UserGroups
Introducing: Ogden Area Linux User Group (OALUG)
Open source enthusiasts in the Weber and Davis counties have a local user group they may participate in. The Ogden Area Linux User Group, or OALUG, meets in-person the last Tuesday of every month at 7:00pm in the Weber County Main Library. Directions and a map to the meeting location are located on the OALUG website.
OALUG also has an active mailing list which can be used by members seeking answers to questions, suggestions when trying to solve a problem, or just shooting the bull with like-minded geeks.
Seth House, current president of OALUG, said “The Ogden Area Linux Users Group (OALUG) is a group of professionals who share a love and a passion for Linux, regardless of distribution. The group serves Weber, Davis, and Morgan counties. We welcome absolutely anyone who is interested in Linux, or Free and Open Source Software, to participate and help run the group.” If you are interested in being a part of the OALUG, simply subscribe to the mailing list or show up to a meeting!
Update: We made a couple of errors in this post. OALUG meets at the Weber County Main Library (not Weber State Library) and we had the link to their website incorrect. These errors have been fixed.
Posted by Doran Barton on August 7, 2008 in Keynotes, UserGroups
If you plan on Attending UTOSC! Read this!
Its the last day for early bird registration for UTOSC, <http://2008.utosc.com>. After today, prices go up to $100 ($50 w/LUG discounts).
Register with eventbrite today! <http://utosc2008.eventbrite.com>
See you all there!
Posted by Clint Savage on August 7, 2008 in Community, Conference, Events, UserGroups
PLUG BBQ: The Aftermath
The party was scheduled from 12-2pm, and while we intended to arrive at around 11:30 to get the grills going for a 12pm start, we didn’t get there until just before noon. As we arrived, it was discovered that while we had obtained briquets for the bbq, no matches were obtained, so I made a quick call.
<Emily>: Hello?
<Me>: Its Clint, I forgot matches, are you coming over to the bbq soon?
<Emily>: Yeah, we’re just leaving now to go to the store, we’ll be 10 minutes.
Mind you, this is at noon. Luckily, nobody had arrived as of yet, standard Utah tardiness was a benefit this time. decided to go get her dog and left me alone at the park to wait.
And wait…. (12:15pm)
And wait…. (12:45pm)
UNTIL … (about 12:50pm)
Finally, in the distance, I could see a couple walking toward me with a couple kids in tow. And so the party began with the arrival of the Ellis family.
After a good bit of hanging out with them, Emily arrived, along with others shortly thereafter. The party started to rock and before long, food was cooking, people were eating and geeks were being ignored by their wives.
We saw the results of spinal surgery.
Ben Payne had spinal surgery
We enjoyed a little boy and his creamsicle experience
Little Noah Rasmussen loves his treats
Oh yeah!
People played on their ‘puters
Heartsbane is enjoying the power
And more…
More Photos available at flickr
Fun was had by all and even a little hardware swapping took place.
Hope to see you all next year as Utah Open Source plans to sponsor the PLUG bbq in late June when the weather is a bit cooler.
Cheers,
Clint
Posted by Clint Savage on August 4, 2008 in Community, Events, Parties, UserGroups
PLUG BBQ Today at Noon
So with all of the announcing and craziness of the Utah Open Source Conference, we’ve neglected to share with you all about the PLUG BBQ tomorrow at noon. It will be lots of fun there will be a the traditional hardware swap. We’ll also be bringing some boardgames to play, so come and enjoy yourself.
Bring your own meat (BYOM), a side dish for everyone to share and we’ll have the grills going strong at noon so you can throw it on and enjoy a burger, chicken or the almighty Steak you’ve been preparing since the beginning of the summer.
You can sign up for an item to bring from this list if you like.
Date: Saturday, August 2, 2008
Time: 12pm-2pm (though some will be there at 11am firing up the grills)
Location: Scera Park, Red Pavilion, look for the Utah Open Source Banner
Map: http://tinyurl.com/plugbbq
See you all there!
Clint
Posted by Clint Savage on August 2, 2008 in Community, Events, UserGroups
Introducing the Provo Linux User Group (PLUG)
This is the first of many articles to come introducing our readers to the organizations associated with Utah Open Source. Today, we bring you one of the oldest Linux user groups in existence, let alone in Utah: the Provo Linux User Group (PLUG).
PLUG was first formed in 1994 by two then-students at BYU, Thayne Harbaugh and Mike Handy. Thayne and Mike had wanted to form an on-campus student organization for enthusiasts of Linux, but were unable to find a faculty member willing to sponsor its creation. Undaunted, they created PLUG as an off-campus organization.
This was during the early days of Linux and the Internet. The fact the plug.org domain name was available is one example of how early this was; The Intel Pentium CPU was brand new and most geeks were running 386 and 486 CPUs with less than 1GB of hard drive space; Internet service was still a novelty and most connections were made over serial modems at 9600 bps to 14.4Kbps.
The Linux community was young, still driven mostly by volunteers coordinating through online groups. However, 1994 would be the year Red Hat, SuSE, and Caldera would all release the first versions of their respective distributions, thus kicking off the fast-paced commercial Linux distribution race.
PLUG began holding its meetings the second Wednesday of every month — a tradition that has stood the test of time — at various venues around Utah Valley including the Canyon Park campus, The Palace, and at CEDO.
After the first five years of PLUG, the original founders were either moving out of the area, getting busy with work-related (Linux, of course) tasks, or just feeling it was time to pass the torch. Jason “Jayce^” Hall suddenly found himself holding said torch and carried PLUG through the next several exciting years until 2007 when Jason stepped aside to become more involved with UTOS and Ryan Simpkins took the helm.
Over the years PLUG has hosted several special engagements with impressive speakers such as John Terpstra and Steve French of the Samba project, Perl guru and O’Reilly author Damian Conway, and Miguel de Icaza of the Gnome project. Over the course of several Summers, PLUG has held annual barbecues for members and their families which also included surplus swap meets where members could trade or sell old hardware.
PLUG has a member mailing list which varies in the amount of traffic it gets. Most of the time, the list sees fairly low to moderate traffic, but occasionally will fill its members’ mailboxes with spurts of off-topic discussions. PLUG hosts archives of these highly intellectual discussions at http://plug.org/pipermail/plug.
The PLUG website is firmly located at http://www.plug.org/ and, as mentioned above, meets (with some very, very rare exceptions) the second Wednesday of each month at the Omniture building in the Canyon Park campus.
Posted by Doran Barton on July 15, 2008 in Community, Membership, UserGroups
PLUG May Meeting - MySQL
Date: May 14th, 2008
Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Location: Omniture, Inc.
Details: http://www.plug.org/
MySQL will be flying Jay Pipes (North American Community Relations Manager at
MySQL) in to Salt Lake on the 14th for the sole purpose of addressing PLUG
(and all other local SIGs). Please spread the word. Set your calendars. Blog
it. Spread it. Tell everyone.
To be clear: THIS WILL BE AN IN-DEPTH TECHNICAL PRESENTATION. Expect this to
be one of those killer, mind-bending, and deep technical presentations. The
kind that leaves you barley able to drive home. Jay will keep the presentation
as language agnostic as possible - and focus just on the SQL-fu Jay
specializes in. This is one presentation you don’t want to miss.
There will be prizes (books and MySQL swag). And we will have drinks. There
might be food, but don’t plan on it.
His bio:
Jay Pipes is the North American Community Relations Manager at MySQL.
Co-author of Pro MySQL (Apress, 2005), Jay has also written articles for Linux
Magazine and regularly assists software developers in identifying how to make
the most effective use of MySQL. He has given sessions on performance tuning
at the MySQL Users Conference, RedHat Summit, NY PHP Conference, OSCON, and
Ohio LinuxFest, amongst others. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife,
Julie, and his four animals. In his abundant free time, when not being
pestered by his two needy cats and two noisy dogs, he daydreams in PHP code
and ponders the ramifications of __clone().
-Ryan
— Books we have to give away:
- A book regarding Fedora.
- A “Head First” book from O’Reilly on SQL.
- Several very excellent “Pragmatic Programmers” books:
- Programming Ruby (very good)
- Java to Ruby
- Enterprise Integration with Ruby
- Agile Web Development with Rails
- Agile Retrospectives
- Practices of an Agile Developer
Posted by Clint Savage on May 8, 2008 in Community, Events, Meetings, UserGroups
Utah Open Source Foundation and Ubuntu Utah bring you a release party of gigantic proportion
Fedora 9 (Sulphur) will be released April 29, 2008
Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) will be released April 24, 2008
All are welcome to join in the celebration of newly released Fedora and Ubuntu distributions. Ubuntu Utah has been gracious to allow revelers from the Fedora camp join in with the Ubuntu Utah team. The entire event will be sponsored by the Utah Open Source Foundation who will also provide food.
FOOD IS FIRST COME FIRST SERVE, SO COME EARLY AND COME HUNGRY!
If you’ve never been to a release party, they are a blast, and this one proves to be nothing less than spectacular. In fact, Code Greene’s owner Mac Newbold has offered up his office (or rather playground) for us to hold our party. Code Greene has foosball, video games, pool, music and more for all to enjoy.
Why: Release of Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) and Fedora Sulphur (F9)
When: May 3, 2008, 6-8pm (or thereabouts)
Where: Code Greene, 44 Exchange Place Salt Lake City, UT 84111
Please RSVP via upcoming.org if you are participating.
Cheers,
Clint Savage / Aaron Toponce
UTOSF / Ubuntu Utah
Posted by Clint Savage on April 3, 2008 in Community, Events, Installfest, News, UserGroups
Utah Open Source Conference 2008: Location, Theme and Dates
For those of you waiting with bated breath, wait no longer. The Utah Open Source Conference volunteers have been hard at work year preparing an even more awesome conference for 2008.
Because 2007 was such a grand success, we’ve made some minor changes and improvements to help with a smoother conference. This year’s conference is at a different location and we’ve added a full day on Thursday.
The Utah Open Source Conference 2008 will be held at the Salt Lake Community College, Redwood Road campus August 28 - 30, 2008.
This years theme is HOWTO. The concept is that within the technology, education, community and business tracks, there will be plenty to talk about.
- HOWTOs will help others get started
- HOWTOs will help families use open source together
- HOWTOs will provide a stepping stone along the road to technology mastery
- HOWTOs will let those that are masters get together and make the products better.
These are just a few of the many things that HOWTO theme will accomplish during the Utah Open Source Conference (UTOSC) 2008.
The Salt Lake Community College Computer Science department is excited to be a sponsor of the 2008 conference and will be using it to improve students’ awareness and understanding of open source software.
The Utah Open Source Foundation is also re-dedicating itself to ensure the pricing structure remains reasonable for those who’d like to come and are on a budget. The pricing structure right now is tentative, but no major increases in the fees are planned for attendees.
We currently have a tentative plan on our wiki, so feel free to have a look. If you have suggestions, please join the chat anytime in the #utos channel on irc.freenode.net or email clints at utos dot org with your comments.
Watch closely over the next week for the Call for Papers, updates on the basic schedule, and the Call for Volunteers among other exciting announcements, including our keynote speakers.
See you all in August.
Clint Savage
Founder, Utah Open Source Foundation
Posted by Doran Barton on February 6, 2008 in Community, Conference, Events, News, UserGroups
Utah LUG Meetings: Feb 3-9, 2008
This week’s Local User Group meetings:
- Layton.rb - Feb 4, 7pm - Topic unavailable
- BYU UUG - Feb 7, 7pm - Basic DNS With Bind by Stuart Jansen
- Ubuntu Utah - Feb 9, 6pm - Debian/Ubuntu Packaging by Tim Riker
A special thanks goes out to TierFour for the streaming and podcast bandwidth to share these meetings. Please feel free to join the streaming discussion this week for the Ubuntu Utah meeting at http://stream.utos.org
Posted by Clint Savage on February 3, 2008 in Community, Meetings, Streaming, UserGroups
UTOS ConMan: Becoming Awesome!
The UTOS Confrence Manager or ConMan, is really coming along. Tonight’s HackNight didn’t last quite as long as last weekend, but there was some definite improvements.
One of the really nice improvements was the addition of the logo by James Hancock who’s really good with his inkscape skills. Other improvements included a better gui, backend administration, refactoring much of the user creation to better accommodate future enhancements.
One of the best features that has been added tonight was the blog functionality by Kevin Kubasik of GNOME fame. When a conference is upcoming and during the conference itself, this feature will be front and center. Nice work!
Things that are left include registration, including payments with google checkout, paypal or a merchant backend. Sponsor management is another, as well as schedules for volunteers, speakers, attendees and sessions, bofs and events.
I’m even sure there are items not yet considered above, but that’s the functionality we hope to have in place within the next few months. Feel free to download the project, and submit patches back to us anytime, we dig the help.
We’re looking forward to deploying the Call for Papers components tomorrow or Sunday in our official call for papers announcement, so keep your eyes peeled.
Cheers,
Clint
Posted by Clint Savage on February 2, 2008 in Community, Conference, Hackfests, UserGroups