LugRadio Live 2008

LUGRadio Live 2008 will not be the last LUGRadio Live event. LUGRadio has been running their Linux and open source podcast since early 2004 and with over one hundred podcasts under their belt had decided to call it a day.

Heise Online UK was at LUGRadio Live 2008, held in Wolverhampton on July 19th and 20th, and heard the LUGRadio team make the announcement. The LUGRadio presenters had previously announced that the Live event would end with the end of the LUGRadio podcast. They explained that the LUGRadio community had applied a lot of pressure to keep the event going, and that they had sucuumbed to that. Given the amusingly coerced change of plans, there were no details on when the next event would be.

LUGRadio Live 2008 was a lively event, bringing together many strands of the open source community. In the exhibition area, all the major linux distributions, Red Hat/Fedora, Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu, Novell with OpenSuse and Debian were represented. The OpenStreetMap project were recruiting more volunteers and going out and mapping more of Wolverhampton with GPS tracking. Their efforts were complemented by LUGRadio's own "Low Tech OpenStreetMap". The Open Rights Group were in fighting form, fighting Phorm and other intrusions on privacy and looking for members to join the cause.
The Low Tech OpenStreetMap

Among the hardware on display, the Beagle Board was showing its mettle playing back Big Buck Bunny and 64 Studio showed a Samsung U1 running Linux and mixing audio with touch. Sub notebooks were around in force, with many stands having EEE PCs, except one, which had the MSI Wind subnotebook which is to go on sale in the UK.
64 Studio's Linux running Samsung U1 UMPC

Four strands of talks and presentations covered a wide range of subjects. Jeremy Allison presented the history of the Samba project adding detail to the tale of when open source comes face to face with corporate giants. Steve Lamb from Microsoft talked about Green IT, not talking about blade servers and low power hardware, but about the social changes that technology can help with that could reduce our carbon footprint. And then there was the Gong-A-Thon which was essentially a lightning talk session, but hosted in a very LUGRadio style by one "mrben". LUGRadio Live is very much about having fun. In one corner, a LAN gaming rig was set up for all comers to relax with some vigorous fragging.
The Relaxing LAN party

The main event was the recording of the last ever LUGRadio podcast, live with a packed audience, and it was here, to great applause that the announcement that LUGRadio Live would continue was made. A small prize was offered to the person who had come the furthest to attend, with people from Canada, Australia and the USA losing to an attendee from New Zealand. As always, the podcast itself was an entertaining discussion, with topics like "Is this fun any more?" and "What will it take to say Linux has won?". After that, it wasn't over. A party that evening and another day of talks on the Sunday showed that the quirkiness of LUGRadio extended even to the scheduling.

Heise Open Source UK will be at LUGRadio Live 2009 and we'll let you know as soon as LUGRadio Live pick a date.