Rebel Zero

It’s been a while since I’ve actually done anything for RebelZero.com, so I’m re-booting things with some Ohio Linux Fest updates.

On day 1, the unofficial start of OLF with Ubucon among the few presentations tracks (IE: Medical, Early Penguins) began much like it did last year. I spent more time with the Early Penguins track than Ubucon. Much of Ubucon was a repeat of last year, which is not to say that’s bad but I wanted to experience other talks and learn something new. Ubucon is a wonderful day of getting to know Ubuntu’s Ohio Loco and Ubuntu’s approach to tackling Bug #1.

Beth Lynn Eicher gave the presentation about being Inside A Bug #1 Resolved Company which gave some fantastic insight about how much Linux has progressed within the professional community. A few members of the audience gave details about how the companies that they work for have been able to transition their services to F/OSS products.

From there I went to the Early Penguins room to listen through Clif Flynt‘s presentation about Writing Games With Tcl/Tk. Essentially in under an hour, we all went through a crash course of Tcl’s coding basics and walked through the creation of a simple game. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to code anything in any other language, so it was invigorating to get that creative itch scratched again.

Then came lunch at Barley’s across the street. They have a fantastic selection of in-house brewed beers. They also have great food and atmosphere, always feeling welcome whenever we go there.

Back to the conference, Mark Terranova gave an educational talk on So What Kind Of Cult Is Linux, Anyway? The insight is that as much as we dislike the strategies and goals of companies like Microsoft or Apple, much of the problems we perceive actually originates from the “fanboy” followers rather than the corporations they represent. That’s not to say there isn’t room for improvement. But you can compare that relationship to Linux community where we have avid followers of particular distributions or applications, the usual emacs vs. vim, Fedora vs. Ubuntu, Red Hat vs. Suse, etc.

Skipped the next hour to head back to the car, walk around Columbus and head back to Barley’s for another drink.

Linux For All by Edward Mokurai Cherlin with OLPC explained clearly that the initiative of giving every child in the world a laptop isn’t about technology but providing them the freedom to empower themselves, first by providing them the knowledge of the world, giving them the ability to connect to one another freely, and further to empower them with the ability to help shape the world by merging their culture with the rest of the information aware world.

Skipped the next hour to hit the bathroom, find connectivity to figure out was going on in the rest of the world, and grabbed a slice of cheesecake.

Friday’s keynote by the immortal Jon “maddog” Hall gave an entertaining presentation about the evolution of Linux from even before Linus Torvalds birth through to how it’s being implemented today with The Twentieth Birthday Of The Linux Kernel. The only person who could be more knowledgeable about Linux other than Jon Hall would be Linus. Everyone should get a chance to attend Jon’s presentation where ever he gives it as it’s entertaining and informative. I did my best to record it but connectivity here is lower than adequate, so I’ll post it later.

Right now I’m part way through Saturday’s presentations and the expo, so another update to follow.