I Must Be Dreaming
Two in a weekend? Y’all know I had to do it to ya.
Day Two
The day started humbly with my blog post yesterday and having an issue shutting down NomadBSD. Talk about that later. Had my Starbucks and some hotel breakfast (shout out to Best Western SeaTac, those omlets were dope). After I had overstayed my welcome in the dining hall, I went back and headed to Bellingham Library in hopes there would be some geekery going on. I arrived fairly early to the library. I think I just missed su || cd as I arrived.
Sitting down and starting to boot into Nomad, a gentleman pops over with, “What distro are you running?” Thus began a great talk on Nomad persistance and Nix impermanance. Thanks GalacticStarfish! Another gentleman pops up after I introduce myself as TGD with the second most interesting laptop of the evening, OpenSourceAccountant! Let me say, even though OSA’s Chromebook is nothing short of a disaster, it is a testament to making old hardware work for you. OSA - If that was your only laptop, hit me up, I might have a solution for you that isnt 16GB of onboard space!
After some really great conversation and learning about some really cool things, 1245 comes around and we all head down to the lecture room.
Lectures
Brentley, whats Next?
We kick things off with Chris giving a welcome and a slight history of his journies with the fest and Linux, and some technical difficulties. Wouldn’t be a tech conference without ’em, right? Brent had the first talk of the afternoon with a talk on What’s new at Nextcloud? Let me tell you, Nextcloud is getting some VERY cool features. From AI stuff to being able to build your own apps for NC, things look veru good. When the VODs come up, I will update this post with links to the talks. My two favorite things are being able to build your own apps for your own (and maybe others) usecases and Nextcloud’s Ethical AI journey. Being able to see that whatever AI you are using is more ethical than another is very useful to those of us that care about how an AI is being trained and I can appreciate that! Soon, you will be able to chat with Assistant, kind of like ChatGPT!
Carl on the Road
Carl George of RHEL and EPEL fame was up second with a great talk on how the EPEL team got to EPEL 9 and how they want to improve the process for EPEL 10! If you aren’t familiar, EPEL is, “Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux” These packages come from Fedora. Some packages that are in Fedora, just aren’t in Enterprise/RHEL, so the EPEL team helps with making those extra packages available! I don’t want to bore you with the details, but, when the videos become available, I will link them here.
Cloning is real!
While I didn’t get the gentleman’s name, next up was a great talk on using Clonezilla to make images of your disks for massive deployments or even just image backups. That would have come in handy two hours ago. This talk got me really looking forward to upping my backup game. Speaking of…
A Little Aside
Let’s go back in time two hours. I tried booting into Nomad and got an odd CAB error. Some googling led me to a failing disk. Mind you, this USB previous to 0600 this morning, was an old PNY USB2.0 device that had dof teeth marks in the housing. Was only a matter of time it would fail. I booted into Solus and repaired it, which fixed it for a bit, but, I think that drive finally kicked the bucket, RIP to a real old one.
Break time
During break, we meet Tyler, a gentleman that just downloads the show and listens in! We all had a rousing chat about our journies for a bit, then back to lecturing!
Are you a FED(ora)
After break, we got a speedrun of a session from Neal Gompa and Davide Cavalca who are doing the Penguin’s work by bringing Fedora to Mac’s M* platform! After Hector Martin brought Arch to the platform, it seemed anything was possible. I loved hearing about bringing Linux to Mac! Maybe this work will go further than M Hardware and maybe to the final Intel chips? That T2 chip is tricky.
All Your Packet Are Belong To Me
Alex Gavin was up fifth with a really neat Cyber Security type talk on capturing packets. The tech was really awesome and shows how you can use your hardware in a way that I didn’t know you could use it. No nefarity, please!
Bots, Please
Finally, Sam Groveman came up and demonstrated how a simple board game of coding robots with drawing cards could turn into a larger scale, Arduino-based, IRL web app game with robots! Learning by doing has always been a passion of mine, even if I give up because I go cross-eyed.
Now, JUST GET OUT
After the talks, there was a bit of socializing and moving over to Brandywine. Shout out to them! Their food was great, the space was quaint but amazing. Did I mention Nix yet? I sat at a table with Firecat and a few other gentlemen and we seen the COOLEST Nix setup. Did you know that you can make a bunch of Firefox profiles and make those profiles .desktop files? No? Me neither. He turned GNOME into what I would consider the PERFECT tablet setup on a Yoga machine.
In Closing
We were at Brandywine until close. If you are reading this before LUP, I will be on the show! Hopefully I get this built before the show.
Be kind to one another and remember - if you can find a group of like minded people and have that sense of community, do it. It will change your life.
Huge Aside
If the details are wrong, PLEASE correct me in the comments. What I know is that I met a ton of wonderful folks this weekend and y’all made me feel more welcome than I have in my entire life ever.
