Episode: 1076
Title: HPR1076: Ohio LinuxFest 2012
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1076/hpr1076.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 18:33:16

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Hello everybody, my name is Ken Fallon and you're listening to another episode of Hacker
Public Radio. What's kind of interesting on this one is that we have an HBR host joining
us as an interviewee. So did you like to introduce yourself because I believe I've already
put your name too many times. Okay, well, as an HBR host, most people know me as a hookah,
but as the director of publicity for Ohio Littix Fest, I think more people know me as Kevin
O'Brien. Actually, that threw me for a good while, not knowing what your real name was.
I suppose in hindsight, I probably didn't need to use a name for Hacker Public Radio. I couldn't
just go on as Kevin O'Brien might have been less of a problem that way.
So you're here to tell us about Ohio Littix Fest. So I guess the first thing to tell us is
what it is and where it is and what it is. Okay, yeah, Ohio Littix Fest is, well, it's a Littix
Festival, an event that goes on every year in the fall and it's in Columbus, Ohio. This is our 10th year
and this year, the event is going to take place the very last weekend of September, the 28th,
the 29th and the 30th. So we're looking forward to a really awesome event here.
Okay, fantastic. And how close is that to, you know, major cities in the US?
Well, let's see. Columbus, Ohio is in roughly the middle of Ohio, which means that it's probably
going to be five or six hour drive from Chicago, which is probably the nearest really large city.
Probably a couple of hours from Cleveland, you know, four or five hours from Pittsburgh.
So it's kind of in the what we call the Midwest.
Okay, fair enough. It seems to be one of the more one more Littix Fest.
Yeah, I think it really is. It's been around, it's not the oldest one of all, but, you know,
it is, I say, it's our 10th year. So that makes it a pretty long jevety,
you know, compared to some of the others. You know, I love having these kinds of events. So,
for instance, earlier this year, we had one in Indiana and I thought that was great too, you know,
let a thousand flowers bloom and all of that. But Ohio Littix Fest, I think, has been around
one of the longer ones. And we've got a really great history over our 10 years.
Mad Dog has been associated with it just about from the beginning and has been a big mentor to us.
Is an inspiration to the soul, I think, actually. We've had a few of us talk so
and be interesting to see what the reactions will be this year following his, you know, very touching
announcement. So, earlier on, yeah.
I, you know, my guess is it probably won't make a whole lot of difference to most people. I,
the other day I was reading, you know, his blog and I'm getting in all the things he's doing and
and it wasn't until I get to the very end, it suddenly occurred to me. Well, you know, he's just
mad dog for me. It didn't really make a whole lot of difference to me one way or the other.
That he came out. No, exactly. And just reading his blog, it was a bit of a shock to me to see
what the experiences that he would have gone through. Pull them. Yeah, there you go. A geeks
a geek in my book. Mm-hmm. Like a hacker. Sorry, you were in a hacker publicly radio. A hacker is
a hacker. Well, you know, we're all geeks, too. That's, I think that's the unifying factor for
all of us on hacker public radio. Okay, dragging us back to the point here. Listen, or high
max fest. Are you as excited about this as I am of a Goentag campaign? Oh, absolutely.
And, you know, if I had the kind of money, I'd be going to a camp, too. But, you know,
unfortunately, that transatlantic airfare just isn't in my budget this year. It sucks, doesn't it?
It really does. But, you know, I mean, it's great that we've got these events in different places.
I've been real excited about this as one of the organizers. You know, this is a year-round
commitment for me and for a number of other people. You know, we basically, this whole cycle started
for us right after the last one. Last year, we had, was it Moose that was on? Talk into us?
Probably Moose. Yeah, Moose is still involved. She's the chair of the committee.
So, you know, there were, there's probably a core of about a dozen to 15 people that are just
involved with it year-round. So, we start right after the event. You know, week or two after the
event is over, we have an in-person get-together in Columbus. Because, you know, most of us don't live
in Columbus. Like, for instance, I live in Michigan, which is a state right above Ohio. So, for me,
it's about a three-hour drive. If I think it's Moose and I live in the same town, just weird
coincidence that way. And, you know, we've got one person who comes from Chicago, another person
from Indianapolis, another person from Pittsburgh, and, and a number of people from Ohio.
So, you know, we get a couple of weeks after the event. We get together. We have an in-person
talk about, okay, what are the lessons learned? And then we just go right from that to
getting to work on the next year. And, you know, we meet every week, they doubt it, except maybe
around the holidays will drop a week off. And we've got to go through all of the process of
lining up speakers, getting our keynotes, just the technical stuff. We've got to get our website
up and running and be able to take registrations and all of that. So, it's kind of a year-round
commitment and I absolutely love it. Is it a lot of that, sorry, is a lot of that whole
no-back-end stuff, most kind of boilerplate template stuff for now?
No, it isn't. And well, kind of, yes, it should. You know, I don't want to put all of our
dirty linen out there in public. But, you know, we've had some struggles over hosting,
getting the server set up the way we want it. And, you know, part of the problem is everyone
involved is a volunteer. So, you know, it's a matter, sometimes it's just finding the time
to get in there and mess around with it. I'm not directly involved as the person in charge of
publicity. There are things I want to do with the website that are going to come up, but,
I'm hoping we're going to be able to get some of those things done this year. So, some of it is
kind of boilerplate, but, you know, I think it could be developed a lot more. Looking forward to
doing some of that. So, let's get down to the on lots and bolts. Can you walk us through
what the schedule is? Is the schedule already tied down at this stage?
We've actually published the schedule. Our website is Ohio Linux OHILINUX.org.
And, if you go there, you can see that we've now published the complete schedule.
So, you know, there's, you know, 50 different talks. I'm not going to go through each one of
those individually. But, I'm going to suggest people go there. Let me give you the 5,000-foot
view, so to speak. And, what that is is that on Friday, Friday is basically training day.
So, we have professional training, and we've got really good people doing that. We call that
the Ohio Linux Fest Institute. We're bringing in professional trainers from companies like Red Hat
and Claudera, the Linux Institute. And, they're going to provide training. We have a whole day session
on Hadoop, all day session on Puppet. Then, we've got half day sessions on performance tuning,
security enhanced Linux, advanced shell scripting, the VI editor, and time management for CIS admins.
So, this is Friday, right? And so, you can get all of that, and that's for a professional
registration, which is $300. But, you know, if you've ever gone for professional training through
any of the boot camps or what have, you know, that's a real bargain price. And, you know,
when you take a look at the instructors we have and the training we're offering, it's a real good deal.
No, I completely understand. I think that's actually fine. And the fact that it's on the Friday as well,
you can, you know, slip in your hotel overnight, as well on your company.
Exactly. Not a bad deal there, either. Then, we're also offering the
cram session for the LPI exam. If you're interested in getting your LPI certification,
you can do that. So, we're offering that on Friday. And also, something that we call Linux
Basics. One of the things that Ohio Linux has always had high in our minds is it's not just an
event for the people who have been using Linux for 10 years in our system. We make a big effort
to reach out to the new people and say, you know, come find out what this is all about. You know,
be a part of the open source revolution. So, we've got a Linux Basics that happens on Friday.
And people who come to that will learn to install and configure Linux. And we do it on laptops.
And they can, if they wish for an additional $100, purchase the laptop at the end of the day.
So, if you've already installed it and configured it, and we say for $100, you can walk out with it.
What type of laptop is that?
Ah, it's not bad. I don't remember the exact specs. I mean, it's obviously not a gamer thing.
But, you know, I think it was like a dual core processor, you know, decent specs, you know,
for $100 in a bad deal. So, that's all of that happens Friday. And then we usually have a,
we're going to, you know, we're always experimenting. So, Friday evening, we're doing a kind of a
pajama party thing. And it's going to include simple ones. pajama party. Please do explain.
Well, you know, pajama parties are traditionally the ideas that it's an overnight. And, you know,
you're in your pajamas. So, we're going to have a, I think we're looking at maybe having a competition
for the best pajamas and have some judging and things like that. It's kind of lighthearted
fun. We're also going to have BOF sessions Friday night. So, there's plenty of stuff to keep
people occupied. Of course, as one of the organizers, I'll probably be busy behind the scenes working
all night, along with the rest of the committee. Should be, yes. Then, you know, Saturday, we,
we hit the ground. Oh, yeah, there's, there's probably going to be a keynote Friday. You know,
that's one of the things we do on Friday as well as is open, you know, with a keynote. So,
we don't want to forget that part either. And he was given that?
Let me look that up. You'd think I'd know that off the top of my head, but I say we just published
the schedule and I haven't got the whole thing memorized yet. So,
I'll just quickly go to the website and take a look.
Oh, okay, that one's going to be mad dog.
Very good. All is good. Yeah. It's the perfect storm. Now, if you were reading his blog,
he did two blog entries about this over the last month. And so, I'm guessing it's the same
because the blog entries were called the perfect storm. And I think he would be talking about
the changes in the environment are going to allow Linux to become more prominent on the desktop.
Never like that. Well, you know, there's a theory that says that the desktop will just melt away.
And Linux will actually take over by being on phones and tablets.
No, this is why it's been an interesting keynote there because he's always bringing up
interesting angles. And hopefully it'll turn out to be true this time.
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. So, you know, mad dogs doing the Friday. And then,
you know, Saturday, we hit the ground running with all of our tracks. We've got tracks for developers.
We have an open source solutions stage, which is where companies can present what they're doing.
We're doing a career. We're calling the career track. And that is we're setting up opportunities
companies that are looking for Linux talent that are going to come there. And we're going to
basically have a job fair as part of this. So, you know, if you were looking to get a job as a
Linux-cissed man or anything related to that, bring your resume. And you can be a part of that.
Another thing that we're doing, and this is kind of interesting, this is a track called
New Linux Users. I mentioned the Linux basics on Friday that the new comers can
install and configure Linux. And if they want, they can pay $100 and purchase the laptop that
they just installed. And what we're going to do on Saturday is we're going to have a track
that is going to be teaching them things about, you know, what they can do with their Linux
computer. Got some great people involved. Now, saying that, I'm one of them. So, it's going to
sound like I'm petting myself on the back, but I am one of the instructors for that track.
I'm going to be teaching Libre Office. Oh, very good, very good.
We got door-to-door geek coming in to teach. Yes, I was about to say that, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, which is if you follow his podcast, you've heard how happy he is about that.
We've got a fellow named Ryan Kather, who's a friend of mine from here in Michigan, who is going
to come in and talk about the different desktop environments, you know, known KDE Unity.
And I'll just give people a little sense of what their options are. We've got a fellow from
my Linux users group, Hans Cox, who's going to come in and talk about Linux gaming.
I don't remember all of them, but I remember those because I was largely involved in helping
to set them up. So, I know there's some other things going on, but this is all day
track for the new Linux users. Yeah, definitely. When I heard about it, I thought that was
an excellent track, especially if somebody's bringing a friend or something for the first time,
get them involved in Linux. It really should be something on every one of the
right. No, I think it's absolutely fabulous. We start, our morning keynote is Wendy Seltzer.
And I don't know if you are familiar with Wendy, but she's a real high-power person,
a policy council to the World Wide Web Consortium, a fellow with the Yale Law School's Information
Society Project, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She founded and
leads the Chilling Effects Clearing House. She's on the board of directors of the Tor Project
and on the board of the World Wide Web Foundation. So, this is a big get for us to get someone
of that caliber. And so, she's going to be talking about stopping SOPA and its spawn
how to preserve free expression on the internet. So, I think that's a great way to start
the day off. So, that's our morning keynote. Then we go through the day with our various
presentations. I'm not going to get into all of them, but you know, we've got some really good
people, Josh Portvillette, who you may know as the community manager for OpenSUSA, is going to be
one of our speakers. We've got Drew Levine coming in again, talking about Frene As. So, there's
some really good people coming in here. Jonathan Nado is going to be here, talking about his
accessibility project. That's very good. Joe Brockmeyer, Zonker. There's going to be one of
our speakers. So, you know, I'm just picky. If you go take a look at the schedule, you can
you can look at all of them. It's just one great talk after another. And it's the problem you're
always going to have with these is that you're going to look at the schedule and say, oh, there's
two talks I want to see at the same time, and that just happens over and over. That's all we
can do about that. Well, are you recording the shows? Yeah, we always do audio recording.
Video is a little more complicated, but yeah, we do audio recordings of all of these,
and usually host them up at archive.org, but it takes a little while for us to do the editing
and get them up there. So, after a whole day of this, we've then got Elizabeth Garby, who's
going to talk about growing up with Linux. Elizabeth is the daughter of the Dale Garby, who just
retired from Hewlett Packard, but was the Debian project leader at one point and is active in a
boatload of open source projects. And Elizabeth has been pretty active in stuff too.
She's part of a pulsar astronomy research team at Oberlin College,
and is involved with computing as part of that. And so she's going to talk about growing up in
a Linux household and what that was like. Then our closing keynote, we've got Angie Byron
from the Drupal project. Angie is the director of community development at Akia,
core maintainer for Drupal 7, open source evangelist on the board of directors of the Drupal
Association. And so, you know, she's very involved in community development, and so she's
going to do a keynote, how to create ravenously passionate contributors. I think that's got to be
great. Now, one of the things that, well, yeah, let me finish the schedule thing quickly. We do
have on Sunday, we're going to offer the LPI certification exams. So, if you took the exam
cram on Friday, you can take the exams on Sunday. And then the diversity in open source workshop,
but that's one of the things we've done for several years now. Just try and talk a little about
how we open up the community. It's one of those things that just keeps coming up in the news.
I don't know if you followed the, there was a, I'm going to call it a kerfuffle, so to speak,
about geek feminism just in the last couple of weeks, with all sorts of Bruce Byfield was writing
about it. Ricky Enzli was writing about it. I mean, there are any number of people, you know,
talking about whether they are or are not geek feminists and, you know, some women who were
basically being called out by other women at a Linux event. Interesting kind of situation.
So anyway, we've got our diversity in open source workshop on Sunday, and it gives a chance to talk
through some of these issues. So that's the 5,000 foot view of the schedule.
Cool. How many people roughly stay over for the Saturday and Sunday? Is it two people stay?
Well, Sunday is, you know, that's going to be pretty light. We're not going to get a huge number
of people on Sunday. But Saturday, you know, I'm, I'm going to put a stake in the ground here.
I'm going to expect about 1500. I think that's realistic. Yeah.
Certainly, I'm hearing from a lot of people how excited they are about Ohio and
Xfest and looking forward to going. And, you know, if there are that many people that excited that
I'm hearing about it all the time, I think we've got a pretty good shot at 1500. We'll see what
the final numbers look like. But that would make it probably one of our more successful years.
Excuse me. It's definitely, definitely very impressive as we said.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's what comes up being around for a while. Like I say, this is our 10th year.
So, you know, we've been, we've been doing it for a while. We're also experimenting with our
registration. This is something that's a little bit different. Can you walk us through?
Yeah. Yeah. We've always had a what we call enthusiast registration, which is free.
Just go to the website and say, yes, I'm coming. And what we did, we do have problems if we don't
know how many people are coming. So, what we have said on that is, you know, if you just register
on the website and say you're coming, you can come for free. If you just walk in the day of the event,
we'll charge you five bucks. Yeah, it seems like that. Yeah. Yeah. And it's more an encouragement
for people to register so we know we can plan than it is an attempt to make money.
And then in the past, we've had, we called a supporter registration that was $65.
And we've dropped that. There was some confusion about it sometime. You know, there were
some people would sort of, you know, for the $65, you get a t-shirt in the box lunch.
It's like, well, that's not worth $65. And it's like, well, that's the point. That's the point.
You know, the idea was it was, you know, we have what we call public television in this country.
And I know it doesn't work the same where you are. But it's like, they have to go on air and beg for
money periodically. And so it's like, yeah, no, exactly. If you, you know, if you give $100, we'll send
you this DVD. And it's like, well, the DVD's not worth a hundred bucks. But the point is, it's just
a little inducement to give money. So we decided, okay, that just, you know, that did cause a little
bit of confusion. And the other thing was there were, there were a number of people say, you know,
I really love to get a t-shirt, but I can't spend $65. So what we did is we turned it into an
all a cart. So when you go to register, you can just register as an enthusiast. And that's fine.
And then on a second page, you can say, and in addition, you can get a ticket to the Saturday party.
And the Saturday party, we're going to have, I have not been given the authority to release the name
yet. I'm just going to say we've got a real good entertainer lined up.
Cool. Tell us here. We won't tell you. Yeah. You know, it should come out in another week or so.
I'm thinking. And so that's a $5 ticket. And, you know, in return for your $5 ticket, you'll get a drink.
So it's kind of a wash that way anyway. But you can buy that when you register. You can get the
t-shirt if you want. And so then for the t-shirt, just looking up the price here and make sure I know
that's $25. Then if you want to come to the diversity and open source workshop,
and that includes a brunch, that's $20. And then if you'd like to
make a donate, just a straight donation, we've got a little button here for a $25 donation
that you can just add to the card. We are a registered nonprofit. Your donations are tax deductible.
So, you know, a number of us, you know, I did everything. So when I registered, I ended up spending
$75. And, you know, some of the people that don't going to stay over Sunday, then it would be $55.
If you did all of the other stuff and you're not going to stay for the diversity and open source workshop.
No, I completely understand what you're doing. I think it's fantastic. I've
done after the interviews that I did previously. I wanted to support your show, but you know,
$75 was always, you know, quite a hit for me. And then the supporters t-shirt of kind of
I ordered one, but give the ticket to somebody else because the cost of shipping it over here would
just be more expensive than they have been purchasing it. So I think it's, you know, really cool.
I'll be able to throw if you could quit your wave. So it's a good idea. Let's see how it works out.
Well, if you really want a t-shirt, let me know, Ken. I'll send you one.
No, that would be abusing my position, such as it is.
Not a problem. Not a problem. I don't make t-shirts big enough to fit me.
Well, now we've got a 5XL here. If that's okay, take that back here.
This is our looked at and then I said, okay, I've seen a few of the people who attend our conference.
I guess we need a couple of those.
So that's, you know, it's an experiment. I mean, we may look back on this in October and say,
you know, that really didn't work very well. In which case, we'll try something different.
Yeah, I've tried something else. It's always a good to be questioned about injuries, I think.
Yeah, I mean, we've got a number of things. You know, some of the stuff I'm really excited about is
like the our, our OLF institute, the professional training. I just, I mean, we've always had
some pretty good stuff, but we've got a fellow involved this year in who really took a hold of
that one and made it his project. So I think that really did a lot to bump that one up.
We got someone else who came in there and said, well, you know, I want to make this job fair.
The career track thing happened and just grabbed it and ran with it, you know, which is great.
And then this new, uh, the newbie training track, you know, introduction to Linux and open
source software and what you can do with it. No, I think that is both of those tracks, uh,
undoubtedly the addition of the T, the supporters back is a fantastic change. And hopefully it'll
be picked up, but especially, I know we've already spoken about the introduce users to Linux
track, which is I think a requirement. People also assume that, um, you know, everybody knows,
you know, as a member of the community and about, um, that's sort of things, but I also would like to
just point out from the point of view of your own career, if you were going down, um, for some training
from your work, um, it's a good, good opportunity to get some budgets out of your
head to our department to go down to the training track. And I'm also going to keep your eyes open
and have your CV up today. So it's always good to have that up today. And you know, just have
a little room at your own there. See what opportunities are available to you. And I think it's
very good and you should be commanded for doing that at your best. Well, thank you. Thank you. Yeah,
I think you should always try and and push the boundaries a little bit one way or another and
say, let's just try something new. Uh, and if it doesn't work with, you know, if you think about it,
that's that's kind of how so much of open source software came about, which people would try
things. And, you know, if it worked great, if it didn't work, well, you know, move on to the next
project. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, where it's getting very late here again. And I'm just
wondering, is there anything that we haven't covered or, uh, I see birds of the feather sessions?
Have we, uh, have we done that enough? Well, I mean, the thing about birds of the feather sessions
is that it's, it's kind of up to the attendees, you know, um, we basically created some slots.
We've got one hour slots from, uh, seven to eight from eight to nine and from nine to 10.
We've got about six different rooms. So we could theoretically have 18 different
boff sessions. Uh, but it's really up to the, the people who come, um, you know, with boffs,
it's, uh, someone says, well, I want to do one and it's like, well, all right, is there an open room
post it? Do it. And how popular are those just by the way? Well, um, you know, it, it's going to
vary a little bit. Uh, last year I went to one on KDE, um, and Trevor Fisher was sort of
organized that one. He's one of the KDE developers. He works on sound. Uh, so he did that,
and there were, I know, about six of us that came and, and had a little chat about all of that.
So I just know about that one. I know there were others. Okay, very good. I suppose this is actually
a quite a good idea. If you did have a project and there were quite a few people coming around
just, uh, grab a room and have a face to face. Right. Um, I know how we definitely do in that
with some of the guys, uh, uh, I'll come just, I have a whole list of stuff that I want to talk
to them about. Would that should be no harm to have a, a session there? Yeah. One of the things we're
doing, uh, this year with, uh, birds of a feather sessions is that we move them to Friday night.
And I think that's good because it otherwise you've got conflicts with all of the talks on Saturday.
You know, last year, I might have gone to more of the buffs if it wasn't the fact that, well,
there's all these talks that I want to see. Uh, only I'm moving it to Friday night. I think is
probably a good idea. But we'll see. Again, you can always, uh, you can always go into your
version control system and take that one out. Right. Exactly. Okay. Uh, Kevin, uh, I suppose
she's a lot easier to remember than, uh, okay. Um, listen, uh, thank you very much. Again,
for, um, taking the time to record the show. We really do appreciate it. Um, if there is anybody,
has anybody already lined up for a HPR table? Do you know? Uh, I don't know. Um,
obviously I can't because I'm already going to be busy the whole time. Uh, I know there's
going to be other HPR people there. Um, you know, Clat 2 is usually involved. Um, so I had expected
he'd be there. Um, you know, the Linux link tech show, there's going to be some people there,
but they're probably going to be representing their own podcast. Um, you know, Mr. Gadget will
be there. I'm sure there will be people, but I, no one has said anything about I'm going to do
an HPR table there. Well, now is the time for them to be doing this. Well, maybe when they hear
this, someone will step forward. Absolutely. Um, listen, um, we'll obviously reserve, um, some
a block of time after the event so that we can get those interviews out, um, in fairly short order.
Sounds great. Okay. Well, I'd like to thank you again and just, uh, remember, everybody,
if you have, um, a topic that you want to discuss here in Hacker Public Radio, it's very
easy to do it. Just go to the contribution page and, uh, continue to read and tune in tomorrow
for another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
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