Hello everyone, greetings from Linux Tag in Berlin. I’ve been in Germany all week and I wanted to post updates each day, but to be honest it’s been far too hectic for that. Nevertheless, I figured I should take the chance to fill you in a bit while I sit propped in bed at the hotel. I’ve just returned from a Fedora party tonight in a nearby restaurant, it’s part of the FUDcon event they’ve been having in conjunction with Linux Tag this week. There was free pizza and lots of beers, unfortunately the beers weren’t free but I can’t complain. The Fedora guys throw a hell of a party. We were also hanging out with Ade Bradshaw of LugRadio fame and generally having a lot of laughs. Good times indeed.

Since arriving in Berlin on Tuesday night I’ve had the good fortune to meet many nice folks and record a few interviews for the show. On the first day of Linux Tag we managed to get a long interview with Max Spevak and Paul Frields from Fedora. It was very informative and funny I think. Then we interviewed Máirín Duffy from the design team, she works on all that funky artwork you see in Fedora. I even ended up installing Fedora 11 on my laptop at the event, while sat in a corner of the press room. Extreme distro testing once again. I’m writing this on Fedora 11 at the moment and it seems to be going well. Still a few things to sort out but I’ll be posting a full review next week when I get home and can get things back on track. Later on I interviewed Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier the OpenSuse community manager and had a good chat with him about events in the OpenSuse world.

We also met some podcast listeners while in Berlin and that was amazing. It’s always fun to meet people who listen to the show and get to know them. We even went for dinner and drinks with Ryan (yareckon). An American who recently moved to Berlin, and a really nice guy to boot. We were interviewed by zahnersatz, who’s starting a new Linux podcast in German, something that’s missing at the moment I’ve been told by a few people. So I wish him all the best and when I have details I’ll be sure to share them with you. Finally we interviewed Jan Wilderboer from Red Hat just before the FUDPUB party. He’s an open source evengelist at the company and a really interesting guy as well. Always distinctive wearing his red fedora hat, company issue apparently. All of these interviews will appear in episode 99 of Linux Outlaws, so listen out for them.

There’s so much stuff to try and remember from the last few days that I’m sure I missed some out. To sum up, Linux Tag 2009 has been fantastic. I’m really glad I came and I would encourage anyone else to check it out in future. Hopefully I’ll make it back next year, fingers crossed. So many people we’ve met and they’ve all been very welcoming. I feel a bit like the ignorant Englishman at times not speaking any other languages, but people have been understanding. It’s humbling to see people switch language mid sentence. I’ve always told myself I’ll learn at least one other language one day. I’m sure I have the capacity, I guess I just need the application now.

Tomorrow we’ll nip into the event hall again, catch up with the guys at FUDcon probably and do the final rounds, before hitting the autobahn and making our way back to Bonn. I’ll write my usual weekly update on my own blog then, there was just so much stuff to talk about from Linux Tag it warranted it’s own post.

Bye for now,

Dan

Man, we have the best listeners in the world! Just a short addendum to yesterday’s post: Jon has just send me his recording of the classical guitar version of Sudo Modprobe and it sounds amazing! So, without further ado, I present you the classical guitar version of your theme song, written and recorded by the great Jonathan Kulp:

• Sudo Modprobe (Classical Version) Ogg Vorbis, 0.9 MB @ 96 KBit/s
• Sudo Modprobe (Classical Version) MP3, 2.2 MB @ 192 KBit/s

Have fun with this, everybody and thanks again to Jon for his great work and commitment! You will hear this being featured on the show pretty soon, I think.

Hey, everyone! I’m back with an update concerning the next few weeks and some very cool news. As we have mentioned a lot on the show already, Dan will be flying down to Germany on Saturday and we will spend most of the next week in Berlin at Linux Tag. We wil record a regular episode on Monday, but we will not stream it live. It will also not be released on Wednesday, since we’ll be busy geeking out and drinking beer in the capital. We will, however, record special content up there, so look for a flurry of activity in your podcatcher in the week starting on the 29th. All of this will mess up our schedule a bit and the Springsteen concert on the 3rd of July that I have tickets for as well as the Rheinkultur festival in Bonn the day after won’t help either, but we should be back on track during the second week of July. I hope all the extra content we’ll hopefully get out of all of this will be worth the disruption.

But now to something completely different: You might have heard Outlaws community member and resident music professor Jonathan Kulp announce in his audio feedback to us from Episode 96 that he was working on an arrangement of the Linux Outlaws theme tune, Sudo Modprobe, for classical guitar. Well, he’s done it already. How cool is that! Now, it’s been ages since I’ve played proper notes, but it looks awesome and the midi file he send us already shows how much intrinsic detail he put into the arrangement. I am really, really stoked about this and can’t wait for his recording; I can already promise you now that you will hear it on the show when we get it. Most definitely! It is totally amazing what Dan and Jon have done to the aweful little tune I hacked together at the beginning of all of this. This stuff is why I can justify spending 8+ hours each week working on the podcast and the many more I invest in growing the community around the show. Thank you very much, Jon! This is one of the coolest LO-related gifts we have ever received, I think. Although beer parcels are always up there as well, of course.

If you are interested in Jon’s work so far, all licensed CC BY-SA of course, here’s the Lilypond source file and a compiled PDF document. You can also listen to a preliminary midi version of the arrangement but please use that as a preview (and maybe to experiment around with it) only since it’s not a proper recording and doesn’t sound like a real song yet. Anyway, have fun trying to play this awesome version, all you wannabe Roy Buchanans.

You might have wondered why our website got redirected to my personal page beginning Sunday afternoon (CEST) and lasting until Monday morning. To make it short: Fab had another server admin fail. While trying to make our server more secure, I must have messed up Apache’s subdomain redirection somewhere which caused it to route all requests for linuxoutlaws.com to lamerk.org which is located on the same server. I did test the new configuration and could see nothing wrong with it so I happily proceeded to have a BBQ with some friends out in the sun, leaving my iPhone, and with it all connections to the virtual world, at home. I also busted my ankle that night, but that’s a whole ‘nother story…

Something must have happened on the server after I left because shortly after I had tested the setup and went outside, people began having problems with the site. I have no clue as to what changed, maybe I just didn’t test everything correctly in my hurry to get out into the sun. In any case, the site and with it the RSS feeds were offline. If you were using gPodder as your podcast client, you might have experienced something else: In a weird twist, gPodder decided to put some “Tiger Records” stuff in our feeds and tried to subsequently download 600+ MB of files. Apparently this is a “feature” of the program; if it does not find one of your subscribed RSS feeds on the provided URL, it crawls that site and all embedded links looking for something that looks like RSS with rich media enclosures. If it finds anything, it helpfully uses that as the new podcast feed. Quite a handy feature that means you can just pop linuxoutlaws.com in the new subscription field and get one of our feeds auto-magically but it also messed with my brain royally when I woke up Monday morning (slightly hangovered) and started gPodder to check if some new podcasts were out for me to listen to. As it were, the “spam” in our feed made me believe our server had been hacked. The fact that nobody, including Dan, hadn’t been able to reach me until then just complicated matters.

Long story short: I have checked the server thoroughly (just in case) and am quite confident that we have not been hacked but that everything was due to me being an idiot. I have also since repaired the subdomain problem and all of the site (including the forums) should be in 100% working order again. If you are using gPodder (a fantastic podcatcher, by the way) and you still have weird stuff in our feed, please re-subscribe and everything should be cleared up. You can also manually remove the non-LO entries from the list. I am really sorry for any inconvenience or frustration this might have caused and I am also very thankful to the great people in our forums, #linuxoutlaws on Freenode and our identi.ca group for their help in figuring this out. Also thanks to everyone who emailed telling us the site was broke, we got a lot of those as well.

And so we prove once again that the life of an outlaw is everything, but it ain’t boring…

28th June - 4th July, Birmingham UK

Some time ago I heard about the EuroPython 2009 Conference and it seemed really interesting. Even more so because it’s being held in Birmingham, UK; somewhere I can get to reasonably easily. I contacted the organisers and we discussed my coming along to cover the event for the podcast. They were great and even made us official media partners, how cool is that? In my infinite wisdom (sic) though I decided to leave it a few weeks before beginning to really promote the event, and me being me, in that intervening time, I forgot. #facepalm

Fortunately, the event isn’t on until the end of next month so I hope some of you will still have plenty of time to book. Particularly if you live in the UK. There will be tutorials and classes in Python available, along with some great keynote speakers like Cory Doctorow and Professor Sir Tony Hoare, to name just two. There will also be many other great things to do and I think it could be really valuable to anyone who develops in Python, even those just looking to get started. I’m a big fan of Python and I make no secret of that. I also love Django (the Python web framework) for rapid and effective web development. The EuroPython event website is actually written in Django, so they immediately won points from me there. Without any further ado (waffling on my part) I should get to the vital event details:

EuroPython 2009 – 28th June to 4th July, Birmingham, UK

There’s even a promotional video (download link) on the website, along with much more information

It should be a lot of fun and I hope some of you will make it along. You can come and say hello to me as well of course, though that may be less of a promotional incentive. I’ll stay out of your way if you’d prefer So get booking now if you’re interested, the Early Bird sign up rate finishes very soon!! Hence my timing FAIL. Get it while you can and I hope to see you in sunny Birmingham in the summer.

Dan

(WARNING: Actual sun of the warm yellow variety may not be included, see pack for details)

As I have briefly talked about on Episode 87, I have spend the last month or so remastering Xubuntu according to my personal tastes. I build the final .iso image yesterday and installed the first version of Katian on my main machine this morning. It still has a few bugs, but it’s mostly working and so I have released it earlier today as Katian Crow 0.00 — in case you are wondering, the distro itself got its name the same way that Debian did and the first release series is named after Crow, Adelai Niska’s henchman from the Firefly episode “The Train Job“. As suggested by this naming choice, we are talking about extremely unstable alpha software here. You are welcome to try it, but don’t blame me if your system looks like it went through a spaceship engine afterwards…

As I have said on the show, this isn’t really a distro and it isn’t really meant to be used by people other than me. It’s more about my personal choices in packages and desktop customisation than anything else and it is decidedly freedom-hating. It is also massively bloated, weighting in at around 976 MB, you could even call it Big Damn Linux in a way. I have learned a lot dabbling in creating this and will probably keep it up, if only to maintain my own versions for personal use. I am also looking at publishing a detailed howto article to document the process I’ve followed since a few people have expressed some interest in it. I will keep you posted on that endeavour. In the meantime, enjoy tinkering with the first release and file some bugs if you encounter any. Just remember to back up all of your stuff before downloading this!

openstreetmap.org

This is very, VERY last minute but we were contacted by some of the guys from OpenStreetMap about an event this weekend and I wanted to pass it on. We would have mentioned it on the show this week but unfortunately it was already too late by the time we heard. There’s a mapping party happening this weekend, 4-5th of April, in the Black Country, which isn’t at all as forboding as it sounds; in fact it’s a rather lovely place with some fine people, honest. It’s an area in the midlands of the United Kingdom – otherwise known as LugRadio country – and they hope to get as many people involved as possible improving OpenStreetMap data for it. The event is being held in The Public, West Bromwich and it’s sponsored by Cloudmade. So if you’ve got a bit of free time over the weekend, you’ve cut the grass, walked the dog and you’re kicking your heels. Why not have some fun and help map the area? You can find all the information you could need on their wiki. You don’t need any special skills, previous experience or equipment to get involved. The guys will sort you out, just turn up and say hello.

Apologies to our readers in other countries for whom this is probably a bit far to travel but you may be able to help OpenStreetMap map your area, wherever in the world that happens to be.

Thanks for reading and have a good weekend everyone,

Dan

Help Wanted

Hey folks, I’d like to take a quick moment to humbly ask for your help with something. I forget who said it orginally but as the great quote goes “ask not what your podcast can do for you, but what you can do for your podcast”. Ok so maybe I added the podcast bit, that wasn’t in the original quote but you get the point. A lot of people ask us how they can help with the podcast and there are many things you can do but I think I’ve come up with an idea which could offer people a cheap and easy way to help us. It doesn’t have to cost any more than a few minutes of your time and a bit of black printer ink… ok maybe some Bluetack or drawing pins too but that’s it honest!

The idea involves 4 simple steps:

1. Head to linuxoutlaws.com/wanted and download the PDF of our Wanted poster
2. Print it out
3. Stick it up somewhere: school, college, workplace or community centre. Anywhere you think interested people might see it
4. Lastly the most important step. Sit back and feel good that you helped us to spread the word

You can of course repeat these steps as many times as you like but we’re not expecting people to print 100 each and go fly posting them. You can if you want but just one is enough to make a difference. If everyone does one poster it could help us to promote the show massively.

Thanks everyone, you’re the best! Fab & I appreciate the kindness, generosity and good humour of all our listeners. You make doing the show a pleasure for us

Dan

As you are probably aware of, I had set up a Laconica instance for the podcast community quite some time ago. I was very ethusiastic about Laconica when I first heard about it and I still think it is a great idea and a very important Free Software project. I have, however, decided to shut down our instance of it at linuxoutlaws.net over the next week.

After debating this for quite some time and soliciting opinions on the forums, Dan and I have come to the conclusion that it is too much work to maintain the installation compared to the amount of use it gets. Don’t get me wrong, Laconica is great, but the administration and maintenance features are still very rudimentary — it is only in version 0.7.x after all. If this was the only site I had to maintain, I’d keep it up, but as it stands now this is taking a lot of time away from doing the podcast and dealing with the main site and the forums. On top of that, Dan has always primarily used identi.ca anyway and I have consolidated my microblogging presence over at that site as well. If you do not want to use identi.ca, there are quite a few other Laconica instances out there (naturally, all of them give you a lot more Freedom than, say, Twitter), so it is not like the federated model is at stake here.

In case anyone wants to get hold of their user data, please email me and I will be happy to send you an SQL dump of the public data straight from the database. I really hope you understand my reasoning for doing this. As you might have guessed, I feel really uncomfortable about shutting down the service, but at the moment I see no other alternative and I think it will be better for the podcast and our community in the long run. As I have said, I am still supporting Evan and the project 100% and I will keep a close eye on its development. It was a lot of fun playing around with the software I just think it doesn’t make much sense for us to keep the service running at the moment.

As I write this, I have just release Episode 81 of the show — this one was a big shakey since we had some unforseen problems during the recording. We streamed the show live again, but discovered afterwards that Dan had lost about two minutes of the recording somewhere in the middle. I got really scared when he told me this via IM, but Dan being the audio wiz that he is, managed to sync the files up flawlessly and fix the problem by re-recording some bits and glueing it all back together with duct tape and some chewing gum. And much like travelling in the Millenium Falcon,a little on-the-fly patch job does not detract at all from the end result. In fact, you would be hard pressed to detect it, even if I told you the exact location of our little slip-up. It turned out to be a quite marvellous show in the end.

I am really glad we could recover this one, there shouldn’t be that much difference between what we streamed live and the final podcast result. I do hope you enjoy the show and rest assured that we always do our best to bring you a show every week. It should be clear that the podcast itself always has priority before anything else we do which includes the live streaming version and I hope you all appreciate that. Anyway, disaster averted, get on with your podcast listening!