BrianPowell’s Blog

This past Saturday I made the trip out to Rochester for the BarCamp being held there. Much to my surprise it was very FOSS oriented and friendly. I got the chance to meet up with a few fellow Ambassadors / Fedorians : Karlie Robinson ; Charles Profitt ; Luke Macken ; and Remy DeCausemaker.

Karlie held a talk on the OLPC and the 4th Grade Math Project which was ulimately the reason I attended the event and there was quite a bit of interest in the project from BarCampers.

Luke and Remy did a talk on civx.us - an Open Source Public Government Information System

I also attended a talk on OpenStreetMap which I found quite interesting.

Due to a previous commitment I was unable to stay for the entire event but I am plan on and look forward to attending the next event.

Barcamp Day!!!

Below is a run down of the sessions I attended.

State of the Wiki / Docs project presented by Ian Weller and Karsten Wade. - This session went over the needs for wiki in regards to categories, namespaces etc as well as how the community can help out with this. The Docs presentation covered possible CRM solutions that can be used.

SVirt presented by Dan Walsh - This session was very enlightening as I expected it would be. It covered some of the issues of with SELinux using Xen virtualization and how it can be resolved using KVM and SELinux.

Puppet presented by Jeroen Van Meeuwen - This session went over the general concept of puppet as well as some advanced configuration. I personally plan on implementing the use of puppet at a few of my client sites now that I understand it much better.

Fedora Cloud presented by Mike McGrath - This session covered the concept of the cloud being built by Fedora. The whole concept is utilizing ovirt. Currently this is a work in progress but should be ready to deploy shortly.

KVM presented by Sunny Dubey - This session was of particular interest to me as I am currently interested in migrating some of my clients over from Xen virtualization to KVM. The presentation covered real use cases as well as why KVM is a better solution than some other well-known virtualization solutions. One of the big topics discussed was KVM’s lack of a gui interface for management and the importance of having one available as soon as possible. Whether this neede GUI end up being ovirt or another solution we will have to wait and see what if anything the community may come up with.

FUDPub was a fun as expected.

Stay tuned for more tomorrow.

The NA Ambassadors completed the creation of the AmbassadorKits. Those that already requested them before they were available I will be shipping them out on Monday at the latest.

We also spent some time building Media Kits which are now at the registration table and will be stocked with F10 Media.

Discussions in regards to Mentoring new Fedora Project sign-ups as well as focusing on participation and contributors.

A few of us were invited to a “roundtable discussion” which was really cool. I didnt fully realize the impact that the NA Ambassadors work has had throughout the Fedora Project this past year until it was brought up during this discussion and I am sure I speak for all of the NA Ambassadors I am really excited about growing and continuing this for 2009 and beyond.

After dinner a few of us attempted to get a jump on installing Moksha to see if we can utilize it for Event Splash Page.

I have had a pretty busy past week so please forgive me if I am a little late in reporting these.

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On Monday December 8th, 2008 I gave a Fedora presentation at ITT Technical Institute in Harrisburg PA to 2 different groups of students throughout the day (the overall total was around 55 or 60). The entire group consisted of Multi-Media, Programming, Criminal Justice and Networking students. ITT Technical Institute already is utilizing Fedora in their Networking curriculum (currently Fedora 8). My presentation was geared mainly towards how students could build experience and a work portfolio while going to school by contributing to Fedora as well as some of the new features of F10 and I also did a small presentation on the XO and OLPC program.

The presentation was well received in fact I was invited by the IT Chair to do another presentation in the upcoming Spring semester.

I collected quite a number of email addresses of interested students that I am currently following up with on becoming possible contributors.

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This past weekend I held a Fedora F10 Release Party and InstallFest with the WNYLug (http://wnylug.org). I presented to the group (around 23) about the Fedora Project and how they could join to become contributors. During the event I created quite a few F10 Live-USB keys and assisted with new installations of F10 on laptops and desktop that were brought in by the attendees and any other questions that they had with existing installations.

Special thanks to the WNYLug (who has only been in existence since Oct 2008) for making this event a huge success and helping out with burning install media and live-cd’s.

Pics from this event will be posted shortly on the WNYlug site (http://wnylug.org)

This coming weekend marks the start of the Fedora IRC Classroom. What the heck is that you say!? Think of it as an online training class utilizing IRC.

This weekend has topics such as :

• SELinux Basics
• Firewall Basics
• Intro to Bugzilla
• Creating a Fedora Remix
• Beginners guide to getting involved
• Packaging
• Configuration Management using Puppet.

If any of the above is of interest, I encourage you check out the details, class dates and times located here

If you are interested in a topic not listed above, please take a moment and add it to the growing “Suggest a Class” list at the bottom of the page https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/IRC/Classroom

If you spot a topic in the “Suggest a Class” list or have another not listed, that you know like the back of your hand, and wish to contribute and share that knowledge with to others, please sign yourself up for a future classroom time slot. There is still one time slot left for this coming weekend.

I want to thank all of the volunteers who already signed up to teach a class this coming weekend without you this initiative would not have gotten off the ground.