UbuCon @ Atlanta Linux Fest 2009

On and off the last few months, we have been thinking about having an UbuCon as part of Atlanta Linux Fest (ALF).We struggled with the notion that an UbuCon would make  ALF seem biased towards Ubuntu, which was not our intention. Even though the Georgia LoCo is doing most of the heavy lifting, we didn’t want to make it uncomfortable for other distributions to participate.

After lots of hemming and hawing, Amber Graner took charge and decided to run with UbuCon Atlanta. In hindsight, it should have been a no-brainer. Looking at the presentations, there will be lots of  speakers who are part of the Ubuntu community, and plenty of individuals from neighboring LoCos will be attending. Why not take the opportunity for various parts of the community to come together, learn, teach, share experiences, and most importantly, have fun?

UbuCon will be run like an unconference. On the day of ALF, there will be a whiteboard, where community members can sign up to lead a session on anything Ubuntu related. But if you already have an idea of what you want to talk about, sign up here.

Is Your Hardware Ready for Karmic?

Several members of the Ubuntu Kernel Team are going to be on hand to help determine if your hardware will work with the upcoming Ubuntu 9.10 release. They will have custom built USB sticks that can be booted and used to run a test suite. This will not touch the hard disk and will let users know what of the new kernel/hardware features will work on their machines, like KMS.

Live Hack Session

Interested in learning how to hack drivers? The Kernel Team will be running a live hack session to show you how. Using a USB dongle that is a thermometer and a “shell” driver, users will be taken through writing the drivers, compiling it, and running it.

Hotels

If you are visiting Atlanta for this event, there is a block of hotel rooms being held ALF. To get the best rates, they should be booked by September 1st. To find out more, see here.

To find out more about Atlanta Linux Fest 2009, visit http://atlantalinuxfest.org.

With less than 2 months till Atlanta Linux Fest 2009, we are close to finalizing the list of talks.

There are two talks that I’d like to point out: Rikki Kite’s Her PR Problem/Tooting the Horns of Women in Open Source and Don McMorris’s Evergreen – the FOSS ILS behind GPLS. Rikki will be talking about positive steps women can take to promote themselves and the advantages of promoting the work of women. Evergreen is open source software that helps library users find materials, and helps libraries manage, catalog, and circulate those materials.

One of the things we are in the process of working out is having a mini PostgreSQL conference as part of ALF. Possibly 6 or 7 sessions devoted to PostgreSQL. Nothing is set in stone yet, but hopefully we will be able to pull it off.

Amber Graner was in town today, locking down hotel rates for ALF 2009 and 2010, and a potential Ubuntu User Conference. Amber is one of the reasons ALF will rock!

To find out more about Atlanta Linux Fest 2009, visit http://atlantalinuxfest.org.