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

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.

Just a quick note wishing you all a happy holiday and a good start into the new year. I am leaving for my parents’ place in Duisburg tomorrow and after a quick stopover back home to release the final episode for 2008, I will be on my way to the Netherlands to spend the “time between years” in Zeeland like I did last year. I hope to see all of you refreshed and ready for more Linux Outlaws action in 2009!

Remember, we will skip the first week of 2009 but will be right back in the swing of things around the 10th, so stay subscribed to those feeds!

As I’ve mentioned on the show before, I will be attending CeBIT, the world’s biggest technology tradeshow, which takes place in Hannover March 4 – 9. They were so kind to provide me with a press pass for the whole show and I’m looking to get some Linux and F/OSS related interviews as well as a “live” report or two from the show floor recorded. I’ll be there at least two whole days, so if you are looking to attend CeBIT and want to meet up or if you have any suggestions for stuff you want us to cover, please contact me or post in the forums.

We will most likely include these segments in Episode 27 as Dan will edit 26 while I’m at the show (if everything works according to plan) so you can look forward to that.

As I mentioned on the show, I visited Berlin over the weekend — which is my excuse for being way too late with the show notes this week. I also promised to link to some photos of the trip, so here they are. I do have to admit that I have used Lightroom to process these which is one program I was never able to find an adequate open source replacement for, forcing me to keep using it in VMware on Ubuntu.

I hope you will nonetheless enjoy these pictures and maybe leave a comment or two on my Flickr page.

Dan and I recorded Episode 3 yesterday. While Dan was in his usual place at his home in Merseyside, things were a bit more complicated on my end. Here’s a little glimpse behind the scenes of the chaos that I call “producing a podcast”: I am currently staying at my parent’s place in Duisburg and I had brought my recording setup with me to hastily assemble it in my old bedroom for the recording of the show. In absence of suitable furniture to put all the stuff onto, I spend over an hour sitting on the floor amidst a great chaos of cables, having the microphone propped up on a chair to talk into — it wasn’t comfortable at all, I tell you. If you click on the image to the left you can see the whole mess in all its glory. The things I do for this project…

On top of all that I also had trouble with Skype. I couldn’t for the life of me get the damn thing to accept the microphone input from the mixer. Since I could record fine but Dan wouldn’t be able to hear me, I had to use an USB headset with a second mic to get Skype to send my voice signal to Dan. That’s why I’m wearing headphones and a headset around my neck on the picture. What a mess! I have no idea why I had this problem now all of a sudden since everything used to work fine for weeks beforehand but maybe I made a mistake connecting it all back together this time. Anyhow, we recorded a great show and as soon as I’ve got it edited (probably by Monday evening) I’m putting it out.

Update:

In other news, this site is now also available under the .net, .org & .de variations of the domain name, enabling me to pull a Dvorak and plug it as “linuxoutlaws-dot-org-slash-blog” whenever I feel like it. Well, that’s about as much features as I can come up with at the moment…