Tag Archives: Fedora

Ambassadors Community Conferences Fedora Life Tech

Following a theme: Help build a better birdhouse

February 27, 2011 – 10:00 am
I originally wrote this post as a comment responese to Robyn’s ‘We might be giants‘ article, but decided it needed more.  Please take a moment and read this article, I think it is very poignant and valuable to everyone.

I’m very happy to read this article. I’ve never really thought about the lyrics to the song, but it makes perfect sense. If I may, I’d take this concept a bit further, focusing on what is important to you in ‘life’. In fact, replacing almost every instance of ‘Fedora’ with life also works.

What I mean by this, is find that passion, find that joy, find that night light that makes you happy in ‘life’. I’ve never been good at metaphors like this, but I am going to be using this one, now.

I hope that every Fedora contributor thinks about what you have written and takes to their hearts the value of Red Hat and the Fedora Project. I truly believe in this community and am truly blessed to have so many amazing and awesome friends here.

For me, what makes me happy in life, beyond my family time and my kids, is the Fedora Project.  I am not kidding, I really mean that from the bottom of my heart.  The Fedora Project has given me more than I have contributed, been my mentor in many places and given me a career I wouldn’t have otherwise.  I will always be grateful to my friends who got me involved with this amazing people.

I’ve been doing a bit of navel gazing lately.  As I depart SCaLE later today, I have been thinking about what reasons I work in the Fedora Project. I think a lot of us didn’t get into Fedora for altruistic reasons, but after a while, they are the reasons to stay.  Why do you stay?

I would like to invite everyone else to think in this way.  Come up with some sort of project or activity that takes a few hours or a few weeks and make a plan.  Share your plan, invite your friends to help make a better birdhouse!

Cheers,

Clint

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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!

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Fedora Passion Tech

What have I been up to lately? Chasing my own tail!

February 9, 2011 – 10:41 am

Lately, I’ve feel like I’m very busy trying to become busy

It’s been a bit of a roller-coaster ride, and so far, being an independent consultant has been very fruitful for me.  Until mid-January, I was as busy as I ever wanted, sometimes too busy.  But time and time again, I’ve been reminded that there will be leaner times for me and Purple Atom, my new training and consulting start-up.

So far, it’s just me and a couple contractors who I have known for some time that I have used for a couple small jobs.  But it seems the work has slowed for now.  While I know it will be back in a month or so, I’ve been trying to land more work, that’s a bit like chasing one’s own tail.

As I grow my business, I’ve wanted to keep a steady income and be able to do the gigs I’ve wanted to do.  Mind you, I’m in no world of hurt monetarily, it’s just interesting to see my first real lull.  While I have a couple on-going contracts, I’ve not had any training gigs in almost a month.  And I have to say, it is nice and disconcerting at the same time.

I find myself doing a little each day to locate a new client, but most of my day is spent on projects I’ve previously ignored.  This is a good thing for my skillset and for the Fedora Project, since that’s where most of the work is going each day.  I’m the one giving me work, and I’m the one completing the work I’ve given myself.

It has been fun and useful

In late January, Jennifer and I took our little AJ to Tempe, Arizona.  I was heading there for the annual FUDCon conference, and Jennifer took AJ over to meet her extended family.  We spent eight (8) days travelling.  We travelled for two days, visited the Grand Canyon along the way.  Spent four (4) days in Tempe visiting family and attending FUDCon.  Our return over two days took us by the Hoover Dam and we stayed a night at the Luxor in Las Vegas.

When we returned, I’ve started to get into a routine of heading over to the coffee shop and working on one project or another.  Much of my time has been spent on personal projects.  I’m working on my own development project, PyCamps.  I’ve also worked on fpaste-server and the SCaLE FAD.

I also spent basically a whole day sorting out honeymoon plans.  Yes, that’s right, I’m getting married to Jennifer on May 13, 2011.  I’m really only in charge of paying for things, but since I’m in charge, we’re doing a real honeymoon too!

The future

Purple Atom is going well, but I want it to get to the vision I have for it.  I have some good partnerships for training and I love that part of my business.  The consulting part, however, I’d like to pare down and focus on helping small-to-medium sized companies build a better infrastructure.  There is much, much more to come about this, so if it interests you, stay tuned…

I know that in the next month, business will pick up with or without my pursuing other work. I’d like to think that I have the chops for this Entrepreneur thing, so I’m out looking for work.  If you know of anyone who is looking for a super-awesome-system-admin or needs help building or retooling an infrastructure, please contact me, leave me a comment, etc.

Cheers,

Herlo

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Ambassadors Community Conferences Fedora Networking Tech Tools

On wireless and media, FUDCon Tempe configuration begins

January 28, 2011 – 11:43 am

Today, I’m sitting around the lobby at the fabulous Courtyard Marriott after a nice morning of listening to the fire alarm tests.  It seems silly to me that anyone would allow the fire alarm to go off at 7:30 in the $%^&* morning at a hotel!  Come on people, do the tests in the afternoon.  The good part, however, is that the train right next to our room is no big deal and I slept right through the horns and vibrations.  Even our 7 month-old slept through the night, YAY!

Today I’m heading over to the Brickyard Artisan Courtyard to test out the wireless access and make sure proper ports are open.  I’m certain to run into issues, but I’m planning on making sure ssh is open for sure.  If you have a particular port you want opened, please comment here or ping ‘herlo’ in irc before noon MST.

I’m also in charge of printing the Fedora Media and have brought a ton for FUDCon attendees.  Watch for the media to be out near the registration tables and take a copy or three.  I’m sure your friends back at home would love for you to share the love, so make sure you get plenty!

I’m ready for FUDCon Tempe, are you!?

Cheers,

Herlo

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Community Conferences Fedora Games Google Life News Passion Tech

FUDCon Tempe 2011, as it happens, I’m on my way!

January 27, 2011 – 12:39 am

It’s strange, odd even.  I’m not quite sure how to react, but it is very weird to me.

FUDCon Tempe 2011 is here in just a few short days.  Some of the people I would expect to attend, aren’t going to be at FUDCon this year.  I am going to miss their presence immensely.

  • It’s the first FUDCon without the master of karaoke, Greg DeKoenigsberg.  He’ll be missing out on the warm weather and friendly collaboration for sure.
  • I know my good friend, David Nalley isn’t going to make it either. I have been at so many Fedora events with him, it will sure be a bit lacking without his late nights and overall good nature.
  • I’m also saddened to hear that Karsten Wade won’t be able to attend, he will surely be missed with his community insight and valuable opinions.

There are others, in fact, who I know probably would like to come.  These specific instances stood out to me because I think of them as amazing contributors.  Their consistent attendance at events like FUDCon have encouraged me to return year after year to events I now love. Mind you, the above folks I mentioned aren’t missing from Fedora overall.  In fact, I know that each of them and many more who can’t make FUDCon this coming weekend in person can still participate and contribute from afar (and will likely do so).

I see a new generation of contributor helping to grow Fedora into a grand new direction.  I’m interested in seeing where this road will take us, and I think that’s the joy.  With each new contributor in a community like Fedora, we continue down the path of the best of free and open source software, but we can meander into realms we had never thought of before.  This is what excites me!

Like I said, I’m on my way to FUDCon Tempe for what is no doubt going to be an awesome event. Right now, I am sitting in my hotel in Flagstaff, Arizona.  A mere 151 miles, about 2 hours at 75mph, from the Courtyard in Tempe, Arizona, where most of our attendees will stay for four days.  I should easily be there by early afternoon tomorrow.

Mind you, this trip was planned for me to be eight days, two travel days to and from Salt Lake City.  Just this afternoon, we spent about 3.5 hours at the amazing Grand Canyon National Park.  If you get a chance to visit this amazing natural canyon, at 10 miles across, do it!  Our little family had a great time seeing the sights and riding the buses around.  By the way, dusk is really amazing at the park, don’t miss that either.

The FUDCon planning committee has crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s.  Thanks to sponsors like Google, Rackspace, and of course our hosts, Arizona State University, we get to have food and fun while working toward our common goal.  Thanks to all who put in such hard work to make this event rock!

See you all in just a few days!

Cheers,

Herlo

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Community Fedora Guru News Tech

News: Fedora 13 Beta Released!!

April 13, 2010 – 9:29 am

Get yours today!!

From the announcement by Jesse Keating:

The countdown is on: Fedora 13, "Goddard," is set to launch in mid-May.
Fedora is the leading edge, free and open source operating system that
continues to deliver innovative features to users worldwide, with a new
release every six months.

But wait! What's that? You can't wait a whole month to try out the
latest and greatest in Fedora's leading-edge technologies? You want to
be the first to see what's new? Well, you're in luck. The Fedora 13 Beta
release is available NOW. Hop on board and take a tour of the rocking
new features.

Get it here!!

I’m downloading the LiveCD version right now to try out on my laptop.  Consider helping out by testing the new Fedora Beta as well.

Cheers,
Herlo

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/announce/2010-April/002787.html
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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

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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

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News: Fedora 12 is NOW AVAILABLE!!

November 19, 2009 – 10:31 am

I’ve been running Fedora 12 for about a month now (Beta first, Alpha before that).  It’s the best Fedora to date.

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!!

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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

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