register Today

I look forward to seeing you all come and improve your skills on Friday, and the entire cost is just what it takes to get into SCaLE, $70.  Register now!

Tags , , , , , , | Permalink | Comment (1)
Community FAD Fedora Tech Tools

Fedora Activity Days 1-3 – A ‘Frank (aka Francis) the Fedora pwnie’ report

February 1, 2010 – 7:44 pm

It appears to me that the weekend in Raleigh went rather well.  Even with the difficult weather conditions on Saturday into Sunday morning, I feel the result was a ‘smashing’ success!  There were so many things being accomplished that I couldn’t keep track of them all.  I will try to make a fairly complete list of the events of the weekend, and what we accomplished overall.

Friday, January 29 — Day 1

Gathered at Red Hat’s main office, we brainstormed in a manual ‘tag cloud’ kind of way.  Mel had us all take sticky notes, write upon them based upon a few words on the white board and then, stick them to said white board appropriately.  This got our minds going about what a FUDCon or FAD should be, why it was important and the things that could really be improved.  I felt very happy about the amount of ideas that were shared on these sticky notes.  it was quite cathartic to get out the things that always had bugged me or I thought needed improvement in our Events.  I have a few pictures of us doing this process, enjoy them.

After spending about 1.5 hours doing this and discussing it, we broke into separate groups, the FUDCon 2.0 folks (upstairs) and FUDCon Live folks, aka me, Yaakov, and the freeseer folks online (downstairs).  My main target was to get the freeseer application working with completely free software and build the AV Kit from components I had, plus the ones that Mel had purchased for this project.

After getting downstairs with Dennis Gilmore (he was my helper for the first hour), we quickly discovered that one component, the Epiphan vga2usb device, was not working.  After a bit of digging, we also discovered that it had a non-free driver and that it would likely not be easy to find a free driver alternative.  We did, however, attempt to build the binary they provided, but kept getting errors.  More on this later on (or in another post), so stay tuned.

I spent the next few hours trying to get everything else up and running, doing research to find a different alternative for video output from a VGA source to USB input.  heffer joined us on IRC and gave me some good links as to where I might look for a Scan Converter and a easyCAP device.  While a little lower quality, the Linux drivers for it are completely open and free, so I set out with a plan to find one in Raleigh.

At 4pm, Max and I headed out on the town, hunting down several items, including firewire PCMCIA adapters (for our miniDV camera) and the Scan Converter components.  We needed to get a screw driver and some other firewire adapter stuff too, we headed to CompUSA. Though normally I wouldn’t go there, but this CompUSA had actually been converted from a Tiger Direct, so I thought we had a chance.  After about 1.5 hours of failure, we ended up with two firewire cards and some audio cables, we headed off to see Avatar in 3D.

Saturday, January 30 — Day 2

After leaving Avatar, we discovered a nice big blanket of snow had come down in Raleigh.  Just 2-3 inches, and in Utah, we’d think nothing of this, but here it’s quite a bit different.  First off, North Carolina doesn’t seems to have the infrastructure, no plows or ice melt, to really deal with something like this kind of storm.  There were news reports of it on every station, the Governor called for a state of emergency, and I just thought it was odd.  Because of this, it was determined that we would not leave the hotel for Day 2 of the FAD.  Instead, we reserved a room in the hotel and worked from there.  Luckily, the hotels infrastructure, plus the Days Inn next door provided us with our networking needs, while Max stayed at his apartment and called in using Fedora Talk.

My work was to spend as much time with the FreeSeeR folks and do tons and tons of testing of their code, plus provide feedback and gstreamer pipelines to get us closer and closer to our eventual goal.  Thanh had spent a lot of time while we were at Avatar to turn FreeSeeR into an API.  He also altered the code to put the gui into a more sensible tool, with both Qt and Gtk implementations.

About half way through the day, I discovered that I had accidentally left my power adapter for my audio mixer in Max’s car (he was 15 minutes way with no snow and at least 25 with), essentially eliminating my high quality audio testing.  Luckily Chris Tyler had a headset with a microphone and Dennis Gilmore had a webcam we could use because the firewire cards were a bit flaky and kept crashing my kernel.

By the end of the night, with some tweaking by Dennis and I, we had FreeSeeR working with DV input, USB video input, 1/4″ audio input and were able to output to an ogg file with reasonable quality and consistency.  A lot of testing later, and we were able to determine that we still needed to tweak some of the code to provide for a better way to adjust audio and video settings prior to recording.  All in all, the FreeSeeR software is coming along very nicely.  Andrew Ross and Thanh Ha have been doing an amazing job and I really appreciate their help working on getting this working.  The new version of FUDCon Live thanks you as well, because without this, we won’t be able to provide our users with a good quality remote experience.

Sunday, January 31 — Day 3

The sun is shining, but for some reason, the roads are still not that clear.  Several cars are still having difficulty climbing the incline out of the Best Western to the main road, which is now melting, but still very snow covered.  Today, we discover that we’ve met one major part of our goals, the Fedora Pony has been created!!  We must thank Robyn Bergeron for creating, Frank, the Fedora Pwnie.  Now mind you, Francis is really her name, but she’s such a tomboy that, well, you just can’t call her that, she doesn’t enjoy it too much.  So we call her Frank.

In addition to our major goal above of a Pony, the FUDCon Live team has done some amazing work.  Yaakov has been working on the FUDCon Live document with Mel, while I was working with the FreeSeeR guys to get their git repo moved over to fedorahosted.org, which is awesome!  I’ve been given commit and sponsor rights to the repo, so we’ll start getting more developers involved right away.  Have a look at the screenshots of the GUI if you’d like to see what FreeSeeR can do.

Jon Stanley and I discussed the possibility of moving fedorahosted.org over to gitolite, and discovered that Jesse Keating has been experimenting with it himself, so this might be something we can do in the near future.  While we currently appear to use gitosis, gitolite gives us the ability to set ACLs on a particular branch, which then can help keep the master branch cleaner.  To help illustrate this, there’s a very great article on nvie.com which explains a git branching system which can really make development and commits very clean and easy to track.  Gitolite can help with this, so I’m going to be experimenting with it this coming week.

I spent the rest of the day writing up the AV Kit wiki page along with Mel.  I stubbed it out, and she added a big section regarding the modules in the AV Kit.  I then rewrote much of that to cover the two styles of AV Kit we’ll be building over the next month or two.  In fact, I plan to have one complete in time for the Marketing FAD in March, where they can use and test it out.  I really hope to get some good feedback on it and improve FreeSeeR some more using these upcoming events as testing grounds.

Currently, I’m on a plane which I didn’t think would take off tonight, headed home for Salt Lake City.  I’m excited to see my sweetie and get some much needed sleep.  As much as I enjoy hanging out with my Fedora friends and working on projects like this, it really wears me out.  I’m ecstatic at the amount of work we accomplished though, and am very appreciative to Paul, Jon, Chris, Denis, Dave, Mel and Max, plus all the folks online for their hard work this weekend.

FUDCon 2.0 is alive and kicking, FUDCon Live will make it just that much better.  Watch for upcoming posts in the near future regarding FreeSeeR and the Fedora AV Kit and how everything is going to work.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags , , , , , , , , , | Permalink | Comment (0)
Community Conferences FAD Fedora screencast Tech

Events Fedora Activity Day: Day 0

January 28, 2010 – 10:51 pm

I’ve been looking forward to this weekend ever since Mel Chua suggested it back in mid-December.  A Fedora Activity Day to revamp how Fedora manages events, deals with events is something that definitely has been needed for some time.  I would say that the Fedora Ambassadors have been doing a bang-up job going from event-to-event talking about Fedora, its values and sharing the SWAG and media they bring along.  But I fear that while they’ve been working toward something valuable, the system is really only tribal knowledge, with a little bit of documentation on our wiki.   The system we have, while it works okay for some, could really be useful if there were a fully documented, managed way of handling each event, whether it be a Fedora run event, like our FUDCons, or not.

It’s clear that Mel has done some incredible work, getting a good number of people to Raleigh this weekend.  I’m looking forward to giving my input and listenting to others as we come up with better ways to handle such things as the EventBox, recording and streaming different presentations, encouraging users to join Fedora and the overall professionalism we portray at each of our events.  There are so many things to get done this weekend, I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out the other side.

As for what I will be doing most of the time.  While I plan to help with the initial brainstorming on FUDCon, external events, etc., I really plan to spend most of my time focusing on improving the way that we record and stream our events.  These events can be as simple as a Local User Group (LUG) meeting to something bigger, like the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE), the Ohio Linux Fest or Pycon, and of course, somewhere in there, is the Fedora FAD and FUDCon.

Now mind you, I can see hundreds of other uses for this concept of recording and streaming.  Including live video podcasts, recording for redistribution, ad-hoc collaboration sessions, troubleshooting a problem with code and many, many more use cases.  However, I think I’m going to try to limit my use cases to those specifically around our events.  Things where we can easily set up our recording equipment and share it with those interested, whether in real-time, or making it available later on to the general public.

The software we plan on using to get the recording and streaming off the ground, is called freeseer.  It’s been put together by some folks who help organize and run FOSSLC.  Andrew and Thanh have been hacking hard lately, altering their code to move from the patent encumbered ffmpeg, to the more open and free gstreamer library.  They’ve also been busy moving from a gui with a command line behind it, to using the python gstreamer bindings.  Much cleaner, much easier to manage and alter in real time.  I’m very excited to see how we can improve freeseer over this weekend.  I actually think we’ll be able to do quite a bit with freeseer to improve external participation in Fedora.

Well, the pilot just announced that we’ll be landing in Raleigh in about 20-30 minutes, and that I need to pack up my electronics.  I’m looking forward to seeing all of my Fedora friends and making an amazing events solution.  I’ll try to keep you updated, with pictures and text, over the next few days.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags , , , , , , | Permalink | Comment (0)
Collaboration Community Conferences Fedora UTOSC

Fedora FAD @ UTOSC 2009: Fedora-Event-Splash (aka FES)

October 8, 2009 – 12:09 am

Even though I’m extremely involved in the organization and management of the Utah Open Source Conference, I’ve got a big project in which I’m interested.  It’s the new concept around Fedora-Event-Splash (or FES, pronounced FEZ).

This project was dreamed up by Mr. Ian Weller and he graciously let me tag along to get the thing going.  At the Utah Open Source Conference tomorrow, we’re going to be digging into a workflow and concept around the items needed to make FES work.  We’ll be hanging out from 12:30-5pm in room 209 while we work on the project, feel free to drop by and ask questions as well.

So if you are interested in FES, come join us at UTOSC or remotely in #fedora-fad on irc.freenode.net

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags , , , | Permalink | Comment (0)
Conferences Fedora Guru Tech

Event: SELF: Day 0.5-2.0

June 15, 2009 – 11:35 am

Hi all,

Now that I am back from the SouthEast LinuxFest at Clemson University, I wanted to report on the fun we had this weekend.  I’m completely wiped out, but it was a very fun and productive weekend.  I wanted to say thanks to the gang at SELF for a job well done.  With only minor issues, they did an amazing job.  They’re first year conference had attendance of 500+, that’s great to hear!  Congratulation on such a great conference fellas!!

As far as my presentation, I was the victim of an apparent overheating of the projector.  After about 20 minutes of fiddling, the staff got it all solved with a portable projector that was waiting in the wings.  This did affect the time on my presentation though, so i wasn’t able to finish everything I wanted.  However, we did a lot of Q&A up front and helped explain some of the four foundations from the Fedora Project and talked a bit about the tools while we were waiting.  I usually show a completed customized liveusb, but ran out of time.  I hope everyone enjoyed it anyway.

The booth area was packed, and every presentation seemed full, it was a great conference.  I went to the after-party, where DualCore rapped for a while, which is always fun.  The rest of the night was drinking, socializing and having an altogether good time.  I recall eating at waffle house around 12:30am and then heading back to the hotel for some much needed sleep.

On Sunday, we spent a good bit of time on the Docs Fedora Activity Day (FAD), quite productive and we made some good goals for F12.  I mostly helped by being an outsider looking in on this process, but did help Lee and Eric to understand packaging as Ian explained how packaging works.  It was great to help the docs guys get the rest of the modules for Zikula into Fedora.  I expect to see some good progress there over the next release period.

All in all, it was an awesome weekend, and if you ever get the chance, Mellow Mushroom pizza is the bomb!  I also took a lot of pictures, they are available up on Flickr.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags , , , , | Permalink | Comment (1)
Ambassadors Collaboration Community Conferences Fedora News Tech

Fedora Activity Day @ SCaLE 7x: Two Exciting Sprints

January 28, 2009 – 9:15 am

Heading over to the Southern California Linux Exposition next month? If you said yes, you are in luck!

The North American Fedora Ambassadors team has obtained a room for the first North American Fedora Activity Day @ SCaLE 7x!

What is a FAD, you ask? Well, let’s try to explain.

It is clear that while FUDCon is a great event, a lot is accomplished there and many successful projects launch or gain much speed there. The problem is that not everyone can attend. For whatever reason, not every Fedora Contributor will get to make it to every FUDCon, it’s just impossible.

Because of this dilemma, the great Max Spevack decided to propose the FAD. A mini-FUDCon of sorts, where, in a smaller forum, a group of folks regionally located could gather, and get a few good things done in a one day session. You might think of code sprints or bar camps as good descriptions of what might happen at a FAD. Still confused? Check out this link for more information.

Any Fedora Contributor can suggest a FAD anywhere, anytime, and it’s even likely to get funding*.  So the next question is, what can be done at a FAD?

To answer this question, I think you’d have to say that anything that benefits Fedora directly or indirectly can be done at a FAD.  Some of the things that have been brought up to my knowledge, starting with the two springs being held at SCaLE 7x.

I’m sure there are a hundred more ideas floating around, feel free to add your FAD to the planning page and get something cool done in your backyard.  If you feel like it as well, drop me a line here with ideas for more FADs around Fedora-land.

Cheers,

Herlo

* – Truthfully, I can only speak for Fedora Ambassadors North America (FAmNA) to say that we’ll do what we can to help fund a FAD near you.

Tags , , , , , | Permalink | Comment (0)
Ambassadors Community Fedora Tech

FAD – NA Planning meeting tonight

September 15, 2008 – 9:58 am

Hi all,

Just another quick reminder that if you are an Ambassador in North America and are wanting to get your input in on what will happen at FAD – NA, come to the meeting tonight.  It will be at 20:00 EDT in #fedora-ambassadors on irc.freenode.net.

Previously, I stated that this was for North American Regional Ambassadors.  I was corrected recently that it could be for any Ambassador with interest, so please feel free to put your $.02.

Sorry for the confusion.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags , , | Permalink | Comment (0)
Community Conferences Fedora Guru Tech

Fedora Ambassador Day, North America

September 14, 2008 – 12:40 pm

Following up with our FAMNA meeting this week, the FAMNA regional ambassadors are meeting tomorrow night at 20:00 EDT in #fedora-ambassadors (irc.freenode.net) to discuss the agenda and events surrounding the Fedora Ambassador Day – North America.  I’m not sure if this is the first FAD – NA, but we’re definitely in a good resurgence with some good folks involved.

In commemoration of this exciting event, which will be held concurrently with the Ohio Linux Fest, October 10-12, I created a badge similar to the one created by Nicu Buculei for FAD EMEA.

I’m excited this looks as good as it does and will show pride for those Fedora Ambassadors in North America who will be joining us at OLF.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags , | Permalink | Comment (0)