Head over to the Talks category to get an over view of some of the presentations you’ll be seeing at ArchCon. Not all talk abstracts have been posted yet; the category will continue to be updated as abstracts come in.
Because of the delay in getting these summaries posted, I have extended the earlybird registration deadline to this Friday. Register now for only $100; your fee will help us cover Schwag for attendees, meals, and classroom rental.
Presented by Dan McGee
(Un)suprisingly, there are a lot of pieces that come together to keep a distro on its feet and active. Although Arch has one of the smaller development staffs of the “well-known” distros, we have a lot of projects under our belt that we maintain. These encompass everything from the homepage to the initscripts to our server repository management tools. This talk will attempt to showcase some of these projects and give a glimpse into the Arch underbelly.
You may also be interested in this talk if you are looking to contribute to Arch but aren’t sure where to start. Coming from a guy who became a developer due to his work on pacman, I hope it will also show how getting involved can earn you the respect of the current developers and eventually member status in a project.
Bio:
Dan is a software developer living in Chicago and has been an Arch developer for around three years. He is well known as a lead developer on pacman, the Arch package manager, but has been spotted doing everything from server upkeep to website development for the distro as
well.
Presented by Dan McGee
The critical piece of any distro is the packages provided and how those packages are managed. While sometimes working with a package manager can be an exercise in frustration, many Arch users find pacman is straightforward and it does exactly what they want. This talk will look briefly at pacman at a high level, then dive down into the guts to see what it does and how it works. We may also touch on makepkg and other scripts. Most importantly, I will show you how the development process works if you are interested in getting involved or have a particular feature you want to see in pacman that doesn’t exist yet.
Bio:
Dan is a software developer living in Chicago and has been an Arch developer for around three years. He is well known as a lead developer on pacman, the Arch package manager, but has been spotted doing everything from server upkeep to website development for the distro as
well.
Presented by Sander Jansen
It is 2010 and in Arch Linux there are tons of music players and managers to choose from. So why should you use Goggles Music Manager? Why develop yet another music player for the Linux Desktop? And why are people still looking for the “perfect” player?
I’ll show how you can use Goggles Music Managers to play and organize your music collection quickly and easily. I’ll also show off some of the new and exciting features that are currently under development.
We will also take a look behind the scenes and discuss my motivation for developing another music player, its design and choice of components it depends on, as well as Maintaining a good balance between new features and keeping it light and fast. We will look at some of the challenges developing cross-desktop applications: the struggle to fit in, attracting active contributors, integrating with the various desktop environments, and the ever changing landscape of audio on the
Linux desktop (pulseaudio, phonon, gstreamer, xine).
Bio:
Born in the Netherlands and graduated from the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, Sander Jansen is a software engineer at ESI Group in Huntsville, Alabama. At ESI he develops engineering software for post-processing CFD analysis results. Initially he ran Mandrake Linux, but has been an Arch Linux user since 2003. He uses Arch both at home and as his primary development platform at work. Jansen has been contributing to open source projects since 2001,starting with small patches to the FOX-Toolkit and running the FOX Community wiki. In 2002 he published his first open source program “Goggles”, a popular frontend for ogle dvd player. For the last few years he has focused on developing and maintaining his own music manager: Goggles Music Manager. Sander has a dog named Einstein.
Presented By Troy Unrau
The World of KDE is ever expanding, with emerging KDE Workspaces, Applications and Technologies released by KDE on a regular basis. In order to make the most of these technologies as they emerge, it is important to be connected to the KDE community. This ensures that KDE and its many downstreams are working together to produce some of the best software that can be found in the FOSS world. This talk discusses the many media that Arch contributors and users can use to ensure that their experience with KDE software is at its finest, including methods of getting support, customizing KDE, and cutting through the walls of inter-distro collaboration.
Bio:
Troy Unrau is a bad coder, so has found other ways of contributing to KDE, from user support to website repairs to marketing. Troy is a member of the KDE Marketing Working Group and the KDE Promotion Team. He is perhaps best known for the series of articles entitled “The Road to KDE 4″ which were published in the lead up to the KDE 4 release. He has previously written about Open Source for Ars Technica, and frequently helps to plan KDE events within North America. He received his B.Sc. in Geophysics at the University of Manitoba in 2009, and is currently at the University of Western Ontario studying Planetary Sciences.
Presented by Dieter Plaetinck
Uzbl is very different from other (even “lightweight”) browsers.
It’s a bare-bones “web interface tool” supposed to be integrated with other tools/scripts. I will describe the design ideas and implementation of Uzbl.
I will explain the philosophy behind it and demonstrate some practical examples of how you can use it and integrate it into your desktop.
The Uzbl project brings:
Bio:
Dieter is an Arch Linux release engineer living in Belgium, the capital of Europe. He’s (supposed to be) working on the installation scripts. He also works on the Uzbl browser. He plays drums, uses dvorak and likes lolcats.
Presented By Dieter Plaetinck
Since the 2009.08 release media, the AIF tool takes care of installing Arch systems onto your hardware. An installer is something pretty tough to get right, and there are many different opinions on how an installation should go. In this talk I will explain the design decisions, some implementation details and most of all: an overview of the features and how to use them.
You will get more insight in how both interactive and automated installations actually work. I will touch subjects such as lvm, encryption, unattended installations, package availability and customizing the installer to your needs. Basically, everything you should know about and around installing Arch systems, and plans for the future.
Bio:
Dieter is an Arch Linux release engineer living in Belgium, the capital of Europe. He’s (supposed to be) working on the installation scripts. He also works on the Uzbl browser. He plays drums, uses dvorak and likes lolcats.
Presented By Jason Chu
Arch Linux and business have always had a rocky relationship. Originally started by a developer/sysadmin, Arch Linux was a distro that ran how he wanted. It’s since exploded into an all things to all people generic distro for anyone willing to put the time in.This talk will address one developer/sysadmin/entrepreneur’s experiences developing with/on, deploying with, and maintaining Arch Linux in a business context.
Bio:
Jason Chu is part owner of Oprius (http://www.oprius.com), founded in 2005. Before founding Oprius, Chu was an official Arch Linux developer.
Presented By Matt Wood
Arch’s simple, lightweight platform gives it the ability to be aimed not only at servers but ‘dummy’ environments. In many enterprise environments, there are times in which you need to control the means by which your users are connecting. The user requires access to specific information systems. However you have to be sure that the end users computer system has not been breached by any number of the malicious software in the wild. Live cd’s are quickly becoming a popular answer to this problem, even in ‘Microsoft Shops’. Between this and the useful tools of mkarchiso and larch a relatively lightweight iso image can be generated to be provided to enterprise users. Such a cd would include features like:
* Basic connectivity suite (VPN, Citrix, IPSec, etc)
* Ease of understanding and use for the end user
* Building and connecting to SAN volumes in Arch and Windows based clients
* Any specialized authentication mechanisms (such as certificates, etc)
* A general list of device drivers for wireless and printing devices to meet the vast majority of hardware
* A basic level of security to provide the user and the enterprise a secure environment by which they can work
Hardware ends up becoming one of the larger issues similar to a one off wireless card or a brand new printer without properly packaged drivers. A great majority of the enterprise experience can be brought to the user, thanks to the Arch and the Larch scripts kindly provided by gradgrind of Germany. This presentation will touch on the main points above as well as provide a general overview about using Arch as a live cd for your remote access and teleworking users.
Bio:
Matt Wood is a US Federal Contractor
Presented By Matt Wood
Archlinux, as we all know, is a dynamic platform which can be molded to suit the users needs. Why not also use ArchLinux as a SAN service provider? With the packages available in the AUR, an Archlinux server will be setup and configured to run as a SAN provider. Major focus points will be:
* Overview of SAN technology
* Installation and configuration of open-iscsi and iscsitarget packages
* Building and connecting to SAN volumes in Arch and Windows based clients
* Securing SAN volume connections
* Replication and backup of SAN volumes
* Single vs multipathing of SAN volumes
* Briefly, the iscsi AUR and according dependancy packages will be installed onto both a client and server.
The server iscsi target installation will be configured with port information, authentication information, and volume information. The volume will be created or added to the system and the iscsi-target daemon will be started. On the client side an initiator and the necessary configuration will be defined so that the client can receive the SAN volume. The daemon will be started and the disk will be discovered as an extra block device in the fdisk listing. The disk will be mounted and at this point the SAN will be functional. Further details will include multipathing, connection to windows hosts, and SAN security
Bio:
Matt Wood is a US Federal Contractor.