Thanks for signing up for the Chef tutorial at OSCON.
Here is some information that should be helpful before the tutorial.
Chef utilizes the Git revision control system. Many open source developers will be familiar with Git, but by no means all. It would be helpful if you took a little time to familiarize yourself with how Git works. A good place to start is the Git web site's documentation page.
Although I will be including plenty of running demonstrations, you will not be required to follow along on your laptop. However, should you wish to get a testbed environment going, you'll be able to hack along as you learn things.
A suitable small environment consists of 2 or 3 virtual machines.
I use Ubuntu Linux, and size one VM at 512MB for the chef server, and a couple of client machines at 256MB each. If you don't own virtualization software already, I recommend VirtualBox as a good, free, starting point. You can follow the installation instructions at the Chef wiki.
It's always helpful for me to know in advance what you'd like to get from the tutorial. There are a large number of people coming, so dealing with individual questions will be a challenge during the actual presentation.
Feel free to get in touch with me in any of these ways:
