Day two at SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) began way too early as I had not received enough sleep. Of course this is a Linux conference; who really gets enough sleep during these things?
Ben had already setup the Fedora table in the conference area of the hotel so I helped with answering the questions of passers-by and handing out the F14 media that no one really wanted because "didn't you just release F15?". Of course we had just released F15 a couple of weeks before but the media that had been ordered had decided to vacation in Salt Lake City at a UPS distribution center. Ben had checked and noticed that it was on the way but he was wary as to if it was going to arrive before we left. Luckily the hotel called him around 10AM to say that UPS had just delivered a box for him at the front desk and F15 media was put on the table for everyone to procure. I was able to snag a few copies of each DVD (32-bit installation, 64-bit installation, and the cool new multi-desktop 32/64-bit live DVDs) for my LUG (TWUUG).
There were several talks I wanted to attend. One was "Intro to Puppet" as I have high hopes of installing several VMs at home that I want to not have to individually manage and with the number of servers at work continuing to increase perhaps I can learn something that I can use to make my life easier there as well. After the introduction I have to say that I really like what Puppet does and I hope to work with it at home in hopes that I wll become competent enough to roll it out at work. Only problem is that you have to build your servers from scratch with Puppet as it won't go out to an existing server and help bring them under control.
Another great talk was given by Thomas Cameron of Red Hat. The topic was SELinux (one of my favorite tools in Linux) and he did an excellent job explaining how to make SELinux work for you instead of fighting you. I'm going to have to see if my notes make any sense as he was throwing so much information that was note worthy and I'm sure there is no order to my writing.
I find that keynote speakers are always very interesting and entertaining to listen to so I try not to miss their talks. Spot kept this tradition up with his talk on how we all fail a little and how we can get better when working with FOSS projects (his talk was derived from a blog post he made in May of 2009). Tom, I only have one word to say to you about your presentation... Cloud!
The rest of the day was spent talking with users and contributors, getting ideas for my next big project, and answering questions that people had about Fedora, documentation (Linux and Fedora), and just generally socializing. Around supper time a gang (or is it a flock?) of us ventured out on the streets and descended upon "A Taste of Spartinburg". After realizing that none of us really had enough cash to get more than a sampling of food we turned our attention to one of the nearby restaurants. An Irish pub was selected and after putting two long tables together we consumed food and beverages before heading back out on the streets.
After returning to the hotel Jared and I decided that hacking on some documentation was more our speed. Deciding to resurrect the Documentation Guide we wrote up an outline, attempted to pull anything useful from the previous guide that was many years old, and started populating the chapters. Somewhere around one o'clock in the morning we decided that we had done enough damage and headed to bed. It was probably a good thing as reviewing what I had written showed that I was mostly asleep during the last few sections of text.
SELF Day Two was definitely productive and is why I enjoy going to these conferences.
