Full Disclosure: ArchCon Financing

July 28th, 2010

In case anyone is interested, here is a breakdown of the income and expenses for ArchCon2010:

Total Income: $2630.00
Total Expenditures: $2518.68

Income: $1630.00 in registration fees
        $1000.00 donation funding from the Arch Linux Project

Expenses: $49.15 in Paypal fees
          $1621.38 for Rooms and Catering
          $388.90 for T-shirts and bags
          $57.60 for UPS brokerage fee shipping t-shirts and bags
          $46.20 for 100 case badge holders (leftovers to go to ArchCon2011)
          $185.00 for 20 each of Pens, Stickers, and Lanyards
          $170.45 for a post-conference supper

Thus, we have $111.32 left. At least, that’s what we should have. In reality, we have $131.66 CAD left. The extra $20.34 is due to my using CAD and USD interchangeably in my calculations.

In summary, we have $131.66 and about 80 case badge holders to carry forward for ArchCon 2011. The money will stay in the archcon@archlinux.ca paypal account, and the badge holders will stay in my closet.

All ArchCon videos have been posted

July 26th, 2010

All videos of archcon talks have been posted to http://archlinux.ca/archcon2010/videos/ Enjoy!

Videos trickling in!

July 25th, 2010

DStein has posted some videos from archcon here:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=101587

In addition, I’ve started uploading videos here:

http://archlinux.ca/archcon2010/videos/

It’s going to take a while to get them all posted, so you’ll have to wait for them to trickle in over the next week or so. Hopefully some people will find them interesting, and will be motivated to give a talk at Archcon 2011 next year!

Archcon 2010: Success and Photos

July 25th, 2010

Archcon 2010 can safely be called a success. There were some hiccups, of course (Thanks Jason, for the ad hoc wireless network), but overall, I think most attendees were satisfied, and I hope everyone had as good a time as I did.

Thank you, everyone for presenting or attending. A conference is only as good as the people who attend it, and Archcon 2010 was therefore phenomenal, just like each of you.

Here are some photos from ArchCon:

http://archlinux.ca/archcon2010/images/

A huge thank you to Isaac Good for taking all these photos. He’s the one not pictured! Sorry for the lack of names/captions.

I am working on uploading videos, but it’s going to take a while to get everything up.

To all of you who did not attend, you will, sadly, never have another chance to attend the first ever Archcon! But the second is already in the planning stages (join discussion on the arch-events mailing list), and we hope to see you there.

Stable and low-maintenance Arch Linux

July 6th, 2010

Note: This talk is being substituted for Leveraging the world of KDE as Troy will be unable to present that talk.

Presented by Tim Savannah

Making arch a stable, low-maintenance, high performance and deployment speed platform for business. This talk will examine what makes a linux system stable, and strategies to use archlinux as a base to develop a stable, rapidly-deployable platform.

Bio:

Tim Savannah has been a software developer for 7 years, currently working for ARINC in Annapolis, MD. He has been using Arch Linux at home for about 6 years, and have converted several people to the platform.

Activities at ArchCon

July 1st, 2010

So what is there to do at ArchCon 2010? We have a variety of events scheduled for the conference. Topping the list are ten scheduled talks by Arch Linux users from around the globe. Talk topics range from installing the system to managing music and media to hacking the internals of the Arch Linux package manager, Pacman. There are summaries of each talk in this booklet, and the schedule is available on the back page. Interspersed with the talks are pastry-filled breaks and a hearty lunch.

This is the first ArchCon, and hopefully not the last. We don’t really know what we’re doing, so we’re experimenting to see what works, and what doesn’t. In addition to the scheduled talks, we will be hosting two Public Workshops, one on each day of the conference. As the name suggests, these workshops will be open to the public. They will be a chance for ArchCon attendees to help people learn about Arch Linux. We can help them install Arch Linux on their laptops or set up a virtual machine if they only want to experiment. And we can demo our own working systems. We need volunteers to help out with these workshops, let Ricardo or I know if you’re interested!

We also have two Open Spaces sessions planned. These are meant to allow spontaneous discussion of any topic that two or more people may be interested in discussing. We’ll be setting up an unplanned schedule where people can pencil in potential discussion topics.

Lightning Talks are short five to ten minute unscheduled presentations on a topic of your choice. We believe that everyone has something interesting to say about Arch Linux, so we hope every ArchCon attendee will be able to throw together a short presentation. That’s You!

We’ll also be hosting a bug squashing session concurrently with Archers around the world. Everyone can help with bug squashing. Programmers can hack on the various Arch Linux projects to eliminate bugs. Packagers can create updated or fixed packages. Even if you think you have no skills whatsoever, you can still wander through the bug tracker and confirm or deny existing bug reports, and nominate bugs for trivial fixes. The goal is to close as many bugs as possible!

Finally, development sprints will be a chance for developer type people to interactively hack on whatever open source projects they are interested in (it doesn’t even have to be Arch Linux related). If you’re a developer of any ability (or even if you’re just interested in learning to program) there will be something to work on.

Tentative ArchCon Schedule

June 28th, 2010

I’ve finally drafted a tentative schedule for the activities and goings on at ArchCon2010. Here it is:

Day 1
Start Time Room 1 Room 2 Legend
08:30 AM Registration Starts Talks
09:15 AM Introductions and Introductory Speech: The Status of
Arch Linux
Meals/Breaks
10:00 AM Morning Break Socializing
10:30 AM Arch Linux Projects Public Workshop Arch Development
11:45 AM Lunch Break Public Workshop
12:45 PM AIF: The Arch Installation Framework Open Spaces Open Spaces
01:30 PM Stable and low-maintenance Arch Linux Lightening Talks
02:15 PM Afternoon Break
02:45 PM Arch Linux as a Live CD Bug Squashing Session
03:30 PM Arch Linux In Business: The Good, The Bad, and The
Ugly
04:45 PM Social: What Pub Should We Go To Tonight?
Day 2
Start Time Room 1 Room 2
08:45 AM Conference Notes
09:15 AM Uzbl — web interface tools which
adhere to the unix philosophy
Open Spaces
10:00 AM Morning Break
10:30 AM Arch Linux as a SAN Provider Hacking Pacman
11:15 AM Goggles Music Manager
12:00 PM Lunch Break
12:45 PM Managing Music the Arch Way Development Sprints
02:00 PM Afternoon Break
02:30 PM Lightening Talks Public Workshop
04:30 PM Social: What touristy stuff is everyone doing this
weekend?

I apologize for the crappy layout, this is actually meant to go into print format, and I’m so busy trying to sort everything else out that I couldn’t devote more time to it. This schedule may change slightly, but I don’t think it will change much. Each talk runs for either half an hour or one hour, with 15 minutes to “reset” before the next talk.

In addition to the scheduled talks, we have several other hosted activities. More information on these will follow.

Thank you to our sponsors!

June 27th, 2010

Archcon is primarily funded by the fees participants are paying to get in. However, we would also like to extend a huge thank you to the following organizations for helping out with costs:

http://www.archlinux.org/ The Arch Linux project forwarded us some of their donation income. Thank you to Aaron and the team!
http://www.elys.com/ Elysium Digital is also helping to defer costs. Elysium uses Arch internally and employs an Arch Linux developer.

Archcon mailing list

June 24th, 2010

I’ve had several requests for an archcon mailing list to be set up. Instead of creating a dedicated list, I’m directing all traffic to the arch-events list:

http://mailman.archlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/arch-events

Use it for discussion of all arch-con related topics, including:

* sharing rooms
* touring or hanging out together before or after the conference
* questions about talks
* helping out with the conference
* anything else!

Registration Deadline

May 27th, 2010

The registration deadline for ArchCon 2010 is almost here. Register by May 31 and help us stay organized. Can’t wait to see you at ArchCon!

http://archcon.archlinux.ca/