The Greater New Hampshire Linux Group manned a booth today at the Hosstraders Hamfest and swap meet. A number of local Linux luminaries were there, evangelizing Linux, talking up the local Linux User Groups, and demonstrating a variety of different Linux distributions, including several with Ham Radio specific software.
Tag Archives | GNHLUG
CentraLUG Meeting Monday, 2 May: Ed Lawson presents Scribus
The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central New Hampshire chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux Users Group, recurs the first Monday of each month on the New Hampshire Technical Institute campus starting at 7 PM.
Directions and maps are available on the NHTI site at http://www.nhti.edu. This month, we’ll be meeting in the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, http://www.nhti.net/nhtimap.pdf , marked as “I” on that map. 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. 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 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!
Microsoft returns to 64-bitness after a six-year hiatus
A strange article at InfoWorld: Top News titled Microsoft: Let the 64-bit era begin. Microsoft was one of the companies that started the Windows 64-bit era with Windows NT running on the PowerPC, MIPS, and Alpha chips in the early 90s. DEC produced the Alpha chip and went on to port UNIX to the chip as Tru64 UNIX. Sun responded with the UltraSPARC in 1995, also 64-bit. For reasons unclear to me, Microsoft dropped all but the Intel 32-bit version of their Windows products in 1999, effectively ceding the 64-bit market to to Sun, DEC, Compaq and HP. Linux has run on 64-bit chips since they were available. A recent post on the GNHLUG board indicates that Linux will run on an AMD64 laptop as well. Wow, 64 bits on a laptop!
The article mentions the 64-bit release of Windows XP, but seems focused on the long-promised “Longhorn” release of Windows, and has a couple of strange paragraphs claiming that the Longhorn flavor Windows Explorer can provide much of the search capabilities of the oft-promised (but not included in Longhorn) WinFS database-as-file-system:
The various transparencies, shading, and richer animation capabilities of Longhorn’s graphical interface that will be featured in the demo are not glitz for glitz’s sake, because these improvements are designed to help users to “collect, organize, and visualize data in a way that is not possible today,”
Uh, hunh.
I don’t think this column is coincidentally timed with the release this Friday of “Tiger,” Apple’s latest OS X version 10.4, including the built-in “Spotlight” desktop search feature. Can’t wait to see how Tiger delivers!
Dartmouth / Lake Sunapee Linux User Group
The Dartmouth – Lake Sunapee Linux User Group, a chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group will meet on Thursday, April 7th, 7:00-9:00PM at Dartmouth College, Carson Hall Room L02 to hear Peter Nikolaidis present “Open Source E-Commerce with Interchange”
According to the website, “Interchange is an open source alternative to commercial commerce servers and application server/component applications. Interchange is one of the most powerful tools available to automate and database-enable your web site or build online applications. The talk will cover the basics of installing and configuring the software, as well as some demonstrations of existing sites running on Interchange.”
The Python Special Interest Group will be meeting before the main meeting at Everything But Anchovies, 603-643-6135, 5 Allen St Hanover, NH 03755, US at 5:30 PM to hear from the several Granite Staters who went to the Python conference in Washington, D.C.
The DLSLUG announcement email list is here, main web site here and the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group here.
Will Python Make It Into The Enterprise?
On Slashdot, Python Moving into the Enterprise. Qa1 writes “Seems that Python is moving into the enterprise. At the recent PyCon it has become apparent that it’s not just Google, GIS, Nokia or even Microsoft anymore. The article points out that Python is increasingly becoming a perfectly viable and even preferred choice for the enterprise. More and more companies are looking at Python as a good alternative to past favorites like Java. Will we finally be able to code for living in a language that’s not painful? Exciting times!”
I knew several attendees at PyCon, although I was tied up that week (teaching MySQL) and couldn’t make it. Ed Leafe, former FoxPro MVP and host of several great email and web forums at http://leafe.com, presented the promising business development framework dabo. The Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group is building up a Python SIG (developers on all platforms welcomed) and will be holding debriefing sessions about the conference as part of meetings state-wide.
LinuxWorld
Sorry for the light blogging. Spent Thursday at LinuxWorld in Boston; got to see lots of vendors big (IBM, Intel, AMD, Novell, Red Hat) and small (X.org, LTSP.org, GNHLUG.org) and hang out with some cool folks. [Update: fixed malformed link above.]
Learn something new every day…
Ed Lawson did a great presentation on CUPS, the Common UNIX Printing System, last night at CentraLUG. Christopher Schmidt did a great job of taking meeting notes when he wasn’t showing us how he programs his cell phone in Python via Bluetooth from his PowerBook. Really. Cool.
The Python SIG also held a session in the hour before the main meeting, and we’ve tentatively agreed on the 3rd Wednesday of the month as the time for the SIG to get together. Location still TBD – we may use the NHTI in Concord, but are also looking at Manchester as a more central location.
Thursday night the Peterborough LUG, also known as MonadLUG, will be holding its first session in a while, coming back from a period of somnolence thanks to their new coordinator, Guy Pardoe. Looking forward to the meeting!
DLSLUG tonight: Hacking the Linksys WRT54G with Sveasoft firmware
I’ll be presenting "Hacking the LinkSys WRT54G with Sveasoft firmware" tonight to the Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Linux User Group, a reprise of my November presentation to the Central NH Linux User Group, both chapters of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group
The presentation was edited with the Taco HTML Editor,
http://www.tacosw.com on the Mac and with
SciTE, http://www.scintilla.org/; on Windows and Linux. Interoperability is Good.
The templates for the document and instructions on their use are from the Simple Standards-based Slide Show System, S5 developed by Eric Meyer and available at http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ under a Creative Commons license. Thanks, Eric!
Central NH Linux Users Group meeting tonight.
Off to the Central NH Linux Users Group (a chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux Users Group) tonight for a demo of Ruby and Mepis.