Ohio LinuxFest 2006: Speakers Selected

The speaker selection commitee for Ohio LinuxFest 2006 has made their final pick of presentations, and (I think) all of the selected speakers have now confirmed their attendence. All of the submitted presentations were interesting, and it was a real challenge to select just a few. We really wished we could have selected all of them! We’re working hard to expand the scope of the conference for next year, in order to accomodate more great presentations.

We worked extra hard to ensure that the selected presentations were education- or community-focused. One of the complaints I (and many others) had about last year’s event was that some of the presentations were little more than commercials for the sponsoring vendors. We’re all pretty confident that the presentations won’t be overly commercial this year.

Chris DiBona from Google will give the opening keynote, discussing Google’s interactions with the Open Source community. A brief discussion of Google came up during this month’s COLUG meeting, and it was generally agreed that even though Google doesn’t open source many of their products, they still do an awful lot to support the open source community in general. Heck, most of the Subversion development team is on Google’s payroll.

Jon ‘maddog’ Hall will give the closing keynote for the day. His presentation sounds really worthwhile:

It may have been from any number of evangelical speakers with grey hair and even greyer beards, but now you are ready to plunge ahead and yell 'Yeah Brother!'....but you don t know where to start. It really is not that hard, and this talk will show you the path to enlightenment. You may come away, as most pilgrims do, with the thought 'That was so simple!', but to have the path illuminated with a bright light may keep you from stumbling in the darkness.

In a follow-up email to a question I asked maddog, he elaborated: "I was tired of telling people WHY they should be using free software, and I thought I would try telling them HOW to do it. A lot of the talk is common sense, but in a lot of ways we have not had any of that for the past 20 years or so. :-) So the talk is relevant." maddog gave an excellent closing keynote at OLF 2004, so I'm excited to hear what he has to say this year.

Other presentations include:

• Jorge Castro's "The Integration Holy Grail", which focuses on GNU/Linux in a Windows Active Directory environment. I'm doing this very thing at work now, so I'm eager to see how someone else is tackling these issues.
• Rich Bowen's "20 things you didn t know you could do with your Apache Web Server". He promises that this will be the first ever public demonstration of mod_pony -- you can hardly afford to miss it!
• Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier's "Are you Linux compatible?", which is an interesting twist on GNU/Linux advocacy.
• Ed Montgomery's "The Future of Education is Open!" will examine the role of Free Software in education. This, too, looks to be an interesting presentation.
• Jay Pipes' "MySQL Performance Tuning Best Practices" should be good for the database crowd. I attended a presentation Jay gave at OSU: he's a terrific presenter, and was able to succinctly discuss a lot of nitty-gritty stuff. I suspect this will be one of the more technical sessions of the day, and not necessarily for the database newbie.
• Christopher Browne will go on immediately after Jay with "PostgreSQL - What's New?", to give us the inside scoop on the other major player in the Free Software database arena.

In addition to a handful of other great presentations, there will also be a two-hour moderated panel on virtualization, with speakers from HP, IBM, Parallels, and possibly others (I’m not sure if Xensource or VMware have confirmed yet). This is likely to be the most commercial of all the presentations, but given the number of participants on the panel I’m hopeful that it’ll focus on the issues related to virtualization, and not so much any specific product or why you should buy it.

Registration is still open, so hurry over to the OhioLinux website if you’re interested in attending!

PS: be sure to arrive early for a special surprise!