Get to know a Fedora Ambassador or user.

More to blame on MooDoo

Name: Ben Williams

IRC Nickname: Southern_Gentlem, VileGent

IRC Channels : #fedora, #fedora-ambassadors, #fedora-ops, #fedora-unity, #fedora-social on irc.freenode.net

Ohio Linuxfest 2009

This is my Ambassador report for Ohio Linuxfest.
I want to thank Pascal Calarco, Jason Fenner, and Jamie Williams for coming and help working at the table.

From the reports i have gotten back Ohio Linuxfest had attendance of 1600.

This is a great event and I hope to represent the Fedora Project here again in the future.

Pics of the Table
http://www.flickr.com/photos/southern_gentlem/sets/72157622468487306/

Week i hope not to relive again

This week has been very stressful.

My mother had open-heart surgery Again on Monday. (yes she is getting better day by day)

I was fun sitting in the Lounge showing people f11 running on my Acer Aspire One to people who have never seen linux running on a computer

This Weekend is Ohio LinuxFest. I will be there at the Fedora Table

I hope to see you there.

Time to address the needs of the community

In a recent blog post  Matt Domsch bought up the info what install cds downloads seem to be dyeing off.

This may be the case. but Matt data comes from the people going to the Main Fedora Project site and downloading from there, and does not have any infomation

from where people went directly to the mirror of their choice and downloaded.  My call for cool heads lay in this question?

There are people downloading the CD install media therefore there is a community need for such media.

My good friend and co Fedora Unity member Kanarip stated that if the Fedora project did not want to meet that need that we would as we have in the past.

This seems to have upset some people in the Fedora project so much as someone currently running for Fesco to even suggesting

"Just drop support for split media from Anaconda,

then they won't be able to do it without changing Anaconda,

 at which point they can't use the Fedora name anymore."

Which I really find to be the most petty childish reaction for

someone running for a Fedora election.

We are here because of our community, the downloads show that there is a need for cd install media

even if it is has dropped off over the past year.

The Needs of the Community comes first, If some members of the Fedora Community dont want to fill that need,

they should not tie and bind the hands of those who are willing to provide that need

**getting off my soap box**

SELF 2009

This weekend I went to the Southeast LinuxFest in Clemson SC.

As this was the 1st of hopefully many more to come, As per Paul’s Blog I heard that they did break 500 attendees (not bad for a bunch of Southernerss )

Friday June 12th: arrived at hotel about 4pm checked in to the hotel ( unlike others who where waiting for a room to be cleaned mine was ready).

After the unload the car routine, I went downstairs and found that SELF had check-in for the convention (+1 on thinking ahead) found David Nalley and got them info I needed to find my way to the site on Saturday (and what time i needed to be there).

Saturday june 13th:

OMG 6:30 AM on a Saturday is toooo dang early , got up went down and had breakfast ( and pleasantly surprised they even had hot food (bisquits, gravy, eggs, sausage as well as the ceral, muffins, coffee and juice affair)) and load the car with the Fedora East Coast Event box and head for the site.

Arrived at the Site at roughly 8 AM found where our table was started setting up (David Nalley had left me a good supply of schwag since he was working as Convention staff).

We had the Table setup and running by 9 AM and people where filtering thru looking at the XO of course and I had my 2 personal Computers set up one with f11 and the other with F10. and initially was handing the f10 media.  Fedora buttons and the new Fedora Tattoos made their debut and seemed to go over well (Note: at future events somehow put up signage that they are tattoos and not stickers) Later on Clint Savage showed up with freshly pressed F11 Media. Major Kudos go out to Mrs Stabbymc for baking and bring 200 Toll house cookies with Fedora Blue M&M’s for the table.

I was able to go to Greg’s Talk which as always are fun and very informative.

5PM I started packing up the table

ALL in all it was a great time was had by all at Southeast Linuxfest.

It was great working with Ian on the the table for the majority of the day,  a Big Thank You go to Clint for bringing the media, and giving us breaks for food.

Pics: That was the one thing i forgot to bring was a camera but others will be posting later

Yet the continueing saga of Jigdo vs Torrents

I like Jigdo and I have since i found out about it a couple years ago.

Today it was time for a jigdo vs torrent battle on the Fedora Unity F10-20090210-i386 respins

These Tests were all performed on the same machine, same network etc….

I downloaded the jigdo file from spins.fedoraunity.org and used the following command:
time jigdo-lite Fedora-Unity-20090210-10.jigdo
press 7 fro the i386 dvd and enter twice and let it run

when it finished I pressed Control-C and got the following output:
real 32m3.000s
user 2m14.458s
sys 2m59.670s

ok time for the torrent
i grabbed the torrent file from spins.fedoraunity.org and issued the time bittorrent command

after 45 minutes I took this pic and then stopped the torrent.

I want you to notice that I am not playing in tricks the bittorrent was able share and the ports where open for the bittorrent.

hmmm 32 Minutes for the Jigdo to complete verses the Torrents 45 minutes in and was only 6.1% done.

This is why I perfer Jigdo to useing Torrents.

YMMV

Meet my New little Friend

This weekend we were in the local wallyworld and we noticed that they had a Acer Aspireone Laptops.

The Battleaxe has been looking for a small lightweight laptop so we bought one.

as you can see compared to my normal laptop it is one-third the size (and at about 3lbs, 1/3 the weight as well)

The Good news!!!!

I installed Fedora 10 using a LIve USB and everything appears to work out of the box.

I just do not understand,

For those who do not know me, I am a long time ‘resident’ in the #fedora channel, helping anyone I can with Fedora.
and One of the most asked questions is “Why are the Fedora 10 Sha1sum files  not on the Fedora Website?”

The answer is they are there, just not easily found.

If someone goes to the

http://fedoraproject.org (1st level)

click  “Get Fedora” (Second level)

click  “Show Me all the Download options in one page” (Third level)

click “After downloading an ISO, verify it.” (Fouth level)

click  the arch of your choice for the sha1sum (Fifth Level)

I consider this a problem for new linux users who have learned they need to verify their downloads but didnt download the sha1sum file from the website they downloaded the isos from and or want to verify the sha1sum that is on a mirror site to make sure it is valid.

I just do not understand why the sha1sums files are not linked directly off of the Get Fedora webpage in some intuitive way like
a link saying Sha1sums going straight to the arch selection page for the sha1sums.

Please someone explain the reasoning for burying the sha1sum so deep in the website?

(yes, I have posted a simulair questions to the website mailing list as well https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-websites-list/2008-December/msg00031.html)

Mom Surgery and Fedora

The Monday of Thankgiving week my mother had Open Heart surgery (she is getting better every day thank you)

While sitting in the Lounge waiting for time to go back to see her (15 minutes every hour), I was sitting there with my laptop doing the ususal hanging out in the #fedora channel or IM my wife for had to work most of the week while i was off. One of the other family members saw the Fedora sticker on my laptop and started a conversation, He said he wanted to try fedora but at home he only really had dailup connection, I said thats no problem i pulled out a 1gb usb key, used livecd tools and made a liveusb.

I handed him the key and he fired it up in his laptop and was nicely impressed.

As the Scouts would say “Be Prepared” and you never will know when you will get a chance to help spread Fedora

Fedora Image on a Pumpkin, and a new user

This past week because of Halloween, one of the Regional Ambassadors John Rose craved the Fedora emblem in to pumpkin and posted a picture . (link http://rose.public.iastate.edu/pumpkin-2.jpg ) Thinking this picture as cool i made it the background for my desktop. (link http://noname.math.vt.edu/Fedoraunity/Screenshot.png ). My Family goes to the local Denny’s about every weekend and I always take my computer (free wireless afterall) While I was there, I usually jump on Irc or look something up online (nothing that requires me to enter passwords by hand). After a little while the gentleman behind me asks me what I was using since he could tell I wasnt using Vista. This gave me the perfect opportunity to tell about the advantages of Linux and of Fedora being open source alternatives to MS Vista. When i had finished the gentleman asked me where he could get Fedora. I reached in my backpack and handed him a Livecd and the Latest Fedora Unity f9 Re-spin ( http://spins.fedoraunity.org/spins ). Gave the gentleman my contact info and told him if he had any problems to please contact me.

ben