Portland Linux/Unix Group Meeting

It's a little known secret that systemd is extremely capable of starting, controlling and regulating more than just system services, but can easily start an entire Desktop UI. Not many people have sat down and implemented and worked out the problems of starting an X service, a few UI components, the session bus and DBus services for normal users with the mechanisms that systemd provides.

The benefits are obvious: Systemd provides excellent service monitoring and restarting capabilities, provides socket and DBus activation for relevant services, and overall improves desktop startup by allowing user services to start well before core services like Xorg or wayland start. In effect, we're saying goodbye to XDG autostart entirely, and getting back reliability and scalability.

We converted several desktop environments including Tizen's Mobile UI, Xfce4, Enlightenment and more to systemd user sessions. We "pop the hood" and take a look at the implications for startup, what's possible to further improve on the session startup and where we can do better.

Auke Kok is a software engineer at Intel's Open Source Technology Center, and has been attempting to make Linux boot faster since 2007. In 2008, he co-presented the "5-second boot" with Arjan van de Ven at the first LPC. Since then, Auke has worked on further improving the Linux Core OS start sequence, first for Moblin and later with MeeGo, where we made the first switch to systemd. Auke now works on Tizen, which will heavily integrate systemd in the Core OS.

Agenda:

7:00 - 7:15 Announcements 7:15 - 8:30 Presentation and Questions 9:00 - ... Beer

        The Lucky Lab Northwest Beer Hall
        1945 NW Quimby
        Portland, Oregon

Follow PLUG on Twitter: @pdxlinux

Michael Dexter PLUG Volunteer

See you there!

The Portland Linux/Unix Group will have an informal meeting to discuss OSCON experiences and general open source questions.

We have several books to give away courtesy of O'Reilly Media!

Many will break for the Lucky Lab NW after the meeting

Linux has been used for network routing for many years, but the interface is different than the standard network appliances. Vyatta is a Debian based distribution that provides an open command line interface that looks like Cisco or Juniper. The command line is built on top of standard bash shell with extensible template language.

This talk will go into the history of Vyatta, where it came from and how it is used today. For those who want to contribute or modify, it will also cover the internals of how this implemented.

Stephen Hemminger is a software engineer working remotely in Portland for Vyatta. He has been involved with Linux networking for 8 years and currently maintains bridging and routing utilities. Steve regularly presents at Linux conferences.

Many will break for the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne afterwards.

The Joy of Logical Volumes

Brian P. Martin will give a short introduction on getting started with the Linux Logical Volume Manager. A demonstration will follow, showing how to get up and running with LVM in three simple commands. Bring your laptop prepared with either an empty partition or an empty flash key and get on LVM yourself during the demo.

Agenda:

7:00 - 7:30 Announcements 7:30 - 8:30 Presentation and Questions 9:00 - ... Refreshments

The Lucky Lab Northwest Beer Hall 1945 NW Quimby Portland, Oregon

Follow PLUG on Twitter: http://twitter.com/pdxlinux

Michael Dexter PLUG Volunteer

See you there!

UEFI Secure Boot and Open Source. It's not a 'general war against computation' by Vincent Zimmer, Intel

As 2012 platform firmware embraces UEFI 2.3.1 and ACPI5.0 support, the ability to interoperate with UEFI Secure Boot is imperative. This poses a unique challenge for open software that may not come pre-installed on the platform. With UEFI Secure Boot, though, infrastructure has been put in place to preserve openness, owner choice and control in addition to mitigating concerns of malware targeting the platform. This talk will provide a history of UEFI Secure Boot, an overview of the implementation, deployment practices, and details on the engagement with the open source community.

Vincent Zimmer is a Principal Engineer with Intel Corporation. He has been working on various platform, networking, trusted computing and security technologies around EFI since 1999 and platform firmware since 1992. Vincent has spoken in various forums on this topic, co-authored 3 books, 10 papers, and several specifications in this area.

Many will break for refreshments at the Lucky Lab NW at 1945 NW Quimby after the meeting

The Portland Linux/Unix Group (PLUG) is a group of enthusiasts dedicated to teaching and learning about Linux, Unix and related projects. There is no membership fee to join and we welcome people of all levels of experience. PLUG has met since 1994 and hosts monthly General and Advanced Topics presentations plus a hands-on support Clinic.

No host or speaker available... making for an exciting UnMeeting at the Lucky Labrador Brew Pub at 915 Southeast Hawthorne.

Bring your questions and stories!