Tag Archives | GNHLUG

Seacoast LUG, 13-August-2007: Panda3D

By Ted Roche on August 13, 2007 in Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Python, Technology

Ben Scott reminds folks about the Seacoast LUG meeting happening tonight:

For the August 2007 SLUG/Seacoast/UNH/Durham meeting, there will be a presentation on the Panda3D 3D engine.

=== About Panda3D ===

Panda3D is an Open Source “3D engine” — software that lets you model a “world”, and then render it in real-time on a graphics display. Think “Doom” or “Half-Life”. It was originally developed by Disney for their massively multi-player online game, Toontown, so it’s got real capabilities. They released it as Free Software in 2002. Carnegie Mellon University and Disney now manage the project jointly. The project emphasizes “a short learning curve and rapid development”.

Panda3D supports the C++ and Python languages, runs on Linux and Windows, and comes with models and artwork to get you started. There is also a library of documentation, sample code, and full projects online, along with what appears to be a reasonably active web forum.

=== About SLUG ===

SLUG is the Seacoast Linux User Group, and is a chapter of GNHLUG, the Greater NH Linux User Group. Rob Anderson is the SLUG coordinator. SLUG meets the second Monday of every month, same time, same place. You can find out more about SLUG and GNHLUG at their respective websites.

Meetings take place starting at 7:00 PM. Meetings are open to all. The meeting proper ends around 9ish, but it’s not uncommon to find hangers-on there until 10 or later. They take place in Room 301 (the third floor conference room), of Morse Hall, at the University of New Hampshire, in Durham.

CentraLUG, August 6th, Special Location: Roger Trussel, Building FireFox Extensions

By Ted Roche on August 3, 2007 in OpenSource, Technology

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 starting at 7 PM. Due to summer hours at the
NHTI Library, we will be meeting at the Sybase offices, 6 Loudon Road,
Suite 501, Concord, thanks to member (and Sybase employee) Larry Cook.

DIRECTIONS: From Interstate 93, take exit 14 and head east over the
Merrimack River. Immediately after the bridge, take the first right.
Drive straight back to the cornfield, then turn right and then right
again to get to the south end of the building. Walk around the building
to the right to come in the front (east) entrance. Take the elevator to
the fifth floor. Straight off the elevator is Sybase. Enter and turn
left. At the end of the hallway is the conference room.

Google Map: http://tinyurl.com/2rtc8k

Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.

Roger Trussell will present a session on building Firefox extensions.
Firefox extensions are small zipped blocks of code that add new
functionality to Firefox, from a simple toolbar button to a completely
new feature. Extensions allow Firefox to stay small and unbloated.
Extensions give content providers another way to make certain features
more accessible to their end-users. We will see some quick examples of
how to build extensions for Firefox 2.x using XML and JavaScript. We
will also see a demonstration of some useful extensions available for
web content developers.

Roger Trussell is a programmer with over five years of experience in a
variety of support roles for health care, software, research, and
manufacturing environments. He has worked at many companies throughout
the Upper Valley such as DHMC, isee systems, inc. (formally known as
High Performance Systems, Inc.), and Timken Aerospace. Roger holds a
Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute in Troy NY. One of Roger’s main interests is
bridging the gap between programmers and end-users. He has worked on
software installer technology and he has worked in end-user support roles.

More details at about this meeting and the group are available at
http://www.centralug.org and http://www.gnhlug.org as I learn them!

Hope to see you there!

DLSLUG notes, 7-June-2007

By Ted Roche on June 26, 2007 in Home Page, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

The Dartmouth – Lake Sunapee Linux User Group held their meeting on the usual first Thursday, but at a new location: the Dartmouth Regional Technology Center, where Bill McGonigle has recently set up his new offices. Nice place!

Seven attendees found their way to the meeting, and we had an informal chat covering a wide range of issue: the challenges of single-person consultancies, the business of consulting, Nagios, Dartware, a new version of Logo from MIT, having a presence at Hanover’s Street Fest (July 28, btw).

Bill had an interesting proposal: that the group create a “chuck box” (Boy Scouts’ term, ref: http://www.troop168.net/forms/patrolboxa.htm) that could contain a GNHLUG-booth-in-a-box: a banner, handouts, a tent/canopy,… what else? Interesting idea.

Bill also recommended we check out http://www.zazzle.com if we’re considering making promotional items.

Good times had by all. No DLSLUG meeting in July; instead, you’re encouraged to come to the GNHLUG-wide BBQ July 15th. Hope to see you there!

MonadLUG, 14-June-2007: Ed Haynes: Real-time in Linux

By Ted Roche on June 12, 2007 in Home Page, Linux, Technology

MonadLUG is fortunate this month to have Ed Haynes of Wind River make a presentation on Real-time processing in Linux. Group coordinator Charlie Farinella posts the announcement:

Who: Ed Haynes, Wind River
What: Real-Time
Date: Thursday June 14, 2007
Time: 7:00PM
Where: SAU 1 office, 106 Hancock Rd., Peterborough
http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/MonadLUG

Linux is finding itself used in more applications that can be characterized as “Real Time”. What is a Real-Time system? What impact does it have to the Linux OS, and how has Linux evolved to better meet real-time challenges? What’s the difference between “soft” and “hard” real-time? A live demonstration will be held to characterize the performance of difference linux kernels.

Presenting will be Ed Haynes from Wind River. Ed currently serves as a technical resource for the New England Wind River region. He has 10 years experience as a software developer on embedded realtime systems and also led IPv6 development at Nortel.

Sounds like a good meeting!

Is ZFS Apple’s secret weapon? | InfoWorld | News | 2007-06-08 | By Gregg Keizer, Computerworld

By Ted Roche on June 9, 2007 in Apple Macintosh OS X, Home Page, OpenSource, Technology

Gregg Keizer asks “Is ZFS Apple’s secret weapon?? Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz said Apple’s upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard would rely on a file system that engineers at his company have spent years creating: ZFS.”

Very cool! GNHLUGgers saw ZFS presented at the Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Linux User Group meeting in April when Todd Underwood mentioned the OS X rumors. An XServe running as the front-end to a whole mess of disks could mean a very easy-to-use, near-infinite scaling of storage devices, ideal for any SME with delusions of grandeur. Looking forward to seeing what Apple does with ZFS!

Notes from PySIG, 24-May-2007: Python logging and wxPython

By Ted Roche on May 31, 2007 in Home Page, OpenSource, Python, Technology

Thirteen participants made it to the May meeting of the Python Special Interest Group of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group, held as usual on the fourth Thursday of the month at 7 PM at the Amoskeag Business Incubator, Manchester, NH.

It was a busy meeting. A quick round of introductions and announcements was followed by several terrific presentations.

Kent Johnson entertained us with Kent’s Korner, this month featuring the logging module. Simple logging can be implemented in two lines of code and customized with a third, but the module can be expanded almost infinitely to include multiple handlers arranged in a hierarchical fashion with different levels of filtering and multiple output. As usual, Kent did a fine job of showing simple examples and clearly building on them.

Bill Sconce decided to defer his second attempt at describing a hierarchy of data types, a discussion sure to rouse an interesting and educational debate amongst the participants. Stay tuned for a future meeting…

Ric Werme made the main presentation on wxPython. He brought the most extensive handouts we’ve had today, with an engaging backstory of his several-decades tinkering with graphing and the Petals of the Rose patterns. The demo was arresting, and source code can be downloaded here and here. Ric walked us through the wxPython wrapper, explaining the various widgets used and spoke well of the new wxPython book.

Thanks to Ric and Kent for their presentations, to Bill Sconce and Alex Hewitt for arranging the meeting and facilities, to the Amoskeag Business Incubator for their hospitality and to all who attended for their participation!

MonadLUG notes, 10-May-2007, dd and Seth Cohn, Drupal

By Ted Roche on May 23, 2007 in Home Page, LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, PHP, Python

Ten attendees made it to the May meeting of the Monadnock Valley Linux User Group, held as usual on the second Thursday of the month at the School Administrative Unit #1 offices, Hancock Road, Peterborough.

Bill Freeman presented his thoughts on the Man Page of the Month: dd. Bill provided two pages of notes. Quite the discussion followed obscure and useful things dd could do, such as preserve floppy drive images for posterity, copy music CDs to images for subsequent loopback mount and playing, copy and restore bootblock records and of course read and write tapes.

Seth Cohn was the featured speaker of the night and spoke on Drupal, the content management system. Seth has screenshots of a surprising number and variety of sites that are running on Drupal, presented a bit of Drupal history – seems it’s been around for a long time, and had a fairly stable history – and its current state, with fairly large and active communities of developers and implementors. He covered a bit of the architecture and philosophy of the modular design of Drupal and did the fairly painless install and initial configuration. 9 PM came too soon as there was lots more to see.

Thanks to Seth for presentation, to Bill for MPoM, to Charlie for organizing the meeting and to all for attending and participating.

Notes from CentraLUG, 7-May-2007: Ben Scott on OpenWRT

By Ted Roche on May 9, 2007 in Home Page, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Seven attendees got to enjoy the last CentraLUG meeting at the New Hampshire Technical Institute Library this academic year. The school will be closing on Friday, and summer hours will not accommodate CentraLUG. Stay tuned on an announcement of a summer location for June, July and August (September will have no meeting due to the Labor Day holiday).

Ben Scott was the featured presenter this evening, showing off the OpenWRT Linux distribution for embedded devices. The list of supported hardware [Updated the link — Ted] goes far beyond the initial LinkSys WRT-54G model to include products from dozens of other vendors. Many attendees brought their own routers for show-and-tell or backup. I had a v.1 WRT54G which I opened for folks to inspect. I also brought the compact (and alas, not yet flashable) WRT54GC. Bruce Dawson brought the WRTSL54GS, a Linux-flashable unit that includes a built-in USB connection. While Ben wrestled with the network and projector, we entertained ourselves well (and heckled Ben).

Ben had a well-prepared presentation, with schematics of the units, pictures of the circuit boards and some of hacks performed upon them, and a live demo of upgrading the unit from stock firmware to use the OpenWRT firmware and X-Wrt interface [3]. The OpenWRT includes a package manager and a large number of packages have been ported to the OpenWRT environment, ready for download. and installation.

Installation was uneventful – the Murphy gods must have been busy torturing the students in their finals week – and simple: select the “upload” option from the web interface and point to the OpenWrt image. Installation takes a short time and requires the router to be rebooted. Ben strongly advised clearing your browser cache, since the “same device” is going to be responding with different responses.

Ben gave us a quick tour of the OpenWRT interface and plunged right into installing X-Wrt. X-Wrt extends the interface and makes management far simpler, with some pretty incredible tools, like live SVG graphs showing actual network usage. Pretty impressive stuff.

Folks considering buying a new WRT54 will want to look for a “GL” unit where the “L” is Linux, the “GS” versions “Speedbooster” with more RAM or the “SL54GS” “Storage Link” that includes the USB connection also.

Bill also notes that it is possible to “brick” a unit. Ben says there are ways to de-brick them. Google ought to help, as would a post to GNHLUG.

Thanks to Ben for the great presentation, to Bill Sconce for providing the projector and notes, and to all for attending and participating.

MonadLUG, 10-May-2007: Seth Cohn presents Drupal

By Ted Roche on May 8, 2007 in Home Page, LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, PHP, Technology

The monthly meeting of the Monadnock region Linux User Group takes place as usual on the second Thursday of the month at the SAU #1 offices in Peterborough. Details and directions here.

Seth Cohn will be presenting Drupal, http://www.drupal.org. I’m looking forward to it. The LUGs have been privileged to see a couple presentations on CMSes: Jonathan Linowes presented Xaraya, and Barrie North Joomla! It’s great that there are som many great choices!

Notes from MerriLUG: Christoph Doerbeck: Xen on RHEL5

By Ted Roche on April 25, 2007 in Home Page, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Thirty people attended the April meeting of the Merrimack Valley Linux
User Group, held as usual on the third Thursday of the month at Martha’s
Exchange in Nashua.

Heather did a fine job of welcoming the large crowd, listing some
upcoming events (remember, you can always find them on
http://www.gnhlug.org), and requesting feedback on next month’s topic: a
professional graphics designer has offered to discuss what’s available
in Linux for graphics, but wants feedback on what to focus on: removing
red eye from photographs, structured drawings, etc. Let Heather know
what you’re looking to do with graphics in Linux.

Christoph was the main presenter. He is a Sales Engineer with Red Hat
and has quite a history with Linux/UNIX. He arrived with three laptops
and his own gigabit network to demonstrate several configurations of
virtualization. One laptop lacked the new hardware support and was
relegated to running VMWare. The other two machines (an HP with an AMD
chip with the magick SVx bits, and a “StinkPad” – his term, not mine! –
with the Intel VTx/VTi capabilities) were capable of using Xen with full
or para-virtualization. Christoph demonstrated both, and used the three
machines to show how a virtual machine could be transferred from one
machine to the other. Suspending and moving the VM was not successful
(it’s a demo, these things never work), but the harder one, moving a
running session was successful, demonstrated vividly with a running
video on his controlling machine streamed from a server that started on
one machine and finished on the other. Bravo!

There was also a discussion of the other alternative for virtualization,
single-kernel-image virtualization, where multiple sessions are running
in multiple zones, somewhat like a “chroot jail.” Examples of this kind
of VM include Solaris Zones, Virtuozzo and Open VZ. Members of the
audience contributed insights to some of the other projects going on,
such as the KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) project favored by some of the
kernel developers, UML (User Mode Linux) and others.

Christoph wrapped up with a long and thorough question-and-answer
session. He then offered a completely different topic: he mastered a DVD
with menus, music, video overlays completely in Linux and had some clips
to show off. A general consensus was that he was welcome to come back at
his convenience to talk about that, too!

Thanks to Christoph for the great demo, to Heather and Jim for
organizing the meeting, to the folks at Martha’s Exchange for providing
the facilities, and to all for attending and participating.

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