[SGVLUG] Fw: [Re: Talk?]

[Dustin Laurence]

On Fri, May 19, 2006 at 11:33:39AM -0700, Alex Roston wrote:
> David Lawyer wrote:
> 
> >I'll abstain but remember, by giving a talk where you need to be
> >a programmer to understand it, you will turn off new potential
> >members who don't know programming.
> > 
> Maybe schedule it alongside a talk about something basic?

Before this goes too far, I will note that I attempted to address this
concern, but apparently it wasn't clear.  I *don't* really think an hour
and a half of Haskell is necessarily a good idea, but neither is it
necessarily what they'll talk about.  Haskell is something they're using
to construct a build environment, and OCaml is something they've used (I
think) to do some hardware detection in the initrd.  That sounds more
like a "this tool is good because ${REASON} and we've used it for
${JOB}, with ${RESULT}" sort of talk.  They also have mentioned wanting
to aim Linspire at a more general demographic than it used to be (which
ties in with Freespire), and mentioned an interest (I don't think
anything was a secret, so I guess I'm OK mentioning such things) in
shipping an SELinux kernel (which is a far cry from the "everybody is
root" days).   I also plugged in some webcams to a prerelease of
Freespire, since that's such a hard thing in Linux.  I suspect they have
particularly hard problems with compatibility because they sell support
to totally non-technical users, so anything they're doing with hardware
detection and so on interests me.

There are a number of things that fit naturally into what the engineers
are doing that I suspect are generally interesting.  I'm not interested
in hearing from their marketdroids but the engineering end of things is,
I think, completely appropriate.

In fact, an explanation of why they're interested in SELinux would
probably be useful knowledge for our members that don't know what it is.

Here is a suggestion: if people will mention things they're interested
in hearing about, I'll pass them on and see what they want to work in.
Please chime in if anything in the above list is of interest to you.

For myself, put me down for

    Haskell

    Ocaml

    SELinux

    Where they see the Linux hardware support situation going in the
    next few years.

Dustin

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