Some podcasts that LUX students (and profs!) might enjoy.

I thought I might recommend some interesting podcasts that might be of interest to LUX students. There really is a surprisingly prolific community of podcasters doing some excellent shows about Linux and open source software, so you don't have to tire your eyes by limiting your learning to reading things off a page or screen - and as many of these shows are quite entertaining, it's not only educational but also recreational.

The Linux Action Show: This one probably has the most in sheer entertainment value, as well as providing a very nice way to keep up on a lot of news relating to Linux and open source that one might otherwise miss. The show is very slickly produced, which is all the more impressive given that it's entirely produced by two people in their spare time. Typical weekly segments include an overview of a new Linux-powered device every episode, a news review, a listener commentary section, and then usually either an interview or a discussion on some topic for the remainder of the episode. The energy between the hosts is excellent, they're both quite hilarious and their enthusiasm is infectious. An excellent show which I highly recommend.

FLOSS Weekly: FLOSS weekly is a high quality podcast hosted by Randal Schwartz (of 'Learning Perl' and 'Pearls of Wisdom' fame) and Leo Laporte (formerly of TechTV's 'Screensavers'). Each episode includes some discussion of recent news usually followed by an interview with some open source luminary or the developer of an interesting project. This show is very successful in finding well known, high profile interview subjects for their interviews, so you can expect to hear from some people doing very interesting work. The show can also be watched live with full video at Twit Live every Wednesday at 2 PM.

Going Linux: Probably the most educationally oriented item on this list, this podcast provides lessons in performing various basic operations and tasks in a Linux environment. This one is mostly geared towards new listeners, so some of the more advanced among you might not find much here, but for those just beginning to learn their way around the Linux world it should prove an invaluable resource in learning some of the basics. The hosts are friendly and quite thorough in their coverage of the topics they select, presenting them in a simple and straight forwards manner that will appeal to new users.

Lugradio: Sadly now defunct, there will be no new episodes of this show. A British Linux podcast whose episodes usually consisted of a roundtable discussion between it's hosts (which include the always entertaining Jono Bacon, community manager for the Ubuntu distribution), the show was both educational and hilarious. Despite the fact that the show has ended, the backlogs of this show are well worth listenning to.

The PDX Perl Monthly meetings: These podcasts are audio recordings of talks from the Portland Perl users group. These tend to be very in depth and technical and usually focussed on some particular module or other, so they can be a bit hit or miss depending on whether the specific topic they are discussing is one that interests you. However, it's certainly worth subscribing to, as when they do hit a topic of interest to you you're likely to learn quite a bit.

Perlcast: A wonderful, if infrequently released, podcast concerning the Perl language and the community around it. Episodes frequently include interviews with developers working on some very interesting Perl-related projects, as well as talks regarding various particular technologies and how to best make use of them from Perl.

If you're new to podcasts, they're simply audio files, resembling radio shows, distributed via an RSS feed - the name 'podcast' is at this point largely historical, and you certainly don't need an iPod - any computer will do. If you need a podcasting client (a 'podcatcher'), I recommend either the excellent bashpodder or RhythmBox for those who prefer to work in a GUI. And of course, if you have a Mac or Windows machine you can always make use of a client like iTunes.

If you have any other questions about getting yourself set up to listen to any of these (or other podcasts), or need any help setting up bashpodder so that it will run automatically as a cron job, please don't hesitate to get ahold of me! Additionally, I will go over a brief overview of both bashpodder and RhythmBox in my XWN740 lab for this week, so you can look there for more information about these clients.