Thoughts of a Traveling Geek
Posts tagged Fedora
Become an Advisor to the Fedora Board!
Aug 13th
One of the things I love about Fedora is it’s dedication to transparency. In today’s Fedora Board Meeting, it came to our attention that we haven’t done a good job of letting people know how they can communicate with the Fedora Board. I took the action item to try to rectify that, and one way I can do that is via this blog post. 
The best way to ask a question of the Fedora Board is to join the advisory board mailing list. The list is open to all interested parties, and serves as a place where the Fedora Board and the community at large can make suggestions, ask questions, and foster discussion on a wide variety of topics that involve the Fedora Board. Most of the items that the Board gets involved in are discussed on the list[1]. As the chairman of the Board, I also use the topics from the advisory-board list to set the agenda for the our weekly Board meetings.
Another way to interact with the Fedora Board is through our public IRC meetings. The schedule shows the exact dates and times of our IRC meetings, and our meetings typically happen every two weeks or so. The meetings take place in the #fedora-board-meeting channel on the Freenode IRC network.
If you have a question, comment, or concern for the Fedora Board, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We value your input!
[1] There are a few private matters that aren’t discussed on the advisory-board mailing list. These typically involve situations where important relationships would be damaged if details were made public, such as personnel issues or fiduciary matters. As a Board, we’re very sensitive to these issues, and try to be as open and transparent about them as is reasonable.
FISL, Day 2
Jul 24th
Day two of my trip to FISL (Friday) started out with me waking up a bit late and scrambling to get ready on time. Rafael kindly picked several of us up at the hotel and drove us to the conference. I spent the morning talking with people both in the Fedora booth and in several of the other booths around the show. I also spent some time in a press interview with Linux Magazine. For lunch, we ate at the buffet and I got to experience the famous banana sushi first hand.
-
- A Fedora Banner
-
- A big grin from Dennis Gilmore after his presentation
In the afternoon, I cheered Dennis Gilmore on as he gave a presentation on RPM packaging in Portuguese. He doesn’t speak much Portuguese (yet!), but he was brave enough to translate his talk into Portuguese and read it as best he could. After Dennis did his talk, I ran over to the large presentation room for my presentation. I talked about how Red Hat and Fedora work together, how Fedora makes a good upstream for RHEL, and how Fedora works with upstream communities. Several hundred people attended the presentation, and I thought it was well received.
After the presentation, I ran into a Brazilian friend of mine doing VoIP work here in Brazil. We chatted for an hour or so about various topics including Fedora, VoIP, and cultural differences between Portuguese-speaking and Spanish-speaking countries in Latin American. After another stint at helping out in the booth, we all ran back to the conference hall for a great presentation on SELinux from Douglas and Marcelo from Red Hat. By the time their presentation was done, it was 9:00pm and we were all hungry. Luckily, some of the Fedora folks had organized a pizza party, so we weren’t hungry for long!
FISL, Day 1
Jul 23rd
Day one of the FISL conference (at least for me, as I arrived on Thursday) was mostly spent in airplanes. My flights took me from Dulles to Orlando to São Paulo to Porto Alegre. (Nothing is better than having a flight attendant wake you up at 3:00am to feed you and airline dinner, right?) When I landed in Porto Alegre, Leo and Rafael were kind enough to pick me up and drive me to the FISL conference. I was impressed with the size of the conference and the variety of the booths.
The Fedora booth at FISL
I have to admit — I was a bit stunned when I saw the Fedora booth. It looked absolutely gorgeous! I had no idea when I walked in whether we were sharing Red Hat’s booth or would have our own; little did I know that we’d have the best looking booth at the show. The location of the booth was perfect — we were right on the corner where people would pass by on their way to the big lecture hall.
After shaking hands with the Fedora ambassadors and volunteers and saying hello to the folks in the Red Hat booth, I gave a quick impromptu speech (in Spanish, by request) to the crowd that had gathered around our booth, and then sat back and watched as Toshio gave a great talk on packaging RPMs for Fedora, with a lot of additional explanation in Portuguese from Rafael and Leo. (We had several other presentations right there in the booth as well over the course of the day.) At that point, we had about fifty people gathered around the booth, so we handed out media and stickers and helped answer questions.
Crowd around the Fedora booth
After the show wound down for the day, we went to dinner at a traditional Brazilian churrascaria. The food was delicious — I ate too much food, and forgot how much I like the Brazilian soft drink called Guaraná. It was the perfect way to end the day. On the way back to the hotel, I got to see a bit of the city of Porto Alegre.
First day on the job
Jul 12th
My T510 laptop
As many of you may well know, today was my first day as a new employee of Red Hat and as the new Fedora Project Leader. I spent the day today in “new hire orientation” meetings at Raleigh, which were interesting. I was impressed by how much time Red Hat took to make sure the new recruits understood the open source way, and where Fedora fits in the mix of things. Some of the highlights for me were Max Spevack explaining open source communities and their importance, and Michael Tiemann (one of my favorite speakers to listen to) giving an excellent presentation on how open source can be a transforming tool for information technology departments. We also spent time filling out paperwork and making sure we had all our ducks in a row, and ended the day with an ice-cream social. I’ll be in new hire orientation tomorrow as well, and then head directly to FUDCon Santiago tomorrow evening. Paul Frields has graciously agreed to help me get up to speed in my new role, which I especially appreciate since I’ll spend the next two weeks on the road.
This evening I also was able to start getting Fedora installed on my new laptop. I opted for a Lenovo T510, mostly because it had been years since I’d used a new ThinkPad, and I wanted to try something that was likely to be a bit outside of the mainstream. (I have this weird habit of finding the oddball hardware bugs in Fedora. Some people go out of their way to make sure their hardware is going to be compatible. As for me, I throw Fedora on weird hardware and see what breaks. Call me crazy…) This laptop is a bit bigger than most people would want to carry around, but I’m happy with it.
Paul Frields was kind enough to take a first stab at getting the laptop setup while I was still in my meetings. Apparently there’s an issue with the new VT-d feature (Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O) of the Intel chipsets, as Paul had to disable it in the BIOS to keep anaconda from crashing with what appeared to be memory-corruption issues. Once we got that tracked down and disabled in the BIOS, I threw Fedora on the machine and it’s been running great ever since. So far, everything has worked great. I was a little worried about how well this new wirless chip would be supported, but it’s working very well. I was even able to setup a quick ad-hoc wireless network for Paul to be able to connect his laptop through mine. Suspend/resume worked out of the box, as did the Nouveau driver. There’s a bit of funkiness with the reporting of the second battery, but I’ll do some more troubleshooting on that over the next few days and file a bug.
The day ended with an excellent sushi dinner (thanks Paul!), and now I’m back at the hotel getting more software installed on the laptop and working on presentations for FUDCon Chile and FISL. All in all, I can’t complain about my first day on the job!
Wearing a new hat
Jul 7th
Well, it appears that the news is out about my new role in the Fedora community. (I apologize for the slow response — I was at Scout Camp with my son last week when Paul made the announcement, and have been busy tying up loose ends at my current employer.) I’m very humbled to be able to follow in the footsteps of some very fine leaders such as Greg and Max and Paul. I’m sure many of you are wondering “Who is this guy?” and “What is his vision for Fedora?”
First, let me introduce myself. My name is Jared. In short, I’m a big Linux nerd. (How does that analogy go? “Nerd is to geek as Star Trek is to Star Wars.” Or did I get it backward again?) I’ve been very lucky to have been employed by some great companies over the past several years — companies that had the vision of how to both use and contribute to open ecosystems. Most recently, I’ve been working for a company called Digium, which is the benevolent corporate sponsor of the Asterisk open source telecommunications platform. I’ve done both community relations and training work for Digium, and I learned many valuable lessons that I hope to use in my new role. Before working full-time on Asterisk, I spent a number of years doing large-scale Linux systems administration and network operations for a large web analytics company. When I’m not on the road, I’ll be working remotely from my home in Virginia. My wife and I used to joke that maybe I’d get lucky and get to work on free software when I retire; luckily for me, the opportunities came much sooner!
I’ve been using Fedora ever since it was announced, and was using Red Hat Linux before then. I very passionately believe in the freedom and community that Fedora represents, and want to do everything I can to further the cause. Over the past few years, I’ve gone from being an end user of Fedora to being a contributing member of the Fedora team. I’ve come to learn that our greatest asset within Fedora is our vibrant community of users and contributors. More specifically, I love the way our community can help individuals rise to their fullest potential and become leaders. I’m a firm believer that if you give someone the tools they need and a little bit of vision and then get out of their way, they’ll come up with solutions you never dreamed of. I’ve seen it happen time and time again in different open source communities, and each time it gives me more hope for the future.
Please bear with me over the next few weeks as I wrap my head around this job and start to articulate my goals and visions for Fedora. I’m sure there are a lot of things for me to learn, and I look forward to sharing some of my knowledge along the way as well. I’ll be on the road for the next few weeks (another blog post about that shortly!), but I’ll be blogging more while on the road. You can also catch me via email or IRC. (My IRC nick is “jsmith”.)
Here’s to a bright future for Fedora!
