Episode: 1361
Title: HPR1361: SFS and Linux Camp
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1361/hpr1361.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 00:12:59

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Got one of these before so I don't know you just sit around talk about it
I mean that's just how this goes. So this is where the monkeys break in we
I think we got plenty of monkeys in the room now
Two of them hairless monkeys. Yes, the big hairless apes
So David Wilson founder of SFS which stands for software freedom
Society or school something or something
What exactly is SFS?
SFS is
An effort to bring together some people that know stuff about free software and
People that want to learn stuff about free software and often those are the same people
One people will have an expertise in a particular thing like my thing is Lennox
I like to think that I know a few things about mostly systems administration of enterprise Lennox
But other people know about other things we have friends that know Ruby friends that know Python
friends that know Blender friends that know Gimp and
My hope is to get those friends
Into a circle of friends so that we can do
classes
Get together
people to do hacker hours on
particular topic and make sure that there's an expert present or even better put together in actual class
Recently we did a four-day retreat called Linux camp and did an exam at the end of that where
One of our guys actually became ill pick one certified and then a few others got half an ill pick
So we have a whole bunch of ill pick 0.5s and one new ill pick one in the world
So you're talking about free software. Why not just software in general?
Well, I thought that there are plenty of schools out there that are already doing that there are plenty of
Organizations out there that will teach you proprietary software, but there are maybe not as many that are
Interested in and in sync with the philosophy of free software
And so I thought well wouldn't it be neat to put together a kind of a school or a kind of a university
Where it is entirely in sync with the free software ideals where not only are we?
Interested only in teaching free software, but we teach it in a free software way where the
the class is
free as in speech
Just like the topic of the class. So we've got the
Materials that the student can take and they're not only allowed to take those materials and build their own class
They're not only allowed to take those materials and lend them out to their co-workers or record the session and play it for their co-workers
They're even encouraged to so we're going as far away from per seat as possible. Oh, excellent
What else have you done with within SFS? I heard about Linux camp. What else have we gotten the pipeline?
Well, we did a one-day session on Ruby. We did a one-day session on Python
We did a one-day session on blender
We've done
One-day sessions on puppet two or three times now and we did a one-day session
on
Linux
So how can people get in touch with you?
Well email of course always works. So DL Wilson at the geek.nu
And then our we have a website which we're just now building at
sofree.us and
Gary's building that for us or Garhid and
Our resident webhead
Okay, so what was the question? I lost track of the question. So how do you get how do people get in touch with you?
Oh, okay, so we have our website at sofree.us
They can always email me
DL Wilson dot geek at let me try that again DL Wilson at the geek.nu
They could just go ahead and join our mailing list
Which is sfs at the geek.nu by
sending an email to sfs dash
Request I think it is at the geek.nu. So I think it's sfs dash request at the geek.nu and
There's there's a great long URL that I could read that will take them to the info page for the sfs mailing list
But but we'll forego that we could also put the sfs mailing list requests on sofree.us as well and and we could do show notes. Yes, should we do show notes? Probably okay
So what does the software freedom something have in the works in the future?
What are we we have a project to do a pile lab we'd like to do a
Can I can I say the town? Sure. Okay, so we're hoping to do a
Pie lab not necessarily on the raspberry pie. We could use the big old bone black or we could use
another single board computer, but we'd like to do a
lab where we get a bunch of the kids from the Lafayette middle school together and
Spend maybe an evening or maybe a Saturday morning and build up a network of Linux based computers and then play a game together or
Maybe do some scratch programming or something. We kind of fun
Let's see
Now sfs just isn't David L. Wilson. It's also comprised of a few other people
One of whom is sitting across the table from me. That would be me. That's Troy Ridgeley
I am kind of just the IT geek of sfs at the moment and trying to make anything and everything work
We also have our wonderful webmaster David or not David. Oh boy. I'm gonna really screw that. No, I'm David. You're David. I'm David
He's scary that one. Who we also have a wonderful webmaster by name of Gary Romero
Garhid Garhid and don't forget the wonderful and always charming lovely and lovely Heather Wilson Heather Wilson Heather Lee Wilson chief cook
Future projects. What else we got we got we got the pie lab. We're gonna try and do we've got
We want to do more online learning
We're also in the midst of working on virtual study groups
Yeah, I'll pick 102 and I'm trying to get us a
Gimp teacher, but I'm having a very very hard time getting him interested in doing one more big gimp project. He wants to quit
I don't know if you've seen my book, but
We have locally an expert on the gimp his name is Mike Hamill. Oh nice and he wrote the artist's guide to the gimp
And I'm trying to get him to do one more big gimp thing, but he doesn't want to he wants to move to nothing
But embedded Linux all the time
So it's a hard sell, okay
So David Wilson you mentioned Linux camp earlier in the program you expand more about that and what what did the what did we actually do at Linux camp?
So we want to my dream for a few years has been to take a few geeks out of
Civilization and take them out into the
paradisicle
paradisicle
out into the nature and
Give them a few days where
They can both immerse themselves in a technology that they want to learn more about and then in the breaks get straight away from
the
Dull gray material and the dull gray stone walls of
Whatever we're learning or
of the
To get away to to the not only commute completely immerse themselves within to the technology, but also
Completely cut themselves off from it as soon as as soon as possible during the camp and to be able to yeah to to take a real break and
Get out into the sunshine and
And breathe deeply and maybe throw a frisbee for a few seconds, and I really wanted to take care of them and get them
Completely away from the
Sometimes cold business like atmosphere that
training facilities can be
And so what we did was we rented a cabin at YMCA snowmountain ranch and
you me Heather
Gary and
10 other people
So 11 students and three staffers or no, sorry 10 students and four staffers
went up there and
Heather did all of the cooking and I did
Most of the teaching and then we had Ross Brunson from LPI come up on the fourth day and
deliver an awesome
exam prep and then a paper-based exam at the very end of it and
And so for the first three days we did a really hands-on
All almost all hands-on
Linux learning experience
Where it was just lab after lab after lab
Where we would take what's a
A task that you would actually be asked to do in the real world like maybe building a server and
then
Do that in the classroom and I would do it before in in front of the students before the students had to do it and
I would talk my way through it and
Talk about the different things that you might want to consider as you are solving that kind of a business problem and
Then finally I would turn it over to the students and then in pairs
The students would work on the lab and the reason why
We did it. It did things in pairs and the reason why I think that that really works well as a learning method is
That people of very similar experience levels have a tendency to speak a similar language
So when you have two people that are relatively new to Linux
They're able to share knowledge back and forth much more effectively than an expert in a relative novice
So if you pair up an expert with a relative novice then a
a lot of times the novice will get value out of it, but maybe the
high expert might not and
What I found is that you don't get a lot of loss by putting two relative novices together
because they're still able to share what they are learning and share it in a more similar
Language
Well, that's really cool. What else did the Linux camp cover?
We covered all of the objectives of the LPI
We didn't completely cover it what we did was we started putting the class together
three months before the first day of Linux camp and
Once we had all the students enrolled or most of the students enrolled we started study groups and
We went through the Linux plus study guide
2013 edition, which I think is the third edition
And we would get together on a weekly basis and cover one
Chapter worth of material so that the people that were less familiar could really get geared up before Linux camp
Four days is simply not enough to not not enough time to cover all the material
In the LPI 101 and LPI 102 exams and both of those exams are necessary to get the certification
So during that four days we covered all of the
objectives of both of those exams
But at a very high
Real-world level so we built a virtualized three node network
With server one server two and workstation one
We used CentOS 6.4 for server one, I think and
Debian 7.1 for server two and Ubuntu
1204 for workstation one and
We did a ton of labs on those three machines
We did of course the the build out itself was a pretty
Challenging and then we not worked the three machines together and managed their host files and
Set up some basic services on the machines
Yeah, you you definitely ran them through a gauntlet especially in 14 students going through and saying okay
Now I've got to build this virtual machine now
I've got to make it work with the other virtual machines that I've built now
I've got to tie these all together and talk to the file servers that we have out there
Was definitely a lot of fun and interesting and the way you presented it was definitely
Exciting and it went into great detail
It was a blast
and it was
It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun to teach it
One one other little detail was every morning at 9 a.m
We played a song to start the day and what song was that David that was
Rusty cage by Johnny Cash, which is a cover of a
Rusty cage by sound garden
And that that did became one of your favorite songs didn't it troll absolutely?
I love I loved every five minutes and 13 seconds of that song
It gave me just another bit of time to go out and enjoy the rest of my coffee in the morning
Well
Well, that's great uh looking forward to more linux camps in the future
So am I great. I want to I want to try to find a way to
um
As everything that can be done on a gift basis. I want to find a way to do it on a gift basis
But that is really hard to do when I'm also trying to fit into the business world
I want students that are sponsored by a business to be able to come to my classes and
It's important to keep the school running too
um
So the school that goes broke doesn't keep running exactly and so this run of linux camp
We had to go with a very simple for pay um model where every uh every seat was
1950 with various
discounts applicable
And that was able to bring the price down as far as uh $1,500 for each student
But wouldn't it be great if someday um we could find a way to either get corporate sponsorship
or
Something so that we could do the class um on a on a gift level
um and then people that don't have
as much
They don't have a bunch of disposable cash of their own
Um, and they don't have a corporate sponsor
Can't still get to that class because I those are the people
In a sense in one sense those are the people that I most want to put these classes out for
I want them to hear about it and go man. I really wish that I could do that and then be able to do it
um
One model one possible model that I've thought of is
We could let people that don't have cash
Help us with the actual work of building sfs
Um, where instead of paying the money
that we can give them a
Accredit to work off where they work on the website or they work on um
The mailing list or whatever, but then that creates a an additional challenge of well
What what exactly do we have them do if they don't know stuff
Yeah, it's always good to to train the entry level as well
Yeah, um, and it gets them experience and you know, oh, I worked for sfs for 15 hours or not 15 hours
But I worked for sfs for a hundred hours to pay for my
Um, seat in the class and now I'm lpix certified and now I'm lpix certified and toy richly said I did a really great job. Yeah
There you go
Um, that's great uh
Again to contact us uh reaches from uh reaches at dl wilson
At the geek.nu can always reach him at his website
uh, so free.us
And you can get on the mailing list
Which will be the request should be on a link on the so free.us here shortly
Excellent. Well, David, it has been a pleasure
It's always been always has been
And we look forward to more additional podcasts from you soon
All right, we'll uh, we'll put together another one soon
Excellent uh, this is the sfs podcast finally signing off
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