Los Angeles may be the second-largest city in the United States, but when it comes to overt, shouting-at-the-rooftops open-source software evangelism, you'd never know it. But there's one shining beacon of activity in the City of Angels, and that's SCALE -- the Southern California Linux Expo -- coming to the Westin Los Angeles Airport hotel Feb. 8-10.

With it's full title of SCALE 6x -- (it's the sixth-annual show) -- the event features exhibitors, speakers and, I hope, a lot of open-source geekery.

See, I write this blog, hammering home the joys and sorrows of Linux and BSD, but many of us do this kind of work in near isolation. Sure, I turned on my friend Bruce to Linux (he's running Ubuntu and Mint right now), but he was tearing apart mainframes from the big-iron age for scrap while I was still launching GI Joes off of the roof and watching "Speed Racer" on L.A.'s Channel 52. So he had a bit of familiarity with Unix (he still waxes rhapsodically about coding with Emacs).

The point is, I don't often get out among "my own kind," when it comes to this kind of stuff.

But I will at SCALE 6x. Already I've heard that my fellow LXer Scott Ruecker will be there, and with exhibitors representing Damn Small Linux, Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, IBM, Novell, Red Hat, HP, Google, Sun and more, I'll have plenty of fodder for my next couple dozen blog entries, hopefully meeting enough people to being steering this blog in a little more of a "journalistic" direction, meaning getting experts to comment on things, over and above my own opinions and noodlings about the open-source movement (and the business behind it).

Check out the list of sponsors, which, in addition to the usual heavy hitters, includes our very own LXer, Linux Pro magazine, Linux Journal, Free Software Magazine, Trusted Computer Solutions, Wind River, and the previously mentioned Linux giants.

Among the major emphases at SCALE is women in open-source, with many speakers on that topic, open source in education, and open source in health care (you don't want your medical data held hostage to proprietary apps, do you?), as well as a barrelful of others http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale6x/conference-info/schedules/ .

I guess what I'm saying is if you're in any way involved in open-source software -- Linux, BSD (there's a lot of BSD here for a convention with "Linux" in the title) -- or want to be, and you're anywhere in the Los Angeles area, you should get yourself registered and get down there.

And for more SCALE news, follow along at the convention's own blog.

And if you want to hear about SCALE, L.A.'s KPFK is the place. A show called "The Digital Village" will welcome the convention's Gareth J. Greenaway and Orv Beach to talk about what's in store at 10 a.m. Sunday, Jan. 26, on KPFK-FM (90.7).

Final note: Remember how I lamented about Los Angeles' lack of vocal open-source activity? Well, I tried to find out what the SCLUG acronym after many of the SCALE principals' names stood for. It's not the Southern California Linux Users Group. Instead, SCLUG stands for the Simi Conejo Linux Users Group, which started way, way back in 1998, and now meets every other Saturday at the Simi Valley YWCA. And they put together this huge show. Clearly, they're better men and women than me, and I salute them.

And if you need a visual, check out this banner from the SCALE site: