Setting Up a Decent Developer Box for OSS and Linux Community Development

So you’re possibly a new OSS contributer, and you want to participate with the established players in the community. But, you quickly find that there is a mountain of communal knowledge around tools, behaviors, and methods that are not well documented, or are documented but effectively hidden or otherwise hard to find and use.

This talk is about the OSS tools of the trade in doing OSS development and includes just enough information to get you started and pointed in the right direction to look like an established member of a distributed OSS on-line community. It will be skewed a bit to the Linux kernel but the tools and methods are common with other communities (at least the ones I’m somewhat involved with) and will be useful to most OSS developers.

Gross will cover taking a new Ubuntu derivative installation on a laptop and making it a decent developer box for OSS community work. The tools and methods covered will include IRC, procmail, mutt, ctags, build tools, python, pylynt, quilt, git, svn, Email and gmail use for busy mailing lists, checkpatch, debugfs, VIM, and others.