Episode: 981
Title: HPR0981: Review Indiana LinuxFest 2012
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0981/hpr0981.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 16:57:05

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So
Hello, this is Ahuka, and welcome to another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
And what I want to do this time is I want to talk about my experience of Indiana Linux
Fest 2012, which I had the wonderful opportunity of participating in last weekend for me as
I record this. It was the weekend of the 13th, 14th, and 15th in Indianapolis, Indiana.
And this was the second time that they've had this event. They premiered it in 2011. And
so we started off with a joke from Lord Drakenblut, who was, you may remember that Ken Fowlin
interviewed Lord Drakenblut about this. Oh, about a month or five weeks before the event.
He was being able to promote and talk about the stuff that they would be doing. So he started
off with pointing out that the theme was the reign of freedom, and reign was R-E-I-G-N officially,
but as it was also reigning outside, which in April is not unusual. He claimed that it
was actually a very tricky double-on-tondra that he had worked into that. So it was an
interesting weekend. I got there Friday, got in late afternoon, and found Lord D and a
few other folks, Jason Corpman and his wife Gail and some other folks that were down by the
registration table. And it just didn't look like there was a whole lot going on. There was,
at that point, there was some talk about, well, you know, maybe we'll have a speaker's meeting.
I don't think that ever happened. What actually happened was I had to drive five hours to get there.
So I went back to my room and lay down for a little bit because a short nap was not a bad idea at
that point. And then after having dinner, I looked around and, you know, there was supposed to be
opening kickoff party, but what actually happened was everyone went to the bar.
That's not a bad thing either. We had a great time there. I was able to catch up with some people.
One of whom was my old buddy, Vern Cedar, who used to live in Indiana, is now in Chicago, and
works for a company called Zoro Tools that was a sponsor of Indiana Linux Fest, and is also a
Python coder. And I met Vern originally at Ohio Linux Fest, where I'm the publicity director,
and I got to know him there. And, you know, I still see him at these kinds of events, which is great.
I always look forward to seeing Vern. And the other thing that was fun was spending some time with
a fellow named Ross Brunson from the Linux Professional Institute. He's the director of member
services. Now, Linux Professional Institute was there, of course, because they were going to be
giving certification exams, the LPIC exam. I think level one, level two, something. I'm not a
system administrator, so I wasn't really the target audience for something like that. But, you know,
it was great, you know, Ross had a, you know, great fund of stories that regaled us on Friday
evening. So that was a lot of fun. And I got to chat with him a little bit then. And then, again,
the next day about how we can work on publicizing what they're doing and what we're doing and
things like that. So it was, it was very useful. But that was about it for Friday. Actually, it was
kind of low key. And then Saturday morning, everything got going with a bang. And we had
Amber Grainer as the opening keynote speaker. And I think a lot of people know Amber in the
community. Her husband Pete is a, a Colonel hacker with canonical. And Amber was very active
with that at one point on the Ubuntu women and things like that. But she is now the engineering
community resources community specialist. All right. That's a, that's a long title. But I think
basically what she does is, is she does community. She, she does this for a group called Lanaro,
L-I-N-A-R-O. And I find it very interesting because I was, I follow Amber on Google Plus
and on Twitter. So I was seeing all of these posts that she was making about Lanaro. And it was,
what's Lanaro? I don't quite get what was going on. And in my mind, she was, you know, part of the
Ubuntu group. And Lanaro is actually something a little bit different. It was a very interesting
presentation. Lanaro is a group that is working on bringing Linux to the ARM processors
so that we can run a free and open software on ARM. And when you say ARM, and you have to start
thinking things like phones, tablets, stuff like that, which is really the, the big area for most
of us where we would encounter ARM processors. Although it's also the case that some of these,
you know, a Beagle board, Raspberry Pi, things like that. I think most of those are also
using ARM processors as well. And so she's, she basically, she's the community leader
for that. So kind of like General Bacon does for Canonical, I guess Amber does for Lanaro.
And it was great learning more about that. It looks like a very exciting project. It's got a lot
of heavy hitters backing it. Companies like IBM, Samsung, Canonical is a, is a backer.
Texas Instruments. So I think a lot of what she was doing was just kind of spreading the word about
what Lanaro is doing and also saying, hey, if you want to get involved, we would love to have you.
And that's what a good community manager does is trying to get more people involved in the
community, right? So Amber's very good at what she does. And afterwards I, after her talk was done,
I had a chance to chat with her at some length and just sort of catch up on various things.
And it was interesting if you're at all in the Ubuntu community or tied in to any of this kind of
stuff, you may know that last year her house burns down. And fortunately, no one was in the house
when it caught fire. So no lives were lost. And as I was just kind of asking her, I said, well,
how's that working out for you are, you know, you're obviously you have useful work to do,
but how are you going with rebuilding your life? And what she had to say, which I thought made a
lot of sense is, you know, the material things just don't mean as much anymore. And I guess that's
what happens when you lose a bunch of stuff and you say, okay, do I really need to replace it
and apparently not. So that that was very interesting.
You know, when you go to something like a Linux Fest, a Linux conference,
there's always two different things going on. There's the the actual
scheduled talks and then what we call the hallway track. And I tried to do a little bit of both.
And so I mentioned that along, a long chat with Amber, you know, because I haven't seen her since
Oh, I think Ohio Linux Fest of 2010 where she was a speaker. And it was not so, you know,
I haven't really had a chance to talk with her since then. And so it was it was great to catch up.
And I'm excited to see what is going to happen. Another part of the hallway track, so to speak,
was I got a chance to talk with a fellow named Brian Unashko, who is himself legally blind
and also very active in the open Sousa community. And so he was there promoting open Sousa,
which he does rather a lot of, I gather. In fact, I have to, if he's listening to this,
I'm going to apologize. He was going to give me a box of stuff to take to Pengwakan and we just
never connected again. So, you know, it wasn't deliberate, Brian, if you're hearing this, I'm real
sorry. I wasn't trying to blow you off. It just, you know, somehow that at the end of the day,
I went to get dinner and all of a sudden I didn't know where anyone was anymore.
So, but it was it was interesting talking to him. And as I mentioned, Ross Brunson from Linux
Professional Institute, I get to talk with him a little bit more as well. And then, you know,
there were some talks. So, one of them was Clat 2, who not surprisingly had an interesting talk.
Clat 2 was talking about something that is a XML document, I think it's called OpenDoc.
And what that does is it lets you create books or documents or what have you with an XML
specification and then you can turn it into, for instance, an EPUB or a PDF or whatever you
wanted to do with it. And it, he gave a very interesting demonstration. It all was, all involved
in EMAX. Next time I see him, I maybe I'll think to ask him whether it's because all of the
software he used, it only works with EMAX or if I don't know, I know a lot of people like to use
VI or VIM. And I would imagine there's probably similar stuff there, but Clat 2 was obviously very
comfortable with that. It was a great talk. I was very interested for a number of reasons, one of
which is I really love ebooks. In fact, I may record something for Hacker Public Radio on that one
of these days. It's on my list of things to talk about at some point. And Clat 2, if you're listening
to this and there's an excellent chance that you are and you happen to notice that I get up and
left before your talk was done, it wasn't you. The fact of the matter was I was freezing my butt off.
I got to remember to bring a sweatshirt whenever I go to one of these conferences, because that hotel,
they just wanted to keep things at a freezing level. And I was just wearing a t-shirt and it got
to be too much. I had to go back to my room and get a coat. And by the time I got back the talk
was just about done. But I did hear a lot of it and the rest of you make a note.