Posts published in “Community”

SCALE 13x, Day 2: Knock on Wood

By Larry Cafiero on February 22, 2015 |

There’s a scene in the movie “Apollo 13” where astronaut Jim Lovell (played by Tom Hanks) is excitedly rushing through the house after finding out he’s been picked to go to the moon on Apollo 13. His wife asks, “Why 13?” “It comes after 12,” Lovell replies without missing a beat.

For all the angst and trepidation that accompanied the fact that this is “unlucky” number 13 in the series of Southern California Linux Expo conferences, the show has gone forward in a relatively painless manner with only run-of-the-mill minor snags here and there.

Knock on wood. Throw table salt over your shoulder.

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

SCALE 13x, Day 1: Oh, the Humanity!

SCALE 13x, Day 1: Oh, the Humanity!

By Larry Cafiero on February 21, 2015 |

Community, News and Operating Systems

What a difference 30 minutes makes: Early Friday morning — 8 a.m. is early Friday morning for most — the registration area for SCALE 13x was relatively quiet and lightly populated with folks checking in, ready for a day of SCALE 13x. By 8:30, the line was around the lobby and down the hall.

Attendance for SCALE looks like it may break previous records. Steve Bibayoff, who works the Free Software Foundation booth, asked me Friday evening if his badge number was any indication of how many people have registered so far.

His badge number is a number just south of 3100; by a factor of less than 10.

Larry Cafiero

SCALE 13x Day 0: Exceeding Expectations

SCALE 13x Day 0: Exceeding Expectations

By Larry Cafiero on February 20, 2015 |

Community, News and Operating Systems

It was a first for the Southern California Linux Expo — a midweek start on Thursday for SCALE 13x, and those of us on the SCALE Team did not know what to expect. The day was composed of a variety of sessions — an all-day Intro to Chef, Puppet Labs held its separate-registration Puppet Camp LA, openSUSE held its mini-summit, PostgreSQL held the first of its two-day PostgreSQL days, Fedora held its Fedora Activity Day, and an all-day Apache session.

Frankly, we weren’t disappointed.

Larry Cafiero

Getting Things Started at SCALE 13x

By Larry Cafiero on February 19, 2015 |

Community, News and Operating Systems

Sure, it’s placid now, but Thursday at 8, this room is going to be buzzing.

As midnight Wednesday becomes Thursday morning, SCALE Team members continue to put in hours, doing everything from wiring the rooms to stuffing swag bags, getting ready for 8 a.m. Thursday morning, when registration opens. Once that happens, the show is on the clock and all the work that those on the SCALE Team have put in so far — the long hours of work prior to, and leading up to, the show — and the work that the team puts in during the course of the show becomes the cornucopia enjoyed by the attendees.

Larry Cafiero

Visit With a Little Boy

Visit With a Little Boy

By Ken Starks on February 17, 2015 |

Business and Community

A while back, my globe trotting niece Niki Starks made the drive out to our place in Taylor. We spent most of the afternoon categorizing some of the old family pictures I had haphazardly thrown into a box. There were a lot of pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. Pictures of my great grandmother, a woman I barely remember from my childhood.

I remember, at that moment, thinking just how old she looked, and she was old…94 years old. I remember attending her funeral as a young boy. My family has the custom of open casket funerals. Me? I think that practice is grotesque, but that’s just me. I’d rather my last mental image of a person be one of laughing and joy. I remember looking down on my great grandmother’s corpse and thinking she looked better laying there dead than she did the last time I saw her alive.

And that’s the thing…

The things we remember and the way we remember them. The four hours that Niki and I spent at our dining room table was probably the most important four hours I’ll spend for the rest of my life.

Often, I think of myself as a 61 year old orphan. Silly really…thinking of yourself like that when you are in your 60s. What solidifies that in my mind is that fact that I am the only one left alive in my direct family.

Both my parents died from various cancers and heart/liver disease. That didn’t take a psychic to see coming, given they both smoked and drank like they were in training for an Olympic event. My kid brother died in a nasty head-on truck wreck at 3:44 in the morning less than a mile from his home. I’m fairly sure that’s the time he died, because that’s the time the cracked and bent face of his watch bore when it was given to me. My sister dropped from sight shortly after receiving her share of our brother’s estate. Addicted to heroin and crack cocaine, there’s little doubt why she cannot be found. Odds favored her dying in an alley somewhere or in a cheap motel room that one of her “friends” paid for. I am still scouring the Internet for her death certificate. My older half brother Bill, Niki’s dad…he died in the hospital from heart failure. He was my boyhood hero.

Ken Starks

Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue

linuxlock.blogspot.com/

SCALE 13x: My Dance Card

By Larry Cafiero on February 16, 2015 |

Community, News and Operating Systems

My first Southern California Linux Expo was SCALE 7x, where I was a booth dude for the Fedora Project. The reason I bring this up…

Crossing Our Fingers for a Lucky SCALE 13x

By Larry Cafiero on February 11, 2015 |

Community and News

It’s been one of those years, and with 2015 being the 13th year for the Southern California Linux Expo — hence SCALE 13x — you might expect that superstition would be rearing its ugly head.

I can say that, knock on wood, we have already had what I hope is going to be the only “black-cat-walking-under-the-ladder” glitch-of-the-show moment a couple of weeks ago when the idiot serving as the publicity chair — okay, that would be me — pulled the wrong list of speakers (the ones not chosen) to start doing speaker interviews with the Publicity Team. Thankfully, I found the error before any interviews were done, but it was a considerable amount of orchestrated work that was thrown out the window and redone with the right list.

Larry Cafiero

Radio Shack’s a Floater, Another RC for Bodhi & Scaling SCALE

By Christine Hall on February 6, 2015 |

Business, Community, Distros, News and Operating Systems

FOSS Week in Review

With Larry Cafiero getting ready for SCALE, that left me with the job of doing this Week in Review. Happy to do it.

Radio Shack files for bankrupcy

This isn’t a FOSS story exactly, but I’m sure there’s hardly a FOSSer of a certain age who didn’t spend too many hours at a Radio Shack, back when the stores were for electronic hobbyists. Indeed, many of us saw our first consumer computers at Radio Shack, with programs loaded and data saved to a manual cassette recorder.

Yup, those were the days.

Anyway, Radio Shack as we knew it has already been gone for years, as in recent times the chain has attempted to redefine itself as a place to buy mobile devices and data plans, now that we no longer fix electronic stuff by replacing resistors, capacitors, selenium rectifiers and the like.

The phone biz hasn’t worked out too well, so yesterday the company filed Chapter 11. The company has worked out a deal with its largest creditor, Sprint, which will take over many of Radio Shack’s stores, although the brand will live on in a co-branding arrangement with Sprint. Many Radio Shack locations are slated to close completely.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

FOSSForce.com

Under the SCALE Big Top

Under the SCALE Big Top

By Larry Cafiero on February 4, 2015 |

Business, Community, News and Software

As we get closer to the Southern California Linux Expo — SCALE 13x for those of you keeping score at home — it bears mentioning that the largest community-run Linux/FOSS show in North America has grown to host a lot of other sub-events during the course of the four-day expo.

In years past, Ubuntu, Fedora, PostgreSQL and Chef held their own sessions at SCALE — Ubucon, Fedora Activity Day, PostgreSQL Days and Intro to Chef respectively — and they’ll be back this year. Highlighting the “event within an event” lineup at SCALE 13x are also a few others.

Most prominently, Puppet Labs is holding its Puppet Camp at SCALE 13x on Thursday, February 19. Puppet Camps are one-day, regional events held around the world for people who are currently using or interested in using Puppet. Attendees have the opportunity to talk to a diverse group of Puppet users, benefit from presentations delivered by prominent community members, share experiences, and discuss potential implementations of Puppet with their peers. There is a separate registration for this all-day event, and more information can be found at the link above.

Larry Cafiero

1:31 A.M. Doesn’t Care Who You Are…

1:31 A.M. Doesn’t Care Who You Are…

By Ken Starks on February 3, 2015 |

Community

Ken Is Back!

Years ago I learned something from my social psychology professor, but it took me a long time to grasp the concept, not to mention putting it to use in my life. I say I learned it. Mostly, however, I only remembered it. Understanding it was a whole new game. A game that lasted 31 years.

“Butcher, baker, candlestick maker, it doesn’t matter. Gaining your sense of self, derived from what you do professionally, will ultimately end badly for you. Without exception and without mercy.”

— Professor John Sellers, Northern Arizona Junior college.

Wow…really? How do you not do that, when the prevailing questions asked upon meeting is often, “So hey there Ken, what do you do for a living?” The question is so pervasive that it seems to echo over and over throughout every day. “What do you do for a living…What do you do for a living?…What do you do for a living?” And convention dictates that the next 10-15 minutes of conversation gets intertwined around the answer.

What took me so long to understand is that I am not what I do. What I do only allows me to live well enough to be who I really am.

Ken Starks

linuxlock.blogspot.com/

Welcome the New Breed of Linux Users

Welcome the New Breed of Linux Users

By Christine Hall on February 2, 2015 |

Community and Operating Systems

Without having a basic knowledge of the inner workings of the internal combustion engine, people drive cars to work every day. Some, in fact, are excellent drivers. Likewise, people watch television and successfully listen to the radio without having a clear understanding of the science behind “over the air” broadcasting. To benefit from wearing corrective lenses it’s not necessary to be an optometrist. It doesn’t take a master electrician to change a light bulb.

But nobody should use a computer without being a master programmer, which is the gospel-according-to-many, especially those who post on Linux forums.

Some people don’t like any changes made to Linux user space which makes the operating system easier to use or configure for casual users. They would rather the user be befuddled and helpless, because according to them, people who don’t know how to open a terminal and edit a configuration file in Emacs have no business sitting at a computer keyboard for any purpose.

These people moan about Linux being taken over by everyday computer users who know little or nothing about FOSS and who mainly want a computer to get work done, exchange emails, watch videos and visit with friends on social sites. OMG, we’re talking ordinary folks who figure they don’t need to know how sausage is made in order to have some for breakfast, and they’re now using Linux without a clue as to how it’s made either.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com