Limoncelli to keynote at Linux conference

By Sam Varghese
Friday, 10 October 2008 05:28

Opinion and Analysis

Activist, organiser and systems administrator Tom Limoncelli will present the first keynote at the Australian national Linux conference 2009. The conference, the 10th of its kind, will be held in Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, from January 19 to 24 next year.
Other keynotes will be presented by the co-founder of Wikia and chairperson of the Wikimedia Fundation Advisory Board, Angela Beesley and Sun Microsystems chief Open Source officer, Simon Phipps.

Limoncelli, 39, is well known as an activist for the lesbian, iisexual, transgender and intersex communities. He is known in technology circles for his 2003 book, Time Management for Systems Administrators." He currently works for Google.

The main conference will run from January 21 to 23 with one keynote starting off the proceedings each day. On January 19 and 20, there will be mini-conferences held; a total of 12 have been scheduled with four  - on open source databases, systems administration, gaming and mobile devices - running over both days.

The topics for the other single-day mini-conferences are the kernel, security, MythTV, multimedia, Linuxchix, virtualisation and management, free as in freedom, and the business of open source.

The main conference programme includes 25 talks, each of which runs roughly for about an hour. The final day, January 24, is open day for the public to visit and find out about free and open source software.

In a media release, conference co-organiser Ben Powell said: "We have a wide selection (of talks) that would appeal to any member of the OSS community. We've covered just about every field of endeavour from medicine to hotted up cars, the law to the Linux kernel, the visual arts and music to robotics - all with a geeky angle of course!

"We wanted to make this LCA all-inclusive, bringing in as many areas of interest as possible. Free software and its ideas have moved into just about every field of human endeavour, inspiring innovation, debate and discussion across all disciplines, and we wanted LCA09 to reflect this."

The conference will be held at the University of Tasmania campus.