hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0935.txt

Episode: 935
Title: HPR0935: Indiana LinuxFest
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0935/hpr0935.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 05:10:27

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Hello everybody, my name is Cam Fallon and you're listening to Hacker Public Radio.
Today we have a special, the Indiana Linux Fest is coming up in April the 13th to April
the 15th in Indianapolis, in the Wydam Indianapolis West Hotel and here to talk us to us about
that is Melored Dracking Blood.
How are you doing?
Well, besides audio problems and latency issues on my internet, things are going pretty
well.
Okay, well, hopefully we're recording some both sides and, hey, poor audio quality is
the whole mark of HPR, at least my show is anyway.
So tell us a little bit about the Indianapolis Linux Fest.
Well, Indianapolis Linux Fest, as he said, coming up with 13th to 15th, but this is our
second year and last year we had about 250 attendees and we're definitely looking to
take it further than that.
One of the things that we're trying to make is unique about Indiana Linux Fest is instead
of being strictly a Linux conference, we're trying to make it a bridge between Linux,
well, open source in general because we're going to have some pretty BSD talks this year
as we did last year.
But we're trying to make it a bridge between open source, creative commons, open hardware
and the security communities and well, just anything else we find interesting.
Yeah, I've seen a lot of tracks actually on the website.
Can you tell us first of all, whereabouts is it going to be held?
Well, it's going to be at the Windom Indianapolis West again this year, which is near the airport
in Indianapolis, Indianapolis International Airport, I should say.
Okay, and for people who like me have a very poor sense of geography, whereabouts is Indian
apolis?
Indianapolis is the capital city of Indiana and it's kind of smack dab in the middle of
the state.
Okay, and so what's your kind of hinterland there, people from Ohio coming over and
Lewis?
Or would that be too far Chicago seems drivable?
We definitely had people from Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, I think we even had
some people from Tennessee as far as speakers.
I do know we had at least one person or actually three people from New York come to mind.
We had Clot 2, the last known god and Bradley Kuhn last year showing up.
That's fantastic.
And can you tell us a little bit of history about the fest when it started, why it started
and who started it, please?
Well, it's the first show was last year in March, but kind of have to go back about a year
before that and it started because just as a lot of open source projects is to scratch
your own itching, I'd seen that there had been a group who tried for three, four years
to start a Linux best in Indiana after the end of IU Linux best, but they never really
had any success getting it off the ground and I just decided I was going to make it happen.
So this is a one-man show with you being at the lead, is that correct?
No, actually Indiana Linux best at this point is put on by the Indiana Foss Society which
I'm the president of.
In last year we had a gentleman named Michael Soltzice as the treasurer and secretary and
he is still with us and also we had Mark Crins also known as Delta Ray to be our audience
as the vice president, but he stepped down last year.
Okay, very good.
To be honest with you, looking at the website and looking at the amount of attendees, it
looks like this has been on for several years, I'm very surprised that it's only been
one of the two years.
That was actually one of the biggest compliments we got out of POTU was last year was our
first year and on the reviews he did, either on HPR or on his own show.
The biggest thing he commented on was the fact that it just did not feel like a first-year
conference.
Yeah, that's correct.
I mean, if I look here on Friday, March the 25th, we have several tracks.
First one is the multimedia production on Linux track, another pro track, and I need
to point out the PIC one exam, security and force.
Jenna, I need to point out that that's last year's schedule.
We should have this year's schedule going up within the next few days, we're finalizing
an irony of it out, so people can at least now at this point still see last year's schedule
so they can see what we managed to pull off last year.
It's actually looking fantastic.
I like the presentation as well.
It's very clear.
I really hope that you continue to do this this year with the highlighting of it, and
I see a QR code for it with the Open Schedule app.
Indeed, we will be making use of the Open Schedule app again this year.
That was a great piece of work by Daniel Frey over at the Linux Link Tech Show and Myth
TVcast.
He is, in fact, a backbone of the community it has to be said.
Can you give us an idea of what sort of tracks you're going to have this year?
Well, for Friday, some of the stuff is going to be coming back.
We will have a return of the LPI C exam cram class, but the interesting thing about this
year is we'll be having Ross Brunson, who is the writer of LPI C exam cram books teaching
that class this year for us.
All very nice, very nice.
We also should be having a talk by Drew Levine of the FreeBSD community of FreeBSD for Linux
people.
Pardon me, I'm trying to frantically open up the spreadsheet that has the listing of
all the sessions of Friday that were accepted and so I can get it up and talk a little
more fluently.
What are you doing now?
Can you give us some background about how easy it would be to, you know, when should
people travel over there?
Is it usual for people to come by air or will they drive?
Do you have parking available and that sort of thing?
Parking is definitely not an issue at the hotel.
If you want to fly in, the hotel runs a shuttle from India, Indianapolis International to
the hotel for free and driving is not a problem.
Indianapolis is very firmly towards driving and this year, unlike last year, all the construction
that was happening around the hotel has been completed.
Oh, that's pretty good to hear.
And do you have a special race at the hotel, little?
Indeed.
This year we managed to negotiate a slightly better rate than last year.
Last year it was $199.99 a night, this year it's $99.99 a night.
Okay, super.
Did you, can you tell me what the hallway track is like at the hotel?
Do you know, is there what sort of a feel is there for the fest?
Is it corporate sponsored?
Is there more things going on in the halls?
Is there a community feel to the fest?
We definitely tried to aim for a community feeling.
I think that's exactly what we managed last year when even the sponsors were
we are corporately sponsored by different groups as we were in last year,
but they were all exceedingly community friendly, so much so that at least a few
of the people from different sessions showed up to the after party Saturday night.
That's very good to hear.
All right, and some of the ones we're looking at potentially for Friday is a session
on Puppet, which is a configuration utility for servers, basically, as I understand it,
a Python for Linux sys admin class, which that will be a professional level class that
will, this is one of the few paid ones we'll have for $150 US BSD for Linux users,
which is going to be a free road track we have.
As I said, the LKIC exam cram class, which is a one of our other paid classes for $150,
and then an undecided track by Clot 2 is the last one we have.
Oh, very good.
Are there those pro tracks on the Friday?
Indeed they are.
Oh, and another pro track should have is for a professional dribble development put
on by a gentleman named Doug Van.
Fantastic.
That would be so you're kind of aiming up the sys admin, people who will be able to expense,
I guess, a trip over to this fest on the basis that there's LPI certifications and you
can stay the night in the hotel and that sort of thing.
Indeed, but we're also aiming for, in my case, something of interest, college students
who are interested in getting their LPI C. My personal example, I may college student
right now and, you know, just professionally.
I'd like to have the LPI C at least one under my belt.
Yeah, I've said it before and I'll say it again here on the network that the LPI C is
really well respected in the industry.
It's that and the red hat certifications and some people like the independence that the
LPI C gives you over something specific like red hat.
And can you tell me how much the classes are going to cost?
Well, we charge individually for a class and it's $150 US.
So instead of paying a bulk fee to sit through any of the classes, it's $150 for the
class you're interested in.
That seems like very good value for a chance of certification, at least training.
And how much is it to do the exam?
We will have most of the exams back again this year for 99.
The only one that runs higher than that is the virtualization one they have.
Okay, but you're getting quite specific at that point.
But seriously, for, you know, save up for a few coffees every week between now and the
fest and you're going to have enough funds there to be able to get yourself on the
Linux certification.
So I'm really glad to see that the LPI are coming to a lot of the fest this year.
I'm definitely glad to have them returning and not only returning, but sending, you
know, Ross Brumson down to give that class for us.
It's, I heard you mentioned something about there being books available or something like that.
For the LPIC exam cram sessions, part of what the fee includes is not only a supporter pass.
So if you show up Friday, we're going to try to improve it this year to where if you
get one of the professional classes on Friday, you'll get a meal Saturday.
You'll get a meal as well for lunch.
And the LPIC gives you a supporter pass, which is a T-shirt.
And it also gives you the LPIC exam cram book.
Wow.
Very good.
And I mean to say, even if you're new to Linux and you get a chance to go in and do the training,
you know, if you can script the money together and all times are hard and all to do the 99
euros or 99 dollars for an exam, it's really worth it.
Just even if you know you're going to fail, it's worth it to get the experience of what
it's going to be like so that the next time when you are prepared, you can go in and, you
know, you're not going to be phased by the newness of the whole thing.
Yeah.
And one other thing that's we're going to have Friday evening is kind of butts in with
one of the things we'll have available Saturday is we're going, one of the sessions we'll
have Saturday is a Python workshop for women.
And Friday night they'll be doing the setup for Saturday for them.
Did you say Python workshop for women?
Indeed I did.
Okay, why are you being so specific?
Part of the point of the Python workshop for women is to try to help bridge, you know, try
to help draw in more female people on the open source community.
And part of what the Python workshop for women, it targets females, but men can come with one
caveat.
They have to bring a female escort with them.
I like that.
I like that very much.
Yeah, just at the introduction, you spoke about that this is more than a Linux Fest.
It's an open source Fest.
It's a creative commons and, you know, kind of open culture, I guess.
And I see that you're going to have BSD there.
What else are you doing, especially on the hardware side to, you know, to live up to that
sort of tagline?
Well, what the thing that we were, as far as I know last year, the first conference to do it,
we will be having the return of the hacker space village.
Now, that is an idea I actually got from the hackers on planet earth conference.
That's you're sharing the code, dude, you're sharing the code.
Yeah, and not only that, but, you know, we're, you know, people seem to enjoy that.
It seemed to go really well.
I mean, we had a lot of people, you know, popping in and out of that.
That was kind of a just open air format where people could come in, check things out.
I'm pretty sure I saw at least a few people learning to solder for the first time.
And it was, you know, just really fun.
You know, beware of the old expression of beware of the programmer with a soldering art.
I think really the thing that first time solders should be aware of,
there's two types of people when it comes to soldering.
Those who burn themselves and those who have yet to burn themselves.
But that's not said to discourage you.
It's a word of warning.
And you will have a lot of fun with anything you make.
I must say my, I have to agree with you.
Yes, I'm, I fall into both of those categories.
I have burned myself and I know that will burn myself.
I am more a mechanical engineering side where I approach soldering like it's welding.
So it seems to be a lot too much, too much flux for me.
Yeah, I definitely have spent my years learning how to solder.
One of the worst things I've ever had to solder was something like 120 end package.
And when you're getting down to that size, you're using a pair of stereo binocular microscope.
And you're really just rebulling things to make sure you've got a good connection.
Oh, painful, painful.
I'm actually looking here at the speaker list from last year.
And, you know, it is because on and on and on and on and on and a lot of names that are, you know, well known,
Bradley Coon and, and so forth.
And even like luminaries from the open source world like verbal and tattoo.
And how did you get so many people to turn up for a first time fest?
It was a lot of word of mouth just hitting up every single possibility I could to talk about it and spread the word.
And I was more surprised by some of the speakers who showed up who were just kind of out of blood field.
Let me see if I can find the gentleman's name.
There was a lawyer who randomly submitted a talk who was just really interesting gentleman.
It's obvious that there was a need in the community for a fest like this.
So well done for stepping up and taking on the taking on the mantle of this.
Definitely. And one of the other ones now we're not doing it this year, but last year we had some sessions on Friday.
Well, it went over all right.
We didn't get the kind of turnout we were hoping for at this point.
So at least for this year, we're dropping it.
But one of the talks I was really kind of proud of was a kid named AJ who this was.
Indiana Linux best was the first conference he was able to go to.
And he was 15 years old and we put him on the speaker track for Friday.
Wow, that's fantastic.
I mean, something like that gives you a lot of confidence going forward.
Definitely. And you know, I'm hoping he's able to come back again this year, but I'm just not sure about that.
Yeah, is the time window still open for submitting papers or has that been closed already?
We have officially closed them, but I would say if some people were interested in trying to sneak a talk in.
I wouldn't fully discourage it because you never know if people won't quite be able to make it last year.
In fact, we had something like three or four speakers drop out on us the day of or the day before.
And we, you know, luckily had enough extra talks in the queue or in cases like ought to.
For Jordan keys of this week in Linux willing to fill in at the last moment for us.
And whatever about anybody else, I'm sure I would have no problem listening to class class too waffle on any subject for a while.
I see you had spores actually on there as well last year.
Another podcaster here on the HPR network.
Indeed, it was spores and I'm from the gentleman who was giving the talk with him was also church, but he ended up becoming a member of the Infonomicon Computer Club.
And he ended up being dubbed the digital beacon at ILS.
Oh, I'm sweet. That is for people who don't know, Infonomicon Computer Club is one of the parents of Hacker Public Radio.
So go back to the history of HPR.
Actually, on the history of HPR.
What's animals on Friday night? Do you have anything planned?
I want to go on the history of HPR real quick.
There is one thing that everyone tends to overlook or forget.
The one group who or there's one more group who should be credited with HPR and it's radio freak America.
Yes, indeed, yes indeed.
Do you have anything planned?
Dual parallel racks and winter mute and I believe at towards the end of RFA's run when they talked about starting Hacker Public Radio.
So they at least were the ones who came up with the main.
Seriously, I have to go back and listen to some of those shows actually.
It's somewhere in like the last 10 to 15 episodes. I haven't done my yearly RFA run yet.
Alright, when you do keep it open Andy.
And you were asking about Friday night one Friday night we will have a bar available to people.
You know, at this point, just because of financial reasons, we don't have enough to say, you know, offer free tickets or anything yet at this point.
So it's going to be a cash bar Friday night.
And what's the turn up for that is it's pretty good Friday night.
I think there was only a dozen or two dozen people there, but for a dozen or two dozen people out of maybe a hundred people for Friday.
I thought that was actually pretty nice.
It was a pretty laid back atmosphere at that point.
I guess people on the rage people are allowed into that.
Actually, quite to the contrary, people of all ages were allowed. They just were carting at the bar because it's a private event.
And it wasn't happening in the bar. We just happened to have a bar. Anyone could come.
Oh, that's fantastic news for everybody.
Even people who don't bar take in the consumption of alcohol.
It's one of the nicest things actually is the evening of a show having a few, you know, socializing with people bumping into people and chatting with people.
It's a great way to put faces on people and, you know, get to know the nice side of the community.
Definitely. And that was Friday, probably the first time I slowed down since Thursday evening.
I can seriously imagine.
And it goes on Saturday as well, does it?
Indeed it does. Saturday is the main expo.
In fact, we're this year we're going to have four simultaneous tracks as well as some side venues going on.
And then you go on into the Sunday as well. What do you have planned on Sunday?
Sunday will be mostly just the testing at this point. It'll be the LPIC and the BSDA certification tests.
So I guess if somebody can make it down for one day, that will be Saturday. I imagine.
Definitely Saturday will be one of, will be the day you want to be there.
And if you're interested in testing, you know, staying overnight till Sunday is not so bad, I think.
Not at all, especially, I mean, I don't know if people are aware that if you're targeting students, but if you are a professional, you can go to your HR department or your IT manager and say, look professionally, I need to go to this conference.
It's on. There's some paid tracks that I need you to pay for and they'll more than happy play for the accommodation in most cases, because it's part of, you know, their yearly employee skills thing.
So always know would be a good time to try putting in the paperwork for that.
And in case, because we had at least two people that I recall from the Indiana government of some nature, if you need some special accommodations for being able to make arrangement for payments by all means, contact us from the form on the website and we will make those arrangements for you.
I know some places aren't so friendly about paying via PayPal for expenses.
Okay, that's very, very good to hear.
Listen, Tony, do you forget the question?
I definitely understand that feeling.
Yes, I remember the question. Do you have, it's late here. Sorry, I've had three kids all day. Do you have provisions for people in wheelchairs with other handicaps?
We definitely do our best or all that last year.
Russ is girlfriend, I want to say, or maybe wife, I'm not exactly sure of that dynamic.
Russ from Linux and the ham shack, his significant other Cheryl came to the show with Russ.
And to my knowledge, she had no problems getting anywhere other than I forgot to show her how to get into the bar area for the festivities Friday and Saturday night.
Okay, I'm sure you'll rectify that this year, yeah.
Definitely, and considering at least one speaker we're having this year, I will be doing my best to make provisions for that.
It just may be a matter of we don't have her on stage, but just kind of shift the focus from stage down to the floor for her.
So that's how all that stands at this point. Now the one other thing we will be having and this is comes out of the pipe on workshop for women group is we will actually have some availability for childcare on Saturday.
Okay, can you tell us are you going to be recording any of the shows and video or audio?
We did record audio and video from last year. We just a little worse than self. We haven't released those yet, but we're working on a way to record the speaker and their slides into one package this year.
Okay, what is very handy and I'm saying to all the people in the interview and about the fest if you can get the show notes, the presentation as well.
That way we can make the audio available here in HPR and we can read out the presentation without having to.
We can read out the slides without having to try and decipher from a projector on a video image.
Actually, we're going to do what we're working on is one better than recording a projector. We're going to be we've got someone working right now on playing with webcam studio to record the desktop and a webcam and audio source.
So we'll be doing a desktop capture to capture the slides while using a webcam to capture the video of the speaker and probably a low-end shotgun mic to record their audio.
Okay, very, very good. Still, it's no harm to have the presentation because when you're translating it for audio, we could end the slide description of what's on the slide into the audio stream for our hard-of-hearing listeners or people who are operating machines at the same time.
We will definitely be doing our best to get copies of all that and one thing it says on the speaker submission form is we ask permission to release these under CC by SA and I believe we did at the NC play as well.
Okay, we're CC by SA over here. So NC is fine. We can release shows on under separate licenses as well. Okay, very good. I think I've covered all my questions. Is there anything you think I've missed?
Nothing that pops off to the top of my head. One thing I would like to tell people is that nothing else. Be sure to check out Linux format or Linux pro magazine for February and March. We've actually got a full color out on the inside back page this year.
Oh, fantastic. Well done.
And I don't know because I want to thank you very because of the audio problems a minute ago. I'm not sure if it got caught but one other thing we'll be having is actually some onsite child care that's going to be run by the Python workshop for women.
Okay, that's very good. So that just leads me to say thank you very much, Lordy for taking the time out to talk about the Indiana Linux Fest. And again, it's on April the 13th to the 15th 2012 in Indian, the wide and Indian Indiana West hotel.
And definitely can thanks for having me on.
It's a pleasure and folks tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of hacker public radio.
And to just give credit to dual parallel. Be the media. Don't consume the media.
That brings me back to the brings me back.
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