Sexy Sexy Penguins

Recently, I’ve been plagued with trying to come up with an organizational model for the Utah Open Source Foundation and it’s relationship to the Utah Open Source Conference.  This is in addition to the new Non-Profit structure we’re building.

To that end, I created a very shabby hierarchical structure which I passed around a week ago at the Core Team after conference dinner.  It went over okay, but people had a lot of questions about how the structure was organized and what not.

Organizing My Thoughts is Hard!

I didn’t know what exactly to do.  As it is, I’ve never been an integral part of an organization before like this one.  Nor have I ever created organizational charts that were very well done.  I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon.  But, something amazing did happen in the span between last Friday and today, that was VYM, or View Your Mind.

When a “Mind Map” was first suggested to me by my buddy Doran Barton, I thought “well, I’ll look into that later”.  However, the more I kept trying to cram jobs into places they didn’t go, the more I got frustrated that there wasn’t a good application to accommodate the structure I was trying to build.

VYM is an application that helps get your thoughts out onto a structure.  It lets you move it around quickly and easily and even associate pictures and notes where applicable.  The problem for me was understanding how to use VYM in an environment I already knew and UTOS was not the right place!

The Fedora Project “Mind Map”

It turns out that a lot of people always wonder how the Fedora Project is structured, where the pieces go and who, what, where and how the project is put together.  Because I could at least see all the pieces, I decided that would be a good place to start.  While it’s not complete by any means, I present to you the Fedora Project VYM “Mind Map”.  From VYM, one can create pdf, png and other output sources, so I created a pdf as well

Contribute!

I’d like to see the Fedora Community take this up and add many pieces to it as it grows and builds into something more than I could make.  It’s fairly simple to add pieces as well.  You can create separate maps which can be integrated into the larger map.  Or, since the format is a zip file (essentially) with an xml definition file, I believe patches could work.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: Fedora, structure, utos, UTOSC

In just under 3 hours, I’ll be giving my presentation on SELinux Basics.  There are many other great presentations today as well.  The schedule is available at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/IRC/Classroom

Come by #fedora-classroom irc channel (on irc.freenode.net) today at 20:00 UTC (3:00pm EST for the timezone challenged)

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: classroom, educate, Fedora, irc, learn

As of this afternoon, between myself and Steven Moix, it appears that almost all of the Fedora 10 Tour will be ready for the upcoming release.  Check it out for yourself, we’re only missing the release summary which should be written very soon.

Also, I should note that the countdown has already started:

Also, F10 Preview came out yesterday during the election so nobody probably noticed.  Get yours today!

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: f10, Fedora, prerelease, tour

Obviously, my distro is Fedora, but for those of you who might choose something else, let’s play along.

This meme comes from Valent Turkovic’s blog post a few days ago, so I thought I’d share mine.

$ su -c 'yum install nautilus-open-terminal'

This enables me to right click on the desktop and click ‘Open in Terminal’. This is much better than choosing ‘Applications -> System Tools -> Terminal’, which in my opinion is a big pain in the ass!

While it used to open in the user’s home directory, now it opens in their Desktop.  Not sure of the benefit for that, but I’m glad it’s still around.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: Fedora, first thing to do, tips

Want to learn a new tool within Fedora?  Interested in getting a better hold on your skillset?  Want to share with others something you’ve learned?  Let us know at the newly formed Fedora Classroom.

As part of the marketing team meeting this week, Kevin Fenzi brought up the Fedora-Classroom.  While #fedora serves a good purpose of troubleshooting, there’s more people can learn with some IRC tutorials.

I will be doing the first session on SELinux Basics, and there are other topics to fit those from beginner to advanced Fedora user.

From the email to the fedora-list:

I’m happy to announce that next weekend we will be opening up the #fedora-classroom irc channel (on irc.freenode.net) for some classroom sessions.

These sessions are intended to be short (30min to an hour) sessions on the IRC network where you can learn about a specific Fedora related topic.

Please see: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/IRC/Classroom to look at what topics will offered next week, what times they will be offered, suggest topics or sign up to teach a session yourself!

Hope to see lots of folks there.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: classroom, educate, Fedora, irc, learn

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:

• Ambassadors/EventBox - The main EventBox page, inspired by the GNOME Foundation.
• FedoraEvents#North_America_Q4 - Request your EventBox for Q4 in North America.
• Ambassadors/EventBox/NA/West - A list of the static contents of the EventBox.  This doesn’t include Media or T-shirts, although they may be inside.
• Ambassadors/EventBox/Details - The travel history of the EventBoxen.  Currently, only the box from the West exists.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: Ambassadors, eventbox, Fedora

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

Tags: f10, Fedora, gnome-do, rawhide, screencast

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

Tags: fas, Fedora, fedora talk, twinkle

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

Tags: 2008, Ambassadors, fadna, Fedora

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

Tags: Ambassadors, fadna, Fedora, ohiolinux, shirts