It is wonderful to see the Fedora Users and Developers Conference kick off in Kuala Lumpur today, May 18 2012. The plan was for me to attend, do a keynote and also pitch a talk for the barcamp. But, Murphy was watching how everything was coming together and pulled the rug from under me on Wednesday. I experienced what I found out later to be “tennis calf”

The symptoms were 100% spot on; felt something hit my calf followed by a pull. Quickly arranged to visit a sports doctor and he advised me about what needs to be done and recommended that perhaps I should not travel for the next two to three days. Bummer. I was so looking forward to being among the Fedora community flying in from Europe, Australia, Vietnam, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh etc.

Among the things I wanted to talk about at FUDCon KL was the following:

1. A demo of the plugable USB2.0 docking station that turns a Fedora 17 machine (server, desktop, laptop – does not matter) into a multi-seat Linux environment. I bought a pair from Amazon. I received it on Wednesday (shipped to Singapore via vpost.com.sg) and it worked exactly as stated – plug the USB to the laptop’s USB port, have a VGA monitor, USB keyboard and mouse plugged into the docking station, and viola, a fresh GNOME login screen. Amazing. You can even do an audio chat and watch streaming video via this setup. Really good stuff and kudos to the developers for main streaming the code into the Linux kernel and working with the Fedora devs to make this workable out of the box on Fedora 17.  What was really amazing from my point of view was the this works even when a machine is booted from a Fedora 17 LiveCD/USB. While this would suggest that the idea of the K12LTSP project is no longer needed, I think there are clear areas where they complement.
2. My journey in OpenShift.redhat.com. I wanted to share my learnings about OpenShift and Git and all the associated stuff. More importantly, the fact that OpenShift is a technology that is being used for a 24-hour programming contest in Singapore called code::XteremeApps was important to share as well to encourage international participation in the contest.  I am hopeful that this blog post will trigger interest.

I guess all is not lost. The show has to go on and I am glad to have facilitated a lot of it.  But the main kudos has to go to the Malaysian Fedora Ambassadors who managed to pull this off in the 8 weeks when they were awarded the hosting rights!