Birds of a Feather 2024

The 2024 OLF Conference will be holding Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions on Friday, November 15. The schedule will be between 7:00 and 10:00pm.

A BoF session is typically more interactive than a regular presentation; it is an opportunity for a group of people with a common interest to get together. Past session topics have included text editors, game development, homebrew computing, Google Summer of Code projects, configuration management systems, and running Linux user groups.

Available rooms will have a projector and screen and a capacity of about 30 people. Let us know if you will want to play audio – we may be able to accommodate this, or you might need to bring your own speakers. While sessions are an hour long, please plan to wrap up 5 to 10 minutes early so the next group can come in and get settled.

Pre-applications have closed, but a few timeslots are still open. Day-of signups will be possible on Friday, November 15 at the registration area.

Planned Sessions

The Fedora and CentOS Ecosystems – Shaun McCance

People know Fedora for its fast and feature-rich Linux distribution and CentOS for its leading enterprise operating system. But both projects are also active ecosystems of special interest groups (SIGs) that do work around and on top of the base operating system. Join us to discuss these projects and how they fit into the wider ecosystem.

Learn Python With Your Face: Hands-On Python Tutorial – Catherine Devlin

Get started with Python programming in a lighthearted way by manipulating photos. It’s all fun and games until you put your nose through a homemade point transform. You could be your own meme!

Bring a laptop with Internet access and a web browser – that’s all! No software installation required, thanks to the magic of PyScript.

Hardware Reverse Engineering 101 – Douglas Habian

Most of our Internet of Things (IOT) devices run on Linux (routers, cameras, thermostats, etc.), so if you have an understanding of Linux on the command line, especially tools commonly used in system administration, you will be able to apply all of that knowledge in understanding what is going on “under the hood” on these devices. We will not just talk about tools and techniques used but showcase them in a “workshop” setting. I’ll provide IOT devices and tools such as chip clips/programmers and UART adapters and demonstrate how to use these tools to do such things as extract & analyze firmware and gain root access through the serial shell onto these devices. Some of the linux command line utilities used include flashrom, binwalk, strings, xxd and grep.

Mastodon and the Fediverse – murph

It will be a mostly informal discussion of the state of the Fediverse, new things that have happened.

Neovim! – Jack Trusler

I’ll be talking about the text editor Neovim, a fork of Vim. I will be doing a demo and have live examples. Probably won’t take a full hour, and then I can do a session at the end for people with questions, or need help setting up their Neovim environment. I also plan on going deep into Language Server Protocol and maybe touch on treesitter.

People can bring their own laptops to follow along.

Hacker Public Radio: From Listener to Host – Lyle and Thaj

Lyle and Thaj will host an informal session about Hacker Public Radio, and how you can go from a listener to a host.

They’ll provide insights on overcoming hurdles such as “I have nothing to talk about” and “My audio sounds bad” as well as a walk through on uploading your first show for posting.


If you have any questions, please contact BoF organizer Vance Kochenderfer at vance@ohiolinux.org.