Plumbers Conference This Year

The 2012 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) will be held on August 29-31 in the Sheraton San Diego, and we hope to see you there!

To that end, the LPC Planning Committee is pleased to announce a call for microconferences. These microconferences are working sessions that are roughly a half day in length, each focused on a specific aspect of the “plumbing” in the Linux system. The Linux system’s plumbing includes kernel subsystems, core libraries, windowing systems, media creation/playback, and so on. For reference, last year’s LPC had tracks on Audio, Bufferbloat and Networking, Cloud, Containers and Cgroups, Desktop, Development Tools, Early Boot and Init Systems, File and Storage Systems, Mobile, Power Management, Scaling, Tracing, Unified Memory Management, and Virtualization.

Please note that submissions to a given microconference should not normally cover finished work. The best submissions are instead problems, proposals, or proof-of-concept solutions that require face-to-face discussions and debate among people from different areas of the Linux plumbing. In other words, the best microconferences are working sessions that turn problems into patches representing solutions.

Leading an LPC microconference can be a fun, exciting, and rewarding activity, but please see here for the responsibilities of a microconference working session leader. If you have an idea for a good LPC microconference, and especially if you would like to lead up a particular microconference, please add it to the LPC wiki here.

Plumbers Conference Next Year

Hello everyone,

Thanks for making this year’s plumbers conference such an enjoyable event.  Next year, we’re planning to co-locate Plumbers with the Kernel Summit and LinuxCon in San Diego from 29-31 August.  The current plan is that Plumbers and LinuxCon would run as parallel but separate events.  To accommodate the parallelism, we’re still planning on keeping the numbers for Plumbers down to 300 and having a separate registration from LinuxCon.  We’re also planning to move the refereed presentations track into LinuxCon itself as a hard core technical track which would still be selected by the Plumbers Programme committe (both Plumbers and LinuxCon attendees would be able to go to this). We plan to keep the two microconference tracks for plumbers only, but also add a third unconference type track, where people could plan meetings and split into discussion groups in a style very similar to Ubuntu Developer Summit (only Plumbers registered attendees would be able to go to this).

If you have any feedback about this plan, please sent it to the current programme committee at lpc2011@virtuousgeek.org

Of course, we’re also looking to recruit another organising and programme committee for 2013, so if you want to volunteer, please read this web page and then send your bid to the plumbers conference steering committee (who are also the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board) at tech-board@lists.linux-foundation.org

Ride Sharing back From Plumbers

For those who want a lift to either San Francisco or its airports, we’ve added a new section to the Ride Sharing wiki.  Please make sure to note which day you need a lift for (Friday or Saturday) and for drivers what time you’ll be leaving.

http://wiki.linuxplumbersconf.org/2011:car_sharing

Additional hotels

It appears many of you have chosen to put off hotel booking to the last minute. As a result, there may not be space available in the negotiated rate block at the venue hotels (the Hyatt and the Marriott). There is still space available at higher rates, so please call for availability (see the “attend” page for details).

If you still can’t get a room or the rates don’t appeal to you, there’s one other hotel near the conference venue, the Hotel La Rose. It’s just a couple of blocks from the Hyatt in Railroad Square so a good choice if you can’t get a room at the venue.

Other good hotels in Santa Rosa include the Hilton Sonoma Wine Country and the Flamingo Hotel. These hotels aren’t within easy walking distance however, so if you choose to stay in one of them, you’ll need to arrange for transportation (either using a hotel shuttle if available, or taking a taxi).

Ride Sharing From San Francisco or Oakland Airports

If you’re going to be renting a car at the airport and are willing to transport others up to Santa Rosa (provided they have proximate arrivals, of course) please indicate that on this wiki page. You may also sign up to share rides on the same wiki page.

Travel Assistance

We have some funds available to provide for people who would otherwise be unable to attend the conference – if you’d like to apply, please visit the Linux Foundation page here.

Shuttle bus updates

The travel page has been updated with details of the shuttle bus running between the Airport Express dropoff point and the Hyatt. It’ll be running for most of Tuesday, and then again on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning. Bear in mind that tickets for the Airport Express do not guarantee a seat – make sure you leave enough time to make your flight if your preferred bus is full!

Invitation from O’Reilly

Marsee Henon from O’Reilly has extended an invitation to tour the O’Reilly campus (in Sebastopol, just a few minutes from the conference venue) to any interested attendees. The O’Reilly campus hosts O’Reilly publishing, Safari Books Online, and Make magazine. Please contact Marsee if interested. Logistics are TBD, but if there’s enough interest we’ll likely get a shuttle bus for the trip.

LPC2011 Internet uplink sponsored by Sonic.net

Sonic.net has graciously agreed to sponsor the Internet needs of our conference. They’ll be providing a 30/30Mb dedicated to the conference facility. Without their support, we would have been stuck with a single 20Mb downstream link (unknown upload speed) shared between the conference, guest rooms, and hotel office. This sponsorship is especially nice because Sonic.net is both a major ISP (you may have heard of its fiber deployments in Northern California recently, or it’s network administration win for one of the Google fiber rollouts) and a local company.

Sonic.net provides Flexlink Ethernet & Fiber solutions for businesses. Please contact preferred account executives Janelle Santos <jmsantos@corp.sonic.net>, Mitzi Zamarripa <mitzi.zamarripa@corp.sonic.net> or Tiffany (Lawson) Bagala <tdl@corp.sonic.net> with any questions; they’re authorized to provide special discounts to attendees and those associated with the conference.

Late-Registration Deadline Approaching

Just a reminder that there is less than two weeks remaining before the late-registration deadline, at which point the registration fee will increase significantly. So please check out our shiny near-final schedule and register today.

Besides which, this year’s Linux Plumbers Conference is well on its way to filling up, which means that unfortunately someone will likely miss out. And we don’t want that someone to be you!