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MerriLUG: Rob Lebree on What's Inside a Mobile Phone

By Ted Roche on October 18, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource, Technology

The monthly meeting of the Merrimack Valley Linux User Group takes place on Thursday, the 19th of October at Martha's Exchange in Nashua, NH. Dinner is at 6 PM and the main meeting (upstairs) at 7:30 PM. Driving directions can be found here

From the group's announcement:

“Rob Lembree from JumpShift, LLC [Edit: fixed broken link] will discuss the components and processes involved in the development of a modern mobile phone, from the processors and radios to the operating system technology, middleware and applications that bring the package together. He will also discuss the peculiarities of the mobile industry that make bringing a handset to market a unique challenge.”

“Rob will bring lots of mobile platforms with him in various states of completion for show and tell. Rob has two decades of experience in operating system technology, many of it in the embedded computing space, with three and a half years applying this experience to the mobile platform industry. When Rob grows up, he'd like to start a research and development company, hire smart people, and develop cool stuff that scares the heck out of big companies.”

Hope to see you there!

Fedora Core 6 close to release

By Ted Roche on October 16, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource

In RedHat magazine, Rahul Sundaram
writes Inside Fedora Core 6: “Fedora Core 6 is about to be unleashed in a week and I decided to give our precious users an in-depth look and sneak peak at what we've been cooking up for this release.”

Here's the official Fedora Core 6 Release Summary.

Ray Noorda passes away

By Ted Roche on October 10, 2006 in Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

Over at Linux-Watch.com, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols notes the passing of one of the PC industries icons: “Good-bye Mr. Noorda, I'll miss you.

Baystar exec says MSFT behind high-burn-rate funding of SCO

By Ted Roche on October 10, 2006 in Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

OSNews is pointing to the story that Microsoft's SCO Involvement Revealed. “A declaration by SCO's backer, BayStar has revealed that the software Giant Microsoft had more links to the anti-Linux bad-boy. The declaration made by from BayStar general partner Larry Goldfarb has turned up as part of IBM's evidence to the court. Goldfarb says that Baystar had been chucking USD 50 million at SCO despite concerns that it had a high cash burn rate. He also claims that former Microsoft senior VP for corporate development and strategy Richard Emerson discussed “a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would 'backstop', or guarantee in some way, BayStar's investment”.

I don't think it's really a surprise that MSFT and SUN are behind the funding of SCO to take a poke at IBM and slow the adoption of Linux through FUD. If you'd like to learn more about this incredibly complex case, GrokLaw is the place to visit. But be warned: it's easy to be dragged into all the fascinating nooks and crannies of the case.

The real question for me is whether MSFT and SUN succeeded in their ventures. SUN has done a turn-around and is re-inventing themselves as the green company with better price/power/performance for the internet. MSFT has… almost shipped Vista. Linux, meanwhile, has moved, up, out and around, scaling to greater multi-CPU architectures, developing a better virtualization story, making huge progress in hardware compatibility, and fielding several worthy desktop competitors. LAMP is not a risky choice for IT; it's a question of which commercially-supported distributions and stacks to choose and ensuring the eager technicians in house get the training they need. If the SCO case cooled enthusiasm and take-up any, it gave FOSS advocates time to get their act together and pay a little closer attention to governance and provenance and licensing terms, cleaning up their houses and getting their story straight. Meanwhile, Microsoft… almost shipped Vista.

If SCO/Baystar/Microsoft/SUN thought that IBM would roll over and settle out of court, they badly miscalculated.

Ubuntu print to PDF

By Ted Roche on October 3, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource

Working on a new install of Ubuntu 6.06 and needed the functionality of printing to PDF out of a variety of applications. OpenOffice.org has it built-in, but other apps don't. There's lots of support in Linux for PostScript as the preferred output format, but the magic of invoking pstopdf is magick to me. Enter cups-pdf, a printer driver that generates PDF files. Following the instructions here (especially the hint in comment 15), I was up and running and generating PDFs in ten minutes. Way cool!

DLSLUG, October 5th, 7 PM: Protecting a Windows Server with a $50 Linux Box from Staples

By Ted Roche on October 3, 2006 in Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Security

Bill McGonigle announces Thursday's Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Linux User Group: “Protecting a Windows Server with a $50 Linux Box from Staples” presented by Lloyd Kvam:

“Lloyd will talk about OpenWRT, the open source linux distribution that targets small routers such as the Linksys WRT45GL. He recently used one to make a bridging firewall, where a Windows computer needed protection, but there was no access to the router.”

“Lloyd will talk about hardware organization, installing packages, the layout of the default configuration, and how to customize the routing and firewall operations… Lloyd works at software development, preferably in Python.”

Should be a fun meeting. Hope to see you there!

RedHat discusses the security challeges of RHEL4

By Ted Roche on September 30, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource, Security

Redhat has posted an interesting “Risk Report” outlining the security experiences with the first year of RedHat Enterprise Linux. A frank discussion of positives and negatives, with some good reminders on basic Best Practices. Worthy of a read.

LPI certification study guide new chapters

By Ted Roche on September 26, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource

IBM continues its series documenting the knowledge you'll need to pass the Linux Professional Institutes certification exams. This month, they cover a portion of the second exam, LPI 102, “Linux Documentation.”

CentraLUG: 2 October 2006 7 PM: Demos, Q&A, future topics

By Ted Roche on September 25, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource

The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central NH GNHLUG chapter, happens the first Monday of the month on the New Hampshire Institute Campus starting at 7 PM. Directions and maps are available on the NHTI site at http://www.nhti.edu/welcome/directions.htm. This month, we'll be meeting in the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, marked as “I” on the map at the link above. The main meeting starts at 7 PM and we finish around 9 PM. Open to the public. Tell your friends.

At this meeting we'll cover a couple of quick demos, including a tour of the GNHLUG wiki and a demo of the NX remote desktop access tool. We'll review upcoming meetings for GNHLUG and discuss what presentations we'd like to see this fall and winter. Over the summer we had a couple of good meetings and talked about learning a bit about software development on Linux. I'd like to open up the discussion to what these “users” are that we are supposed to be a group of, and what sort of presentations these “users” might like to see. Over the summer, I attended two “Open Mike” meetings, one in Nashua and one in Peterborough, that were very interesting and highly interactive. We'll certainly include some Q&A in this meeting, and perhaps include it as a permanent part of the meeting. MonadLUG has also added a “man page of the month” to their meetings; let's consider this as well.

7:00 Welcome, Announcements
7:15 Questions
7:30 Demos
8:00 Answers
8:30 Discussion: Future meetings

There's lots more information about CentraLUG and its parent organization GNHLUG at http://www.gnhlug.org.

Python Special Interest Group: September 28: byte codes and TurboGears

By Ted Roche on September 23, 2006 in OpenSource, Python

Bill Sconce posts the news for next Thursdays Python Special Interest Group meeting in Manchester:

PySIG — New Hampshire Python Special Interest Group
Amoskeag Business Incubator, Manchester, NH
28 September 2006 (4th Thursday) 7:00 PM

PySIG meetings are seminar-style, hands on. Laptop-friendly: 'Net access, wired + wireless. Python questions, war stories, examples always welcome.Everyone is welcome. Free of charge. Free of braces.

7:00 PM: Introductions –Bill & Ted & Alex, Milk & Cookies –Ben, Janet

7:10 PM: Happenings & AnnouncementsL Python 2.5 Released! Hosstraders 5-6 October, Hopkinton…

7:15 PM: Anyone's question(s) about Python, Python Module of the Month, Favorite-Python-Gotcha contest, Topics for future meetings…

7:30 PM: Bytecode Disassembly & Reassembly, presented by Bill Sconce, In Spec, Inc., Milford NH

Bill: “An August announcement on python-announce-list caught my eye — a bytecode assembler/dissassembler for Python. Because I spent one of my former lives as project leader for a bytecode/stack-pseudomachine, JIT-compiled, commercial language I thought it'd be fun and instructive to poke into Python's pseudomachine. It was and is. This easy-to-use tool makes it easy for anyone to get a start looking at Python internals.”

Bill Sconce is co-founder and chief cookie-procurer at PySIG, teaches Python, and writes in Python as often as he can.

8:10 PM: TurboGears, presented by Lloyd Kvam, Venix Corp, Lebanon NH

Lloyd: “I am impressed with the TurboGears (TG) approach to combining data and templates. They have a 20 minute tutorial that took me an hour – I insist on trying to understand how the magic is done. TG has a very ingenious use of decorators to link templates and data.

“The result is very different from Myghty which is much more like PHP with lots of snippets that get combined any which way you like.

“I am not sure I really understand all of the tradeoffs between the TG and Myghty approaches. That could lead to some interesting discussion.”

Lloyd Kvam is a charter member of PySIG and has given a number of Python tutorials at PySIG and elsewhere.

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