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DLSLUG/GNHLUG Quarterly Meeting, 3 Nov 2005

By on November 7, 2005 in OpenSource, Technology

What a great meeting last week! Forty-three attendees made this the most attended Greater New Hampshire Linux User Groupquarterly meeting of the year.

Thanks to Doug McIlroy for a fascinating presentation on his memories of growing up with the computer industry. Doug ran the department at Bell Labs where Kernighan and Ritchie came up with C, studied at MIT with WhirlWind, and had many fascinating adventures along the way. Doug put on a great show featuring significant and memorable milestones and wonderful anecdotes. Several people took notes, audio and video recordings. We hope to see something on the Dartmouth – Lake Sunapee LUG site soon!

Thanks also to Bill McGonigle for arranging and emceeing the meeting. Bill started with the usual announcements about the group, thanking PTR/Addison Wesley for providing some books to raffle as well as paying for the delicious refreshments. Bill had been contacted by a survey firm claiming to be looking for cases of Linux cost of ownership situations other than those that have been popularly reported. Bill expressed some scepticism on the legitimacy of this information and asked to contact him if you want to look into it. A raffle after Doug’s presentation gave away a couple of Addison-Wesley books and some RedHat promotional DVDs.

Bill Stearns announced the results of the project to bring some networking gear to Pass Christian schools following Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of their schools, and pointed to a link with pictures. Great job, Bill!

At the end, I spoke for a few minutes on the on-going effort to gather feedback for the development of by-laws and the registration of GNHLUG as a non-profit organization. Reception was generally positive. Several attendees offered to send along by-laws for their organizations, so we can examine what others have done.

Finally, we announced the next quarterly meeting. We’ll be joining with the New Hampshire Chapters of the ACM and IEEE for a presentation by Rik van Riel showing off spamikaze, an automated spam block system. The meeting will take place at Robert Frost Hall in the Walker Auditorium at Southern New Hampshire University. Note the unusual time: the main presentation is 5 Pm to 6 Pm, to allow evening graduate school students to attend. Hope to see you there! Thanks to all who attended!

PySIG last Thursday: Jython

By on October 29, 2005 in OpenSource, Python, Technology

The Python Special Interest Group (http://www.pysig.org), a chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group (http://www.gnhlug.org) had it’s monthly meeting last Thursday at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in Manchester, NH.

Kent Johnson put on a very good presentation and demonstration of Jython, complete with working demos, sample code and handouts. Everyone from novice to journeyman practitioner walked away with a better appreciation of what Jython is (simplifying, a Python interpreter/runtime written in Java) and what it isn’t, when to use it (working in a Java environment or wanting to use Java-based library functions). Great job, Kent! I’ve posted some notes from the meeting as well as Kent’s notes to the PySIG wiki at http://www.pysig.org/pywiki/PyNotes20051027.

Nearly a dozen people attended at the Amoskeag Business Incubator (thanks to them for the free space and projector), including new attendees brought in by Bill Sconce’s recent appearance at the ACM/IEEE seminar series and from my posts to the SwaNH lists. See, PR works!

Nashua GNHLUG meeting next Thursday: OpenVPN

By on October 15, 2005 in OpenSource, Security, Technology

The Nashua chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group meets the third Thursday of each month at Martha’s Exchange, Main Street Nashua. Dinner starts at 6 PM (pay for your own), the presentation starts upstairs at 7:30.

This months meeting on the 20th of October will have Ken D’Ambrosio showing OpenVPN, an open source solution to remote secure access to a network. OpenVPN runs on Windows, Linux, *BSD, OS X and Solaris. From their web page:

“OpenVPN implements OSI layer 2 or 3 secure network extension using the industry standard SSL/TLS protocol, supports flexible client authentication methods based on certificates, smart cards, and/or 2-factor authentication, and allows user or group-specific access control policies using firewall rules applied to the VPN virtual interface. OpenVPN is not a web application proxy and does not operate through a web browser.”

Sounds like a meeting not to miss!

MonadLUG tonight: The Open CD

By on October 13, 2005 in OpenSource

Tonight at the MonadLUG meeting, I will present “The Open CD” a CD to share with family and friends. It has Windows-readable and -runnable binaries including FireFox, OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird, 7-Zip, Audacity, Battle for Wesnoth, Gaim, Celestia, GIMP, Notepad2, PDFCreator, Really Slick Screensaveers, NVU, Sokoban and TuxPaint. It also includes the texts “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” and “Open Sources.” If booted, the CD runs a LiveCD version of Ubuntu. It’s a powerful tool to convince family, friends, clients and perfect strangers to try out F/OSS.

Download your copy from http://www.theopencd.org/ or come to the MonadLUG meeting tonight where I will have copies to give away.

The Monadnock Linux User Group (MonadLUG) meets the second Thursday or each month at 7:00pm at the SAU 1 Superintendent’s Office behind South Meadow School in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Details, directions and lots more information are available at the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group web site.

PySIG in two weeks: Jython

By on October 13, 2005 in OpenSource, Python

The Python Special Interest Group (“PySIG”) of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group meets the fourth Thursday of each month at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in Manchester at 7 PM.

This month, the meeting will take place on Thursday, 27 October 2005 and will feature a presentation on Jython by KentJohnson.

“Kent is soliciting suggestions for specific topics (on the PySIG mailing list). In the meantime here’s a synopsis about Jython in the large from the project’s home page: http://www.jython.org/docs/whatis.html. Jython should be of interest to anyone who uses or wants to know about either Python or Java. I particularly like the “typically 2-10X shorter” part, having worked on Java projects in a former life…” — Bill Sconce, PySIG coordinator

Off to MerriLUG

By on September 15, 2005 in LAMP, OpenSource, Technology

The Merrimack Valley Linux User Group, one of the five LUGs that makes up the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group meets the third Thursday of each month at Martha’s Exchange in Nashua. Meetings commence at 7 PM, but members often gather for dinner before the meeting at 6 PM. The presenters tonight will be from WindRiver, manufacturers of VxWorks and a number of fascinating industrial products. Wind River will be presenting their build system, “which automates building the Linux kernel, and automatically generates the Linux filesystem from pristine source with needed patches applied automatically.” There ought to be good time for a Q&A as always on generally Linux topics, too. Hope to see you there.

MonadLUG: Tim Lind demos four Open Source Firewalls

By on September 8, 2005 in OpenSource, Security

Saw a great presentation by Tim Lind at the Peterborough/Monadnock LUG this evening comparing four Open Source firewalls: Smoothwall, IPCOP, Sentry and M0N0Wall.Each comes as a bootable CD-ROM, some install to a hard drive, m0n0wall runs off the CD-ROM with settings stored on a floppy (or, optionally, a Compact Flash or USB storage). Each supports a variety of tools, including DCHP, DNS, some varieties of VPN, intrusion detection, logging, NTP, ssh, and a couple of acronyms that flew right past me. Tim uses these to set up clients with internet access, re-using an old clunker PII-350 they clients have laying around, and getting a statefull firewall with some pretty impressive tools.

Monadnock Linux User Group tonight: Ira Krakow on Wine

By on July 14, 2005 in OpenSource, Technology

The next meeting of the Monadnock Linux User Group (MonadLUG) will be this Thursday, July 14th, 7:00pm, at the SAU 1 Superintendent’s Office behind South Meadow School in Peterborough. Google map here.

This is a combined meeting with CentraLUG (of the Concord area) and will feature guest speaker Ira Krakow, discussing WINE and running Windows applications on Linux. Ira will present an overview of Wine, which enables Windows applications to run in Linux, and Winelib, which enables Windows application sources to compile and run on Linux. Ira discusses Wine and Winelib, which make it possible to run some Windows applications on Linux, and to more easily port applications that were originally written for a Windows platform.

He’ll also touch on other projects that can help an enterprise overcome its Windows dependencies, such as ReactOS (the open source port of Windows NT), MinGW (the port of GCC for Windows programs), and Mono (essentially, Wine for .NET and C#). Ira is currently co- authoring a book for Prentice-Hall, on Wine and Winelib; his co- author is Brian Vincent.

Using WebMin for Fun and Profit, a DLSLUG presentation with S5

By on July 8, 2005 in OpenSource

I had the privilege last night of speaking to the Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Linux User Group, one of five chapters of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group on the installation, configuration and management of WebMin, a Perl-based, BSD-licensed tool for remote, secure, web-based management of many, many different modules in a Linux/Unix/HP-UX/Solaris system. This is a great tool, providing a simple, discoverable, explorable GUI for systems controlled by sometimes-obscure text configuration files. Text files are superior to an opaque “Registry” but having a GUI as well is the best of both worlds! My slides and notes are available for viewing from the tedroche.com whitepapers site, written in Eric Meyer’s great S5: Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System – a single HTML page, a couple of magic CSS files and a couple of images give you a slide show with keyboard shortcuts, a handout/slideshow view toggle and a popup menu (move your mouse to the lower right corner) to navigate to any slide. Slick stuff, elegantly simple to use.

CentraLUG: Ed Lawson presents Scribus, 7 PM June 6th, NHTI

By on June 1, 2005 in Home Page

The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central New Hampshire chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux Users Group, occurs on the first Monday of each month on the New Hampshire Technical Institute Campus starting at 7 PM. (Note that we’re likely to reschedule the July meeting as it falls on the Fourth.)

This month, we’ll be meeting in Room 146 of the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, http://www.nhti.net/nhtimap.pdf, marked as “I” on that map. Directions and maps are available on the NHTI site at http://www.nhti.edu. The main meeting starts at 7 PM, with Ed Lawson presenting Scribus, an open desktop publishing system. Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.

Scribus is available from http://www.scribus.org.uk and is not just another pretentious word processor, but an entire pre-press system for producing high-quality documents suitable for publication. It will generate PDF files. It has a new “Scriptor” API for scripting in Python. Imports and exports SVG. Bells! Whistles! It runs natively under Linux and under X11 on Mac OS X and (in theory, anyway) CygWin on Windows. Scribus is distributed under the GPL.

More details at about this meeting and the group are available at http://www.centralug.org and http://www.gnhlug.org.

Hope to see you there!

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