This week, I am traveling to Oregon to attend the Community Leadership Summit Sat-Sun and O’Reilly’s OSCON Mon-Fri. That’s a full week of high community involvement, and I am looking forward to every minute of it.

As regular readers know, I’ll be speaking at OSCON on the subject of the BeagleBoard, my favorite inexpensive single-board computer based on the ARM Cortex-A8. I’ll present detailed instructions on how to boot several flavors of Linux (with demos!) and I’ll have a prototype of the new BeagleBoard xM that is set to debut at the end of July. My talk is Wednesday at 2:30 just after Bryan Smith’s presentation on the SheevaPlug, which I am very much looking forward to hearing.

I’m also looking forward to the Embedded Linux Community BoF, which I’ll be running on Wednesday evening at 7pm. This BoF is opposite the recently-announced Android Hands-On, but I am hoping to stimulate a conversation more about the embedded community in general than about specific distributions. The roundtable discussion will likely focus on non-mobile embedded computing, particularly build systems like OpenEmbedded and the new crop of inexpensive reference platforms, and how communities can accelerate development, even among corporations (witness GENIVI, open-source success in the automotive industry).

I will also be joining the Teaching Open Source crowd at the Education BoF on Monday evening, where we hope to discuss many issues surrounding the Open Source Way and its impact on open-source concepts in education. A splinter group (ha!) will very likely stay late to discuss the schedule for the upcoming Education Mini-Summit at LinuxCon, which I have the honor to help organize. I’m also speaking at LinuxCon about desktop Linux and holding another Embedded BoF.

Yes, I love participating! Life is a contact sport, if you do it right.

Feel free to comment if you plan on attending any of these events, and you will win one (1) Jefro.net business card and a hearty handshake at the event in question. See you at the show!

I just updated my definitive list of open-source conferences for 2010. This is a list I maintain for all conferences that are important to open-source projects, Linux in particular, with an emphasis toward the embedded space. If you know of a conference I missed, please let me know in comments and I’ll be take a look.

I have added two new goodies this year. First is a note for calls for participation (CFPs) for conferences that accept presentations, as there is nothing as invigorating as standing up to talk in front of twenty or thirty people who are smarter than you are. Second, I also made a Google calendar of this list of conferences—please feel free to add it to your calendar, and edit it or send me edits. (If you can’t edit it for some reason, let me know.)

The hottest news conference-wise is for SCALE 8x, the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles in February. The deadline for presentations was just extended to Dec. 24, so get them in! Also, CELF’s Embedded Linux Conference (April) is accepting presentations until January 15, and if you attend you also get to go to the Linux Collaboration Summit that is co-located at the beautiful Kabuki Hotel in San Francisco. And don’t forget Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (Feb), Embedded World in Nuremberg (March), and of course the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose in April, in case you need t-shirts, pens, free magazines, or any of the really intense presentations on the roster, including Michio Kaku as the keynote presenter!

Looks like quite a year on the conference circuit.

Michael Cooper and Jason Cooper have written up an extremely approachable treatise on the Beagle Board’s boot process. For those who are struggling with understanding the detailed behavior behind bootloaders and the User button, this is the place to go. Thanks guys! Come discuss it in Meld as well.

UPDATE: Andy in Meld has also pointed me to an interesting post discussing how to get rid of the first-stage bootloader entirely. Now that’s creative!

Ever wonder about all those fancy project names Intel gives for its various architectures, and how they are related? A new page available on the Meld embedded Linux community shows a very interesting graphical representation: the family of Intel processors from the venerable i386 down to the present day Atom and Nehalem.

What I like best about this representation is its family tree aspect, specifically the part showing the “new” Atom processor evolving directly from the older P6 architecture rather than from more modern (some might say “overmodern”) generations of packaged cleverness. The drawing was created by Klaas van Gend, one of my colleages at MontaVista. Thanks, Klaas!

Full disclosure—I am an admin for the Meld community. Feel free to poke around and join us, as there is more where that came from.

No one is more social than software developers, right? We invented the internet in order to converse, interact, fan flamewars, etc. Sometime in this decade, the international marketing machine seems to have gotten hold of the tubes and sort of taken over, diluting our technical conversations with adware and l33tsp33k. The original intent of the Internet is being drowned by its popularity.

However, there still exist some corners of the tubes where actual technical conversation still happens. These are a few of those corners that cater to those of us with a taste for embedded Linux. Please feel free to add to this list in the comments below.

Social media:

These include communities dedicated to embedded Linux, wikis, etc. Blogs are listed in a separate section.

• Meld has been called the “Facebook of embedded Linux”, and not just by me. Conversations tend to get very technical. Stop in and join the discussion groups. [full disclosure: MontaVista sponsors Meld, and I am a Meld admin]
• Elinux.org is an excellent wiki maintained by CELF. The wiki contains a huge amount of embedded Linux information and is growing all the time.
• Embedded group on Linux.com, recently absorbed by the Linux Foundation.

Blogs:

Do blogs count as social media? Almost certainly. Here are just a few that discuss embedded Linux:

• Jeff’s Open Source Resource [full disclosure - that’s me]
• Kate Alhola’s Maemo blog
• Embedded Linux Interfacing, serving the Embedded Linux community since 2001

Embedded Linux appearances in other social media:

Our presence is small, but loud.

• Twitter supports many fascinating twigs and branches, some of which, like Meld and MontaVista, relate to embedded Linux.
• Google Groups hosts many groups related to specific projects, e.g. the Beagle Board discussion group.
• LinkedIn Embedded Linux group.
• Facebook Embedded Linux group. Be sure to also visit MontaVista’s page.
• MontaVista on YouTube. There are more embedded Linux videos there as well, just search on “embedded linux”.

Developer Advocate. It has been on my business cards since I arrived at MontaVista last fall, but I don’t know if it has ever been defined in print. This blog’s name is a play on the term “playing devil’s advocate”, but what does it actually mean to be one? What is the role of a Developer Advocate in the world of open-source?

The short answer is that I am an ambassador for Linux developers, currently acting within this corporate structure. Obviously I have a vested interest in helping MontaVista succeed. What that means to me, though, is that a major component of that interest is to help embedded Linux developers succeed in general, partly because they may someday become MontaVista customers, but mostly because they help to advance the cause and penetration of the current best embedded operating system.

As a community admin, technical writer, and developer, I have several avenues by which I advocate.

One is that I help to administer an open community called Meld. Meld is sponsored by MontaVista, but it is truly open, meaning that anyone can join and discuss any embedded Linux topic, including the merger of Wind River with Intel, the recent webinar about fault-tolerant memory management, or even the thrill of rolling your own kernel, none of which directly involve MontaVista. In company meetings about Meld and at conferences, I try to represent the needs of developers at large and help to keep Meld open and non-corporate, although I’m swimming with the flow in that case—MontaVista as a corporation and the entire Meld team are as dedicated as I am to that level of openness.

Another way I advocate for developers is as a technical writer, by helping to document important tools, like MontaVista Linux 6. It is fascinating to be a part of building such a complex tool and useful tool and to try to find the best ways to explain it.

A third method is to find ways we as a company can give back to the communities that support us. This is more than just the kernel community, of course: CELF and elinux.org, the Linux Foundation, OpenEmbedded and BitBake, and Moblin are all organizations and projects that share a common goal in helping embedded Linux succeed.

Actually, to boil it down, I figure it is my job to help embedded Linux developers succeed. I think that sums it up nicely.

If you are an embedded Linux developer, don’t be shy about letting me know how I can help YOU succeed, by email or in the comments below.

Stormy Peters asked in a recent blog post why people really go to conferences, and took a very interesting poll. It’s a good question. Travel is exciting, but rarely comfortable. Why do we do it?

The answers in Stormy’s poll turned out overwhemlingly to be “people”—over 50% of respondents answered that the one single thing that drew them to conferences was meeting other attendees. This is perhaps unsurprising, particularly since the statistical sample was completely made up of open-source folks, who tend to be more outgoing and people-oriented than the average developer. Another answer high on the list was “meeting the speakers”, which I believe is indicative of the very level playing field in which we participate.

But I think the real answer is deeper than that. Other answers high on the list had to do with attending talks, hacking with friends, and learning more about interesting topics (this is based on the published survey responses). I tend to put these things in a blender and look at the whole picture together—people attend conferences to learn about interesting things with their friends, to make new friends at the same time.

So far as I can tell, this is the end goal of Community, with a capital C. Conferences are the physical manifestation of the activities we perform in all of the communities to which we belong. When we talk about being part of a community, whether it is the Linux community or the open-source community or the embedded or real-time, or BitBake or Git or Beagle Board communities, the whole point is that we are part of those communities—we participate, we learn interesting things, and we do it by hanging out with existing friends and making new ones. We contribute to the whole, which would not be complete without us. As Jono Bacon said in his presentation at Collab Summit, we are building a sense of belonging, because belonging to and being part of a larger group resonates deeply with our mental firmware. We are fulfilling our internal destinies as social animals.

[Parts of this post were previously published on Jeff’s Open Source Resource, but there are some new bits too! Prizes available for spotting the differences.]

I attended and presented at the 2009 Embedded Linux Conference and the 2009 Linux Collaboration Summit. The conferences were co-located at the Kabuki Hotel in San Francisco, CA. Both conferences were extremely useful individually, but the combination of the two was absolutely electric.

At ELC, I attended some fantastic sessions, beginning with Dirk Hohndel’s keynote on ubiquitous Linux—very appropriate for an embedded conference, as much of the ubiquity he described is manifested from the embedded systems space. Cell phones and the networks that drive them, all of the multiple layers of networking equipment around us, the search engines and bookstores and LOLcats we hit every day, all are driven by Linux, largely by embedded Linux. His theoretical challenge was to go for a certain amount of time in the modern world without touching Linux, which very shortly led to not being able to even cross the street in many large cities.

The rest of the conference was full of fascinating information. I attended a presentation on Maemo, a keynote by embedded maintainer David Woodhouse, a great talk by embedded luminary Jim Ready, a fascinating discussion by David Mandala from Ubuntu on how they got such a large distro to work well in an ARM environment, and an extremely interesting panel hosted by Tim Bird and featuring Matt Mackall, Jon Corbet, and David Woodhouse. Tuesday evening provided a showcase of demos, including my demo of Meld running in Firefox, on Montabello, on a Beagle Board.

Wednesday was a rough one, because it was the day the two conferences overlapped. It was quite odd to wake up to find the population in the hotel’s conference area quadrupled, quite literally, and the rooms were physically changed around to accommodate all of the new conferencegoers. I didn’t get a chance to see many of the remaining ELC technical talks because I was riveted by the Collaboration Summit keynotes, most of which addressed community either directly or indirectly. I also managed to meet several community leaders, including Karsten Wade, Joe Brockmeier, and Jono Bacon. As a newcomer to community management, I found all of them welcoming, open, and filled with advice about community-building. The advice itself was worth the price of the trip—they gave me a lot to think about, particularly Karsten, whose role with the Fedora community is probably most similar to mine in the embedded space.

I gave my ELC presentation Wednesday as well, and was pleased to see some participation despite being opposite a very compelling panel featuring representatives from Sun, Microsoft, and the Linux Foundation. Note that Free Electrons recorded all of the sessions at ELC, including mine, so I expect to see those online in the coming weeks. Well done again, guys, and great to meet you in person!

The Linux Collaboration Summit is normally an invitation-only affair. This year, however, they invited all ELC members to stay for the remaining two days and participate. Thursday and Friday were simply a blur of packed sessions, including one that Joerg Bertholdt, VP Mktg at MontaVista, and I gave during the Community Best Practices track on Friday morning. The attendees were mostly community managers and active members, and we had a lively discussion about community and its role in product development and commericalization as well as some details about Meld itself. Our slides are available for anyone who would like them.

I came home exhausted on Friday afternoon, very grateful for such events and eager for more (after a rest!).