Beats so fresh they drop from the trees.

I forgot to mention in my last post that the after-party entertainment at Ohio Linux Fest was provided by none other than Dual Core. Clint tells me that these guys freestyled a Fedora rap at their table yesterday afternoon that at least two different people caught on tape. If any of those videographers are reading this, or if you might know the guys who taped it, please get in touch! I don’t necessarily want to post it, but for the love of all that’s good and holy, I’ve got to hear it for myself.

Ohio Linux Fest 2008.

Started today early with epically bad hotel coffee and a courteous curbside pickup by Jeffrey Tadlock. We drove over to the Convention Center and started setup of the Fedora booth early. We were in a great location, right by the entrance to the hall. We quickly set up a metric ton of media, shirts, buttons, and stickers, some OLPC XO laptops, and a modern high-octane laptop running Fedora 9.

We were soon joined by many other Ambassadors — David Nalley, Pascal Calarco, Clint Savage, Brian Powell, Ben Williams and others. Clint had the great idea of taking our banner and putting it on the wall beside the booth. Later we used it to great effect, taking photos of many users who stopped by to find out about Fedora and stayed on to find out about contributing. I fully expect you’ll see a lot of these photos on this very planet feed soon enough.

There was really no time to catch talks, because between meeting with community and commercial folks, and helping at the booth, the day was pretty full. The Ambassadors did a great job talking about Fedora’s contributions to the FOSS world and our work encouraging upstream growth, features, and problem-solving. A young man named Seth stopped by to talk about multi-seat and multi-head progress in Linux, and I passed on Chris Tyler’s name as someone keenly interested in this subject. Could we have the makings of a SIG? I talked to folks about OLPC and how to develop for Sugar, either through Fedora’s OLPC list. I listened to and answered questions about the Fedora mission and philosophy, about hardware compatibility, and about how to get involved.

I also talked to a couple hardware folks regrding some more Red Hattish matters. There’s a chance that some of those conversations could lead to some pleasant side effects for Fedora, so it was well worth the time no matter which color headwear I had on.

I was thrilled that so many of the non-vendor people I met, though, were interested in how to contribute something to free software. We held a small BoF in the afternoon where I met, among other people, Klaatu, one of the hosts of the new and revamped Fedora Reloaded podcast. We agreed to get together at some point in the near future for an interview or other appearance on the podcast. He made a joke about the podcast now being “FPL approved” but really, the only point is that he and his cohost Skirlet took it upon themselves to step up and do something. Great work, guys!

After the BoF I also got to do an interview with podcaster David Yates of Lotta Linux Links fame, which should show up some time next week. Soon afterward the day was over and it was time to pack up the booth. We scooted upstairs to catch the closing speech by Bethlynn Eicher, the mastermind behind the OhioLF conference, and Jono Bacon who was his normal entertaining self.

After the speech we dropped our stuff off and had a superb dinner at The Happy Greek, thanks to Brian Pepple’s good recommendation. Some of the guys headed back to the after-party; I have an early flight so I went back to the hotel to catch some shut-eye. An earlyish flight on Sunday means I have a 6:30 wakeup call, and unfortunately will miss the FADNA event — if I’m lucky, though, I’ll be back in town with enough time to go visit Da Momz who’s still recuperating from her back surgery in a full-time rehab facility.

Somewhere around 1,000 people showed up for Ohio Linux Fest, some driving for hours, despite crazy fuel costs and uncertain economic times, to share the joy of free software. (And some good drinks at the after-party, I’m sure.) It was a great event and I’m happy to have had a chance to meet our new North American community superheroes. Thanks to all these guys for putting together a fantastic booth, and giving Fedora excellent visibility here. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone here again next year!

Fedora at Ohio Linux Fest, Day 0.

All my travel on Friday went smoothly — the only troublesome part at all was driving on the DC Beltway where even after 10:30 in the morning, traffic was stacked up around I-66 on my way to the Dulles Toll Road. This is a short trip, so once I got to the airport, with no bags to check, I whisked right to the gate and proceeded to enjoy the wirelessness Dulles provides its busy travelers. Hooray for git, because I did a little bit of work on some old Docs toolchain material — although in this case, “work” meant silly fiddling with how to get GNU make and rpm to cooperatively evaluate some specfile innards. I wasn’t airborne for more than 55 minutes, so the electronics-free periods of takeoff and landing left about four and a half minutes of actual work time.

When I arrived, I already had a voicemail from Jon Stanley, who was having lunch with Brian Pepple just a little ways from the airport. They offered to swing by and pick me up and I gladly accepted. We took a brief tour of the theater district in Columbus, which is quite nice, and I got to my hotel with a couple hours to kill — easy enough, since I needed to catch up on my email for the day.

Last night Daddy Shadowman bought dinner for a group of the North American Ambassadors who’ve come out to help represent Fedora at Ohio Linux Fest. We had a great time at Barley’s, the venue chosen by the event for the before-party. The food was great, the company more so — and the house beers were all extremely good too! I ran into Jono and talked with him a while about his travel schedule, the financial and real estate markets, and various biological clocks. Also, my friends James and Aaron from FredLUG made it too, fresh from the road from Virginia. Sweet!

This morning I’m meeting Jeffrey Tadlock to help with booth setup, and preparing to have a great day at the Ohio Linux Fest! I’m not sure what the wifi connectivity will be there — if I heard Brian right last night, possibly nonexistent — but I’ll post again when I can.

How I’ve missed your convoluted way of speaking.

Today I’m at the Red Hat Government Users and Developers Conference in Washington, D.C. As one would expect, the Ronald Reagan Trade Building has completely failed to deliver a working wireless connection without severely cracking the folds of my wallet. And of course I can’t live without connectivity, so here I am, $20 lighter.

I did get to say hello and have a quick conversation with Michael Tiemann before his opening keynote. But aside from that, a lot of people here today are not talking about “Should we?” or “Why?”, but rather, “How, and how fast?” The change of administration in the White House (whoever wins), coupled with uncertainty about budget futures given the current national financial crisis, are leading a lot of people to look at the “gateway drug” of open source — how does my agency spend less and achieve more with our IT dollars? And of course, Red Hat is there to show the way. Now it’s all about federal agencies having the foresight and courage to take the path out of darkness.

Banishing frowns.

I know I’ve talked about Clare & the Reasons here before, but this is so worth seeing, if only to get rid of your personal bad case of the Mondays (evil Flash required, sorry):

Everybody loves rehab.

I’ve been a little scarce after hours recently because of some family matters here in Virginia. My mom has had progressively worsening back problems for a while now, and this week she had another surgery, just a few weeks following the previous one. Right now she’s in a full-time rehab facility (not a nursing home), where she’s recuperating and doing exercises that will get her back to the point she can walk effectively again. She’s recovering very well thus far, a far cry from earlier this week, when she was losing the ability to actually move her lower extremities — thanks to all those who sent nice thoughts her way, they’re much appreciated!

So when she gets home, I’ll likely be working from her home part-time. If you find my presence is a little reduced, it’s probably because her router isn’t configured quite like mine (nor can it be, since it’s not an open model like my Linksys WRT54GL). I’m tending to eschew IRC just a bit recently so I can get a lot of my other communications moving. But I should be around some this weekend as I work on Docs tasks a bit. Bear with me as I circumnavigate the choppy waters of Someone Else’s Internet Connection!

I’m actually headed over to the rehab facility now to hang out with mom for a bit — back later.

Calendar blues.

With the recent slippage in the Fedora 10 Beta release phase, we’re at a November 25 release for the final Fedora 10 release.

Part of the slippage is obviously due to the August intrusion — we lost about three weeks due to all the infrastructure rebuilding that had to take place. As I’ve said before, the community working on those rebuilds did a magnificent job, and our release engineering team has come back up to speed as quickly as possible. Therefore, we’re really only two weeks off a “normal” schedule, not counting that three week period of lost time. The actual lost time is not a reflection on anyone’s efforts — it’s phenomenal it wasn’t longer.

Here’s the tricky part, though. If we have any further slippage in the release cycle, we’re looking at a minimum of a two-week slip in GA, because of the USA Thanksgiving holiday on November 27. There simply wouldn’t be time enough to get composes done and shipped to mirrors for a December 2 release, so we’d then be at December 9. Obviously no one is aiming for this, since we like to make the dates when we can.

So why am I writing here about the slip? Well, in large part because it impacts on FUDCon planning, which is something I’m handling for the North American F11 powwow. Had we settled on December 5-7 for FUDCon F11 Boston already, we’d be looking at a very strange situation if the GA does slip to December 9. Having FUDCon for the next release before the current one’s out the door? Hm, that would be weird all right. Even a December 12-14 FUDCon might be optimistic. So for right now, we’re targeting January 9-11, 2009 for FUDCon F11 Boston.

To make things more complicated. I’m working with a few friends to make this FUDCon a little special. I don’t want to blow the horn quite yet, but it’s definitely timely and will excite a lot of people. But the coordination effort is definitely higher than your average event!

And on top of all this, we still have another strange issue to resolve — a Fedora 11 Alpha freeze of January 13, meaning FUDCon would come a little late in the cycle. I’ve raised this schedule conundrum on the rel-eng list, but wanted to give the wider community a chance to ponder it too. Cutting to the chase: we need to consider the schdule for Fedora 11 in the context of these other slips, and the time we need to accomplish some of the technical features and community enablers that won’t quite make it to F10.

The past is prologue, indeed.

Back in late 2006, we in Fedora land were already looking toward a future where anyone could draw bits out of Fedora and make what matters to them. By the time Fedora 7 came around in May 2007, we were already talking about the remix.

The “remix” term has a long and colorful history that’s decades old, as the art of producing them passed down from the music industry, to professional DJ’s, to independent members of the overall free culture movement. In a way, the term itself, and the emergence of the “remix culture,” shows how the concept of re-using and building on knowledge and art has become a major game-changing concept around the globe.

Fedora has always embraced the free software and culture movements, so with tools like pungi, livecd-tools, and revisor, our developer community made it easy for their fellow community members to disassemble and reform Fedora like Voltron. Any community should be able to form around a specialized remix with the tools they want to combine. In the past, we’ve officially hosted some of these remixes as spins, and our Spins SIG continues to grow and provide technical guidance and a body of knowledge on making good remixes.

But the step that we’ve needed, to cap everything off nicely, is a way for these downstream communities to point effectively back upstream to Fedora. So for the last couple of months, among my other projects, I’ve been working on a new set of trademark guidelines that allow remixes of Fedora to carry a new secondary design mark, reminding users and consumers where the toys get made. It’s my hope that this will encourage a slew of new Fedora derivatives that show off the cool technologies we often premiere in Fedora.

Thus far we have some wording for the mark, “Fedora Remix,” thus combining the long history of the remix concept, and our introduction of the remix distribution back in 2006-2007. We also have some preliminary designs by the Artwork team (yet to be approved, but very good progress so far!). My hope is that we’ll have the final touches on this work within the next several business days, so stay tuned!

Beat into submission.

We handle our release notes by separating them into beats, where various community members take ownership of a particular piece of the distribution. They pay attention to features and developments in that area, and make sure that the relevant page of release notes is updated with all the news that users, sysadmins, and other developers will want to read.

We need more beat owners — it only takes a couple hours of time total for a release, not all at once, and the Docs team will take care of cleaning up the content for you once it’s there. You don’t need to be a formal Docs team member or have any special access other than a Fedora account, which lets you edit the wiki.

Our Release Notes typically are chock full of important information and give the many people helping users on the front lines a place to point: “Read this, it explains why/how/when.” If you can’t spend a lot of time helping end users one on one, this is a great way to have a major impact on potentially thousands of people at a time with just a few hours of contribution.

With the release of Fedora 10 Beta, we’re starting the countdown to the Preview Release. So now’s the time for all good Fedorans to come to the aid of their Project! Or something like that.