First day on the job

As many of you may well know, today was my first day as a new employee of Red Hat and as the new Fedora Project Leader.  I spent the day today in “new hire orientation” meetings at Raleigh, which were interesting.  I was impressed by how much time Red Hat took to make sure the new recruits understood the open source way, and where Fedora fits in the mix of things. Some of the highlights for me were Max Spevack explaining open source communities and their importance, and Michael Tiemann (one of my favorite speakers to listen to) giving an excellent presentation on how open source can be a transforming tool for information technology departments.  We also spent time filling out paperwork and making sure we had all our ducks in a row, and ended the day with an ice-cream social.  I’ll be in new hire orientation tomorrow as well, and then head directly to FUDCon Santiago tomorrow evening. Paul Frields has graciously agreed to help me get up to speed in my new role, which I especially appreciate since I’ll spend the next two weeks on the road.

This evening I also was able to start getting Fedora installed on my new laptop.  I opted for a Lenovo T510, mostly because it had been years since I’d used a new ThinkPad, and I wanted to try something that was likely to be a bit outside of the mainstream.  (I have this weird habit of finding the oddball hardware bugs in Fedora.  Some people go out of their way to make sure their hardware is going to be compatible.  As for me, I throw Fedora on weird hardware and see what breaks.  Call me crazy…)  This laptop is a bit bigger than most people would want to carry around, but I’m happy with it.

Paul Frields was kind enough to take a first stab at getting the laptop setup while I was still in my meetings.  Apparently there’s an issue with the new VT-d feature (Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O) of the Intel chipsets, as Paul had to disable it in the BIOS to keep anaconda from crashing with what appeared to be memory-corruption issues. Once we got that tracked down and disabled in the BIOS, I threw Fedora on the machine and it’s been running great ever since.  So far, everything has worked great.  I was a little worried about how well this new wirless chip would be supported, but it’s working very well.  I was even able to setup a quick ad-hoc wireless network for Paul to be able to connect his laptop through mine.  Suspend/resume worked out of the box, as did the Nouveau driver.  There’s a bit of funkiness with the reporting of the second battery, but I’ll do some more troubleshooting on that over the next few days and file a bug.

The day ended with an excellent sushi dinner (thanks Paul!), and now I’m back at the hotel getting more software installed on the laptop and working on presentations for FUDCon Chile and FISL.  All in all, I can’t complain about my first day on the job!