Episode: 1214
Title: HPR1214: LinuxFest Northwest is April 27, 28,2013
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1214/hpr1214.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 21:46:49

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Hello, Hacker Public Radio. This is David Whitman. I'm on the line here today with someone
from Bellingham, from Linux Fest, Northwest, and I'd like to introduce yourself.
Sure. Hello, David. My name is Jacob Perry. I am an organizer with Linux Fest Northwest.
We've been around for about 14 years now. This will be our 14th Fest, and we're excited to be
on here and tell you guys a little bit about what's going on in the Northwest part of the country.
So I attended Linux Fest Northwest last year and there was quite a good size crowd there.
Can you give an estimate about how many people you expect to attend this year?
Sure. Since it is a Fest, we try to allow people to come and go as they please.
In the last few years, we've started doing more conference-style registrations.
Last year, we had 800 registered people, and then at the Fest itself, we had 1200 badges, and we went through all of them.
So we had to actually run and buy the whole town of Bellingham out of badge holders so we could get people on Sunday the badges they needed.
So we range somewhere between 800 and 1200 people a year, and last year definitely was our biggest to date.
Well, I know there was a tremendous amount of people there, and before we go any further, let's make it a point here to
you tell us the dates and the times Linux Fest Northwest is this year.
Sure. So Linux Fest Northwest this year is April 27th and April 28th. That's a Saturday and Sunday.
It will be the last week in April. To try to be consistent, we're usually always the last week in April.
Haven't missed a beat yet. It opens up around 9 a.m. and our first talks are at 10 a.m.
We end the day around 5 o'clock with a big raffle at 4.30, and then we have an after party.
So go out and have dinner in Bellingham, and then come to our after party at around 7 o'clock this year
at the light catcher museum sponsored by the Lockham County Museum.
And you can see some great eats, desserts, architecture exhibits. It should be a good fun time.
And then Saturday we do it all over again, starting around 9 a.m.
And then we close around 3 to 4 o'clock, and that's sort of how we've done it last few years, and that's how we intend to do it this year.
Just so unclear, the Linux best is on Saturday, and then ends the next day on Sunday, is that right?
Correct, it's the two day fast.
Okay, and last year I remember there were some guys there that had a big truck and a trailer, and they had a bunch of beer brewing equipment.
Can you tell us a little bit about them, and if they'll be back?
Yeah, so that's Linux Automation, two guys of Tacoma, Washington.
They drive up every year and provide us the beer at the after party.
So in true open source sense, we have some brewers who basically have automation equipment for their brewing setup.
This year they're going to have a booth.
It'll be a little bit different than last year, as far as like the on site brewing goes.
But the big thing that everyone loves, which is their beer, and they also have a root beer for those who don't drink or can't drink, they will be there.
I kind of owe those guys an apology because I was supposed to get back with them and do an interview after I got back from Linux Fest in Northwest in 2012.
But when my life just went, it kind of fell apart then, and I've kind of been going strong just getting things back organized until just a couple of months ago.
So I'll be trying to get an interview with them while I'm at the Fest this year.
So I don't miss that because they seem like a great group of guys.
Is there a theme for the Linux Fest this year?
Well, every year we sort of, we try to theme it based on what people are submitting.
This year we tried a little bit different sort of a surrounded around the community.
So our expo hall is moved into a new area.
We're trying to get more birds of feathers and little meeting spots so people can have sort of buffs or they could have little hackathons or developer sprints.
In addition to our regular talks, which spread the gametes of doing systems administration to programming, to beginning using blender, to doing regular Linux installs, to whatever you want that's open source.
So yeah, we try to get a little bit of a theme, but there's just so much.
It's just really crazy how many different, how diverse everyone's needs and wants and desires are that it's a little hard to say, you know, one specific thing.
Okay, last year I noticed Katie, he had a real heavy presence at the Fest and do you think it's going to be the same this year?
Well, we haven't seen as much of an interest this year from them. We had interest from them last year and we had interest from them two or three years ago.
It seems to go in cycles with their other conferences that they do every few years and then we send to be in their orbit.
I don't think there will probably be a few people either doing KDE based projects or presentations, but I don't think we're going to have what we had exactly last year for them.
Okay, since this is sort of an unstructured talk or interviewer, we're just chatting here. Can you tell me how you got involved in helping with the Linux Fest?
Sure, so I started Linux Fest or I started with the group. In 1999, we conceived this at Boundary Bay over some pizza during our Christmas party.
I was, I guess, 15 at the time and now I'm whatever that's plus 14, so I just turned 29.
So I've been involved through that, got involved through the Bellingham Linux users group back in the late 90s, early 2000s. There's all these Linux users groups and I've stayed strong with it ever since because I really do believe that this is a strong community based, I don't know, Fest that gets everyone together and I've met not only a lot of great people through this, but I've gotten great job opportunities, great learning opportunities.
And I don't think I'd be where I am today without without this Fest.
Well, real good. Since I've got you right here, I'm going to ask is do you think Linux is something that young people should be learning is to help them find jobs and get careers and have an interesting future?
I think Linux is definitely, especially if you're doing any type of sys, sysops, DevOps, any type of automation, it's pretty clear that if you want good, a good pain job and you want to move past the realm of simple IT, Linux is where it's at.
You go look at Amazon, Google, Facebook, Aqua, you look at different cloud-based organizations like Rackspace, they're all Ryan Linux and they're all Ryan open source software, like Puppet, Chef, Mongo, MySQL, and these are all things that if you want to make lots of, you know, have a good career out of it and really have fun, you should be looking at these things.
Because at least in Dellingham, Windows will get you a nice cushy sort of not really well-paying job, but if you really want to work with the big rigs, you got to be learning Linux and open source.
And do you think the Linux Fest Northwest offers people an avenue to then get a start in Linux or to learn more about it and keep things going for them?
Yeah, I think actually Linux Fest does two things for people that are coming in. For the people who have an interest in computers and computer science in general, I think Linux Fest will let them look at some beginner presentations so that they can dip their feet in and sort of get an idea of what's going on. That certainly helped me.
The second part is once you've started working on this, you get to meet people, you get to talk with people. And as you network with different folks that have been in the industry, your name gets out there and a lot of these projects are meritocracies and Drupal, which is the realm that I work in the most.
You get your name out by working on stuff. There's issue queues and patches are welcome. And by going to Linux Fest, you get to see how the process works. And then it's all up to you. If you want to make this work, we open the doors for you here at Linux Fest Northwest, as well as all the other Linux Fest scale, Linux Fest Ohio, Southeast Linux Fest, et cetera, et cetera.
That's what these things are meant to do.
All right. I was looking a little bit here at the list on your website, which is Linux Fest Northwest.org and going through some of the proposed presentations.
And I'm seeing one Ajax plus SEO is possible with XSL. And one other one that I don't see it exactly right in front of me, but I know a fella up there that lives in the area is developed a Braille system that connects with computers, you know, anything about these presentations.
I know a little bit about the Braille one, not a whole lot, but basically we've had various people with disabilities, approaches in the past. And one of the topics I believe the Braille presentation was supposed to talk about was accessibility and getting that working with people with accessibility issues.
So that would be a very useful presentation. Go to if if you're someone who who's looking for using Linux or programming with Linux and you have a disability.
I believe that's that's the one he was presenting on unless that's changed.
I know that's I think his name is Kristen and he was real anxious to get the word out because he's developed this system that he wants someone to help or to take on building it's actually a hardware system to help people that need accessibility.
Yeah, he's definitely going to be there. And I believe there's another group for the the death as well to help transcribe if anyone needs help there.
But that's that's a good example of one of many projects that people are looking for help on. And so if any of them look interesting to you, this is the place to go to start working on him.
Yeah, I believe that's McKinney interpretive services or interpreting services. She was there last year. We had our table right next to hers and I did an interview with her and posted it.
So really interesting people with a lot of passion for helping people that have needs.
And that's that's what we're here for is to for everyone to basically connect. We have a vast diverse group of people, you know, whether that's with disabilities or whether that's doing robotics or what not.
It's it's quite interesting to see if you have an interest in something there's probably someone either doing a presentation on it or there's someone who is also interested and that's what we're here to serve.
I've noticed here that there is a proposed talk on literature and amateur radio and then one on Linux on IPv6, which is probably going to be interesting to a lot of people. I know a lot of HPR people are interested in the amateur radio thing.
As I am also a ham operator, I too am interested in that. I actually haven't we're going to do our presentation review on Thursday, the 21st. That actually is the day that any presentation proposals are are due.
But I'm going to take a look for that because one of my personal projects would be to make an amateur radio system in Linux so that I could run embedded embedded hardware in my mobile in my in my car.
So I could run radio without having to have three or four different amateur radios. I could just have, you know, a bunch of different USB drives or different hardware drives and then run software to do that would be I think would be a fun project.
That sounds really cool. So when you mention the fact that there is the sessions aren't completely chosen yet. There is still an open window then for people.
I mean, we're talking here on I believe the 18th of March and the 21st is a closing date for papers and correct.
That is correct. We have about 50 or 60 trying to get the number here exactly. But we usually aim between 60 and 75. So we're hoping again another 10 to 15 presentations by Thursday. If not, that's that's no big deal. But we'll see how it goes.
And then we're going to sift through them all and make sure they're legitimate or not every year. There's usually a few presentations that we've we've had to, you know, nicks because of various reasons.
But in general, you know, most of them get accepted. So if there's something you're passionate about, submit a presentation proposal.
Very cool. And I want to get back to the subject of these lightning talks or birds of a feather sessions. Then are they organized ahead of time? Or is that something people are going to be able to come and maybe get an audience for what the test is going on?
Well, there's a few different formats in the past. We've tried to do lightning sessions. Unfortunately, we just haven't had the staff to do it.
Like any other open source project, Linux Fest Northwest, definitely, I guess I shouldn't say patches welcome, but people welcome.
If someone wants to take that on, that would be awesome to do like an ignite type, you know, five minute lightning talk series.
But this year right now, we don't have plans for lightning talk.
As far as sprints go or boss, we have two different approaches that go on. One, different groups we've had open sus known KDE and Drupal are the ones I know of that have actually done their own sort of many sprints and in conversations around development on their projects.
Those are organized usually within their own groups and then they bring the results of that to our team and then we throw up a, you know, say, hey, here's the room for them.
And then you can go and do whatever you want there.
The second part we have is like a lightboard or what we'll have online. There will be a buff section under our schedule where you can either go online and create a basically just enter a table on the grid for a time.
And say, I'm going to be in this room at this time talking about such and such. Come on in.
And as long as no one else has reserved that time, it is yours. So that's sort of how the buffs work. They're very ad hoc and it works really well for for small groups of between five to 15 people.
Yeah, I've been to a buffer to some of them are well attended some of them are not and just depends on the interest people have in the subject matter.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, a lot of times buffs are just, you know, we have some presentations that are proposed. If we run out of space, we will go to the presentation guy, the presenter and say, hey, you know, we only had five people suggest that they had interest in this.
Do you want to make this a buff? And sometimes we turn those into that just that we don't have bigger rooms having, you know, only five people in them.
Yeah, as an organizer for the and a participant in organizing Linux Fest Northwest, you tell our audience about how much time you have to spend and what their challenges and rewards are being someone who puts on a Linux Fest.
Yeah, so the time commitment is a little difficult. I know it's a lot. Basically, it's a year round commitment. We try to get better and better every year. Some years were better, some years were worse at it.
But basically every second Thursday of the month, we meet when it comes around January, February, we're usually meeting two times a month, sometimes three times a month. And then right now March and April, we'll be meeting this Thursday, we'll be meeting next Tuesday, we'll be next Thursday.
So it really gets up like the last month or so, you can expect to be spending almost 10 hours a week on this.
Do you use the Linux Fest Northwest IRC channel then to communicate during the other times of the year?
Well, actually, not really. Our group is very much face to face. And that works great for us gain things done. We have someone who takes really diligent notes.
But that might be something changing with my move to Vancouver or Vancouver, Washington, such Portland.
I'm still hopefully be involved with the Fest and they definitely need more people. So I'm hoping that we can start to bring this online a little bit so that we can bring more people in.
Because now everyone can get to belling him and they may still have the ability to participate, even if you live in Seattle or Portland or Vancouver or St. Helens.
Yeah, I'm so good. I'm excited to have you as a closer by neighbor, I guess. And I've been a little bit involved in attending some group.
People get together here in Portland, but I actually moved further away from town to closer to my job.
So it's going to be real nice having you as a neighbor. Anyhow, as you move to Vancouver, which is just not very far from where I live, if I could just get across that river easily.
Sure, sure. Yeah, they don't they didn't make a bridge there yet. So I guess there's not that many people to do that and long views a bit north.
Yeah, and I go the other way to work so it's not easy to get down there. But I mean, Portland is a great open source community.
I'm really surprised that there isn't a Fest in Portland, actually that is like Linux Fest Northwest or scale or Ohio Linux Fest.
Well, I think one of the problems with Portland and it's a similar problem with Seattle is that you have, well, we have an advantage here that we have a large technical college that gives us all the resources for free.
There is open source bridge down down there and there is a off-con, but both of them have tremendous costs and with those tremendous costs without tremendous sponsorship, you know, it makes it very hard to throw on a Fest that we're trying to do.
And I think that's why we have thought about moving Linux Fest Northwest, you know, originally the premise of Linux Fest Northwest was that it's supposed to be in the Northwest.
And so it would go around from Seattle to to coma to Portland to Bellingham to Vancouver.
But it just really didn't materialize because we had all the organizers in Bellingham and we had the venue in Bellingham and the other people who lived in the other cities saw the time commitment required and said, you know, we they couldn't do it, especially when it costs so much to try to get a venue.
And that's probably our biggest cost, or well, our biggest savings, but a biggest cost to any festival.
Yeah, there are definitely hurdles when it comes to securing a location and then being able to supply all the necessary things like tables, rooms, heat, and then all the other things to go with the Fest.
And of course, the printing and just a lot of expenses, I guess, when you think about it, expenses do head up when you're putting something on.
Yeah, we actually are fairly lucky. I would say we have the highest person to cost ratio of any festival, any Linux Festival, maybe any major festival, you know, computer related festival.
We have a budget of around seven to $10,000 a year, which is dramatically low.
And we try to be as careful with our funds and diligent with our supporters and sponsors that basically every cent goes to the Fest and that we drive those dollars as far as possible.
One example of that this year, taken from what DrupalCon and other Drupal Campsman doing is our pamphlets and our brochures will be embedded together instead of separate.
That allows us to basically print one thing that allows you to see your pamphlet on your name tag so you can see what the schedule is without having to go fetch it.
At the same time, we save at least 50% on our printing costs.
That sounds like an interesting idea. Talk a little bit about the sponsorship by the technical college there in Bellingham and what that means to Linux Fest and how the students are involved.
So every year, the conference has sort of evolved from a let's use BTC as a facility to actually be coming integrated within the CNET program.
CNET is what the technical college considers their computer IT technical program.
And so there is about 50 students or so that basically are required to do some type of volunteer work with Linux Fest Northwest as part of their curriculum.
The staff there sees Linux Fest Northwest is probably one of the biggest opportunities they have for real live world experience to see how networks get set up, to see how event organizations get set up, to gain something done on a deadline.
And they really see the need for this as part of their program. And so we benefit from that having more volunteers than most other festivals have.
And it's a really great opportunity for both students attendees and us because there's only about 10 of us in the core organizing group.
And how many students would you expect to be participating this year?
We usually figure there's about 50 or so that are participating through, I believe, about 8 to 10 different subgroups that do different things around the Fest.
And that includes setting up a wireless network for the Fest, is that right?
Correct. And the Linux Fest Northwest, I would like to say is someone who's been to many festivals and many hotels around the country.
I feel that Linux Fest Northwest is one of the best networks of anywhere.
That's partially because of the BTC team that has a real good handle on the networking.
They have full access to the facility, they have full access to all the hardware.
But we also have a gracious donation from CSS Northwest, which basically gives us a fiber optic connection to fiber cloud, which is our in town data center.
And as may know, Bellingham is smack dab between Seattle and Vancouver, which means that most of the fiber lines run right through Bellingham and we're connected straight up via gigabit to the internet from BTC.
And then are you aware of what software packages they're using to do the networking?
I'm not totally sure of all the software packages they use. I know they have a bunch of Linux monitoring tools and they have some various switches, which I believe are hardware based.
I don't know if there's this score or three comma or whatnot. I'm guessing it's not an open source firmware. But that's a good question.
And so Bellingham Technical College also teaches other things besides computer technology. And so part of the Linux best last year was the culinary class cook lunch for the attendees. Is that going to be happening again this year?
Well, I should make a slight distinction while there are culinary. So the culinary students used to cook many, many years ago. They used to have a program where they would do a salmon bake for us for a fundraiser for for their group.
In the last few years, they actually have their own like culinary services, inner departmental services, which a lot of culinary students work at, but slightly different.
And they're going to do a buffet this year. Food's been up a question in the previous few years. So we're going to be changing it up a bit.
And with the new building, we are hoping that we'll have more indoor seating. We're going to have more options, more alternative diet options as well for those who are vegetarian, vegan, gluten free.
And it should be it should be a bit better than than it's ever been before.
That sounds really good. I know the meal was real good last year. And I don't think we'll be disappointed this year.
Good. Well, yeah, it should be it should be pretty pretty awesome. And we're working on on ways to get the cost down for that.
Because we know that there's a lot of people who are, you know, to have various restricted budgets. But there's also an opportunity if you get a individual sponsorship through the website.
For I believe $60, you get a t-shirt and you get free lunch and all of that included. So that might also be something to look at for listeners who are interested to get all their expenses paid before they go to the fest itself.
And so the fest is pretty with 10 isn't it? And but you can be an individual sponsor or get some level of sponsorship.
Correct. You know, fundamentally, the fest is supposed to be free as in beer, free as an open source. And we don't want to restrict that.
And nor should we have to. But there are lots of costs and lunch and t-shirts and other various items that people get included with other festivals.
We just can't give to everyone for free. So if you get an individual sponsorship, that's $60 and that gives you what you would get at a normal conference.
Whereas a free registration, you still get to have a badge, you still get to see the brochure and you get that type of material. But you're going to have to pay separately for a shirt and separately for lunches if you want to do that.
And then a tendency that the party is extra also because people who don't have a sponsorship.
Oh no. So the party is free for anyone who is registered free or individual sponsors, but you do have to show your badge because of Washington state law.
And because we feel that if you go to the fest, you deserve a party, but not, you know, we shouldn't have some kids off the street just come in.
You must wear your badge. When you come there, we will check them. We'll scan your badges and you'll get in there for free. Just make sure you have your badge on with you.
And so how do people sign up for a sponsorship or get registered for the fest?
So if you go to LinuxfestNorthwest.org, there's a register now button up at the top. And if you click that, it'll let you go through and you can select a free or individual sponsor.
Just fill out the data there and it will sign you up. And we'll be sending out an email here after the presentations windows closed and we'll be encouraging people to go through.
And I don't want to say vote many other organizations say vote, but we say, please select the sessions that you think you're likely to attend.
This gives us an idea in our planning because we have many different sizes of rooms. And we need to get different, you know, we won't put the right presentation in the right room.
So please make sure you get on there and you say that you're interested in a session doesn't commit you to the session, but it does give us an idea of what type of interest that session is generating.
How could public radio has had a table at LinuxfestNorthwest now for this will be the third year. And the table there is free of cost to us. And how many dot org organizations are having tables or booths at the fest?
This year we will have 13 dot org booths. Can you name any of them besides HDR?
Sure. So we have, let's see, who all do we have this year? We'll have a bunch of let's see Cascadia IT. I think we'll have a group there that's a local other technical college.
We have the various Linux users group from Everett and Tacoma, etc. FreeBSD, the EFF, OpenBSD. So we have a bunch of non-linear stuff there, I guess. But they're all open source.
There should be a Drupal booth. We're going to have Postgres users group. Mozilla will be there. And a few others that I can't remember off top of my head.
There are still a few slots left if you want to get in, but they are closing very quickly. So get them in. And if you make it in too late, we have a waiting list as well.
Okay. Can you talk about how people find a place to stay in Bellingham for the fest? Of course the festival is held at the technical college. So the hotels are not really close by. And would you talk about that a little bit?
Yeah, unfortunately, we aren't very close by. I'm still hoping that the new LaQuinta will be opening up right across the freeway from where we usually stay, which is the Hampton Inn.
I'm not sure if that'll be open in the next month or so. Also, unfortunately, this weekend is host to a plethora of other events in Bellingham. So if you are planning to go, you need to get a hotel soon.
We suggest the Hampton Inn. The Hampton Inn is located off Bakerview just north of Bellingham and near the airport. There also be a 24 hour hacker lounge in there. And that's usually where we try to get as many people into as possible.
If you can't make it into there, there's the Lakeway Inn, which is also filling up quickly. That one's closer to downtown, but a little bit opposite of town from the Hampton. And then if you can't get in there, there's a bunch of other hotels on Meridian, a various quality.
And if you want to really splurge and have an awesome vacation, you can go to the chrysalis or the hotel bell weather. Both of those have packages. It's almost wouldn't say honeymoon or type, but they're definitely your three and a half four star hotels.
So I noticed on the website, it says yellow cab is offering a special deal for anings fest northwest. That must be for people who don't have transportation from the hotel to the festival site. Is that true?
Yeah, they have a deal. I believe it's a 15% discount if you use a taxi gain around. There isn't a whole lot of mass transit, but the taxis worked fairly well last year, especially coming home from the party.
And the other way I would suggest to is find out what other people are staying at your hotel. And in good old carpool open source fashion, there's usually people that can take other people to and from the hotel to the to the fest.
Okay. You have anything else you want to share about the festival and before we wrap things up, we've been going almost 40 minutes now.
I think that's pretty good. I would suggest people, you know, check out the website, links fest northwest.org. Look at the community page, gallon IRC. If you have questions, feel free to use the contact link or post up in the forum so other people can see it.
I know they're not widely used, but every year we hope that more and more people use them. And yeah, if you're common, you know, get your presentations in, get registered, get your hotel, because unlike previous years, doing it last minute is going to be not nearly as fun this year, because Bellingham is becoming a very hop and town.
And links fest is just one of many other big things that happen in Bellingham that weekend.
Okay. Real good. I would thank you for coming on and doing this interview for Hacker Public Radio. I want to point out that you actually always have had the Ruby slippers on, Mike. I'm referring to the Wizard of Oz when the girl wanted to go home, because anyone can make a presentation and post it on Hacker Public Radio and audio presentation.
The website is open and you can find that information at Hacker Public Radio.org. So if you have anything else you want to add or a subject you want to talk about and any of our listeners, go to the Hacker Public Radio.org and find out how to contribute. It's easy. It's free and it's there for you.
Cool. Well, and I thank you for this service and this opportunity. I think what you guys do is really awesome for the community as a whole.
You know, it's really awesome to be able to connect people back to each other and that's sort of how we make everything better. So thank you.
Thank you, Jacob, and be sure to come by the Hacker Public Radio table and we have some special mini bumper stickers that are just right for netbooks and laptops for people that are attending one, especially come by, say hello to us, talk to us and get one of those bumper stickers. And thank you for working on the next best Northwest.
Cool. Well, do thank you, David. I'll be looking forward to meeting you. Goodbye.
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