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…