Gabrielle Roth and Selena Deckelmann will be discussing ways to build and maintain Open Source Communities. Their emphasis will be in building real in-person communities rather than virtual on-line type communities.

Gabriell and Selena recently presented "Running a Successful User Group" at OSCON 2008, see notes at http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/30268

The meeting will be in Room FAB 86-01 of The Fariborz Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science Building at Portland State University. This building, nicknamed The New Engineering Building, is on SW 4th across from SW College Street. See location H-10 on the map at http://pdxLinux.org/campus_map.jpg

Speaker: brian d foy Topic: Indexing CPAN

BackPAN is the historical archive of the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, where most Perl modules live. Going back to 1993, BackPAN has about 100,000 distributions, taking up 12 GB of space. So far, there has not been a comprehensive index of all of these distributions. I'm working on a project to go through each distribution, record as much information as I can, and store that in a way that other people can ask questions. The big goal now is to take any Perl module file you have installed locally and query my index to determine exactly which distribution it came from, when it was released, what other files came with it, and at the time of it's release what its dependency list was.

My talk is a demonstration of what I have so far, which is still in the data collection phase. I have an indexer that knows how to go through distributions and record information, and can do some with pluggable components for each portion of the work. In my talk, I'll demonstrate the current indexer and talk a little bit about the tools and techniques I use. There's plenty of cool Perl things going on, and I'm sure some of the Linux people will have valuable comments about software indexing.

Kirk Harr will speak on "LANs, iptables, routing, and more"

Speaker: Russell Senior Topic: OpenWrt - It's not just for Linksys Routers anymore

Russell has been fiddling around with OpenWrt for a couple years, on various platforms. He'll give a step-by-step on how to build OpenWrt for your device, various ways to get it onto your device, and how configuration is handled in the OpenWrt way.

Normal meeting rules apply.

David Mandel will discuss some of the thoughts he has on the role
of Open Source ideas in Agriculture and International Development
and maybe even on us locally.

*******************************************************************

    Agenda:

        7:00 - 7:30  Business
             We will discuss the status of our ongoing projects
             including PLUG's monthly Advanced Topics meetings,
             PLUG's monthly hands on clinics, PLUG for Education,
             etc.

        7:30 - 8:30  Presentation

             See above

        9:00 - ...  Beer
                            Jax Bar And Restaurant
                            826 SW 2nd Avenue
                            Portland
                            (Note:  We no longer use the Lucky Lab.)

Jax Bar 826 SW 2nd Ave

Speaker: Eric Wilhelm

Codeless GUI Programming A Declarative Syntax Layer for Desktop Graphical User Interfaces

This will be the world premiere of a game-changing advancement in the development of desktop graphical user interfaces (GUIs). FreeTUIT removes the verbosity, tedium, and confusion from GUI development and provides a unified syntax for widget layout and configuration which supports good software design practice without getting in the way of rapid application development.

FreeTUIT is a syntax and runtime for concisely declaring the layout and configuration of GUI widgets (such as forms, toolbars, buttons, and dialogs). The freetuit interpreter drives a unified object layer which is accessible from event callbacks. This takes you from a blank page to a static demo of the layout with zero setup and allows desktop applications to be developed and deployed faster than web applications by simply removing the HTML, CSS, XML, HTTP, Javascript, Database, Network, and User Agent components.

                          Rapid Discussions

                                  on

                              Any Topic

                                  by

                          Anyone & Everyone

  Instead of having a formal presentation, we will get together and
  discuss anything anyone wants to discuss in brief sessions of no 
  more than a few minutes each.  If we have enough people involved
  we can break into smaller groups to handle each topic.  

Agenda:

7:00 - 7:30 Business We will discuss the status of our ongoing projects including PLUG's monthly Advanced Topics meetings, PLUG's monthly hands on clinics, PLUG for Education, etc.

7:30 - 8:30 Presentation

See above

9:00 - ... Beer Jax Bar And Restaurant 826 SW 2nd Avenue Portland

Speaker: Eric Wilhelm

Codeless GUI Programming A Declarative Syntax Layer for Desktop Graphical User Interfaces

This will be the world premiere of a game-changing advancement in the development of desktop graphical user interfaces (GUIs). FreeTUIT removes the verbosity, tedium, and confusion from GUI development and provides a unified syntax for widget layout and configuration which supports good software design practice without getting in the way of rapid application development.

FreeTUIT is a syntax and runtime for concisely declaring the layout and configuration of GUI widgets (such as forms, toolbars, buttons, and dialogs). The freetuit interpreter drives a unified object layer which is accessible from event callbacks. This takes you from a blank page to a static demo of the layout with zero setup and allows desktop applications to be developed and deployed faster than web applications by simply removing the HTML, CSS, XML, HTTP, Javascript, Database, Network, and User Agent components.

                             PRESENTATION

                      Intro to Digital Forensics
                 (aka Groveling Through File Systems)


                                  by

                             Hal Pomeranz
                         Deer Run Associates

While it may not be as sexy as they make it look on TV, there are a number of powerful Open Source tools available for analyzing file systems and recovering data-- even data that may have been deleted by the attacker. This talk will start with an overview of the standard Unix file system architecture and discuss tools for imaging file systems, suggest a few useful tools and idioms for finding clues in your images, and cover how to discover "interesting" data from deleted files and re-assemble that data into an actual file image.

Hal Pomeranz is the founder and technical lead of Deer Run Associates, and has been active in the system and network management/security field for over twenty years. As a senior member of the Faculty for the SANS Institute, Hal developed the SANS "Step-by-Step" course model and currently serves as the track coordinator and primary instructor for the SANS/GIAC Linux/Unix Security Certification track (GCUX). In 2001 he was given the SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award for his teaching and leadership in the field of System Administration.

Note:

(1)  The slides for the presentation are available at:
     http://www.deer-run.com/~hal/IntroToDigitalForensics.pdf

(2)  Randal Schwartz will do a live cast of this presentation at:
     http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/25652
     You can follow along if you have a web browser, 
     and if you register, you can also participate in the chat, 
     and Randal might relay your questions to the speaker.
     The recording of the session will be available afterward 
     at the same address.

                             PRESENTATION

                               Fun with
                     "blktrace" and "seekwatcher"

                                  by

                        M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
                          <[email protected]>


 blktrace is a command that generates traces of the i/o 
 traffic on block devices such as hard drives.

 seekwatcher generates graphs from blktrace runs to help 
 visualize IO patterns and performance. It can plot multiple 
 blktrace runs together, making it easy to compare the differences 
 between different benchmark runs.

 Ed will show us how to install and use these cool tools.

Note: (1) Randal Schwartz will do a live cast of this presentation at: http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/25652 You can follow along if you have a web browser, and if you register, you can also participate in the chat, and Randal might relay your questions to the speaker. The recording of the session will be available afterward at the same address.

                             PRESENTATION

                           To Be Announced

                                  by

                           Barton C Massey


 I haven't gotten the topic yet from Bart; but Bart Massey
 who is with the Computer Science Department at PSU will
 be giving the presentation. 

Note: Randal Schwartz will do a live cast of this presentation at: http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/25652 You can follow along if you have a web browser, and if you register, you can also participate in the chat, and Randal might relay your questions to the speaker. The recording of the session will be available afterward at the same address.

                             PRESENTATION

                Displaying HD Video Content with a PC,
              Presented from a Linux User's Perspective

                                  by

                            Terry Griffin
                         <[email protected]>


     A discussion of issues associated with displaying
     High Definition (HD) video content using a PC,
     focusing on the data path from the PC to the display.
     Particular attention will be given to issues unique
     to Linux/FOSS but much of the presentation will be
     applicable to any HD video setup.

Note: Randal Schwartz will do a live cast of this presentation at: http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/25652 You can follow along if you have a web browser, and if you register, you can also participate in the chat, and Randal might relay your questions to the speaker. The recording of the session will be available afterward at the same address.

PRESENTATION

What is Linux Fund? by Randal L. Schwartz and David Mandel

A discussion of the administrative side of running an Open Source organization - legal standing, non-profit status, taxes and fees, accepting donations, international issues, etc.

We will also discuss ways Open Source "Foundations"like Linux Fund, Apache Software Foundation, The Software Conservancy, The Free Software Foundation, The Open Source Geospatial Foundation, and others are helping particular projects minimize the overhead of running their own non-profit.

A lot of the discussion will center on Linux Fund since both presenters are from Linux Fund and ways to become involved with Linux Fund.

                           PRESENTATION

                        Rapid Discussions

                                on

                            Any Topic

                                by

                        Anyone & Everyone

Instead of having a formal presentation, we will get together and
discuss anything anyone wants to discuss in brief sessions of no
more than a few minutes each.  If we have enough people involved
we can break into smaller groups to handle each topic.

                             PRESENTATION

                  Virtualize vs Containerize: Fight!

                                  by

                          Irving Popovetsky
                       <[email protected]>

                                 and

                           Andy de la Lucha

 Everyone has a different reason to love virtualization: security,
 configuration isolation... the list goes on. But containerization 
 offers many of the same goodies as virtualization, alongside an 
 efficiency and performance advantage. Just what you need, more 
 options. There's no wrong answer. Andy de la Lucha and Irving 
 Popovetsky help you ask the right questions about what's right 
 for your environment.

                             PRESENTATION

       Crash Reporting: Mozilla's Open Source Solution

                  by

             K Lars Lohn

 Nothing exercises the limits of software like turning it 
 over to the end users. While in-house testing is invaluable, 
 the end users can often find the neglected edge cases or subtle 
 race conditions in a more reliable manner. However, once the 
 software is in the end user’s hands, postmortem crash information 
 is usually lost.

 By taking the Google Breakpad project and enhancing it with 
 Mozilla’s own Socorro project, Mozilla has a solution to this problem.  
 When Firefox goes down, in a last ditch effort, it lobs a 
 packet of crash information over the wall to Mozilla's Socorro 
 servers.  Socorro Servers, written in Python, can handle millions 
 of these crashes per day. Using Google Breakpad libraries to 
 reconstitute useful stack traces, Socorro Server saves its 
 work in a PostgreSQL database.  There statistics are gathered 
 and displayed under the Socorro UI, a PHP web application.  
 With this suite of tools, the Mozilla developers can track 
 trends and even drill down to look at specific instances of
 Firefox crashes.

 WARNING: during this talk, Firefox will be intentionally 
 crashed live on stage.  Those of delicate constitution may wish 
 to retire to the lobby prior to the spectacle.

             about Lars

 Trapped at the triple point between a geek, a hippie and 
 a biker, Lars is a self proclaimed Cowboy Programmer at the 
 Mozilla Corporation.  Unintentionally specializing in programming 
 as performance art, Lars frequently jumps into projects on the 
 Thursday prior to a Monday deadline. Lars is proud of being the 
 only member of the Web Development team that does absolutely 
 no Web development.

 Lars prefers Python, PostgreSQL and Harleys, but is versed in C++,
 MySQL and Subarus.

Michael Dexter from Linux Fund/BSD Fund will give his EuroBSDCon 2008 presentation:

Zen and the Art of Multiplicity Maintenance: An applied survey of BSD-licensed multiplicity strategies from chroot to mult.

Topics of this survey include chroot, jails, Xen, sysjail, SIMH, NetBSD/usermode, kauth Jail, QEMU/kQEMU, GXemul, vkernel

  Given that the database, as the canonical repository of data, 
 is the most important part of many applications, why is it 
 that we don't write database unit tests? This talk promotes 
 the practice of implementing tests to directly test the 
 schema, storage, and functionality of databases.

 David E. Wheeler, Founder of Kineticode and Co-Founder of 
 PostgreSQL Experts hacks Perl, PostgreSQL, JavaScript, and Ruby. 
 I believe David is also the lead developer and maintainer 
 Bricolage which is a well known CMS. 
 David lives in Portland.

Using DRBD to Build High-Availability Clusters on Commodity Hardware

Charlie Schluting of LINBIT will explain how DRBD works and how people currently use it, with enough information to get you started building your own clusters.

DRBD stands for Distributed Replicated Block Device, and as the name implies, allows you to replicate block devices over TCP. DRBD is extremely flexible due to the fact it is a block device, and as such is used in a variety of situations. At the most basic level, you can replicate data between two servers to provide synchronously replicated storage redundancy for either failover or disaster recovery purposes. In active/active mode, you can also run GFS, OCFS2, or other clustered file systems.

Topics that will be covered: - How it works, history, and future exciting news regarding mainline kernel inclusion - How it is used: HA-iSCSI, HA-NFS, Virtualization, Apache, Samba, etc. - Cluster Resource Manager options and recommendations, and news about the confusing changes in the Linux-HA / Clusterlabs communities.

And the majority of the time will be spent on: - Example cluster configuration: hardware setup, installation and configuration, and cluster manager integration.

Come with questions!

                             PRESENTATION

                                Drupal
                         What is it Good For?

                                  by

                              Lev Tsypin

 Drupal is growing leaps and bounds these days, powering everything 
 from ma and pa brochure sites to Obama’s recovery.gov. Does this 
 mean it’s a great fit for any website? Not exactly.

 Drupal has been defined as many things, including a content 
 management system, a web application framework, and community 
 plumbing. In some ways, this is both a blessing and a curse; 
 there’s so much you can do, in so many different ways, that new 
 users are crushed under the weight of the options and lack of 
 clarity. In addition, all of that flexibility does come with a cost, 
 in terms of performance and conciseness.

 This presentation will cover some Drupal basics including history, 
 core concepts, and system structure. From there, we will dig into 
 Drupal’s strengths and weaknesses, finishing off by discussing the 
 types of projects Drupal is best suited for, including specific 
 examples for each case.

 My hope is that developers new to the platform will gain a better 
 understanding of when to approach a new project with Drupal, more 
 experienced developers will gain a bit of insight on when not to 
 use it, and non-techies will have some help in choosing a platform 
 for their projects along with an understanding why developers they 
 work with select a given platform. Please note that this talk will 
 not delve deeply into the technical details of Drupal.

WARNING!!!

Jeri is sick and can't do the talk tonight.

Informal DorkBotPDX demo night instead!

In place of Jeri, I have some offers to do demos of projects from DorkBotPDX land, including Simran Gleason about his Kepler's Orrery (a generative music system that composes music from gravity equations), I have a little stepper motor demo, someone suggested they could demo Luz (a ruby / opengl 4-d drawing software), and there may be others.

    CANCELLED PRESENTATION was ...


                A Talk
                  by

            Jeri Ellsworth
                            (Circuit Girl)

 Jeri Ellsworth is a native Oregonian, born in Yamhill and raised
 in Dallas, Oregon.  Early on she became fascinated with electronics 
 and 8-bit computers setting the stage for her unique approach to 
 learning.  Not being challenged in school, she skipped higher 
 education to pursue a career in car-racing and chassis fabrication.
 After that, she opened a chain of computer stores in Oregon and 
 Washington.  She sold those to persue a career in chip design,
 which lead her to design the CommodoreOne - based upon the 
 Commodore 64 - using reconfigurable logic and the C64 DTV 30- 
 games-in-one joystick, selling, a quarter million units.
 She currently works as an Oregon based consultant.   

 I'm not sure what Jeri is going to speak about yet, but judging from
 the talk she gave at Stanford, it should be very good indeed.
 See a video of her Stanford talk at: 
 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1053309060448851979#

 Also, see her webs sites at:
 http://www.jeriellsworth.com/
 and
 http://www.fatmanandcircuitgirl.com/    

OpenEmbedded

Getting started in embedded Linux development can be intimidating. Every hardware device vendor seems to have its own embedded Linux distribution and way of developing for it. OpenEmbedded (OE) is a framework for creating highly customizable embedded Linux distributions. It provides a well-designed build system and cross-compilation environment to developers, and a robust package management system for setting up and maintaining your embedded Linux system.

Find out why OpenEmbedded is taking the embedded world by storm and improving the lives of embedded Linux developers.

Scott Garman is a Linux Software Engineer at Russound, a leader in multi-room audio systems, which allow you to enjoy music throughout your home.

A Talk by

Jeri Ellsworth (Circuit Girl)

Jeri Ellsworth is a native Oregonian, born in Yamhill and raised in Dallas, Oregon. Early on she became fascinated with electronics and 8-bit computers setting the stage for her unique approach to learning. Not being challenged in school, she skipped higher education to pursue a career in car-racing and chassis fabrication. After that, she opened a chain of computer stores in Oregon and Washington. She sold those to persue a career in chip design, which lead her to design the CommodoreOne - based upon the Commodore 64 - using reconfigurable logic and the C64 DTV 30-games-in-one joystick, selling, a quarter million units. She currently works as an Oregon based consultant.

I'm not sure what Jeri is going to speak about yet, but judging from the talk she gave at Stanford, it should be very good indeed.

See a video of her Stanford talk at: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1053309060448851979#

Also, see her webs sites at: http://www.jeriellsworth.com/ and http://www.fatmanandcircuitgirl.com/

Brian Martin will be test-driving his IEEE presentation on his experiences in a true, "abandon the building" disaster recovery effort. He'll place particular emphasis on where technically sound, well-tested disaster plans often fail in a real disaster, and how these problems can be overcome.

The best data center disaster recovery plans are developed carefully and tested regularly. If you're at that stage, you may think you are well prepared. In this entertaining presentation, Brian Martin describes the unexpected problems that arose when a well thought out and tested plan met a real disaster, and draws lessons that are applicable to any disaster recovery situation.

Brian Martin has spent 30 years in the IT field, fairly evenly divided between being a mainframe system programmer and a server system administrator. He has operated Martin Consulting Services in the Portland Oregon area since moving to Portland from the San Francisco Bay Area in 1996. He has a wife, two cats, a dog, and nine in-service computers at home.

                             PRESENTATION

                          Rapid Discussions

                                  on

                              Any Topic

                                  by

                          Anyone & Everyone

  Instead of having a formal presentation, we will get together and
  discuss anything anyone wants to discuss in brief sessions of no
  more than a few minutes each.  If we have enough people involved
  we can break into smaller groups to handle each topic.

  Two topics that I will be prepared to discuss for a few minutes 
  will be:
       -  Subsistence Computing 
          How to do good computing on a low budget.
       -  Could we lose the internet to Government and Corporate
          interests?

 AND YES - We are looking for speakers for upcoming months.
           Volunteers and Recommendations are welcome.

This talk will present some highlights in Linux Wireless development made over the past year or so. Some of these developments resulted in new userspace tools which will be introduced. We will then highlight recent developments in Intel's Linux Wireless driver.

Reinette is the maintainer of Intel's Linux wireless driver (iwlwifi) and is a member of the Open Source Technology Center (OTC), within the Intel Software and Services Group (SSG).

Please spread the word!

             PRESENTATION

         How Linux Containers fit your cloud

                  by

             Alec Istomin
              www.Parallels.com

 Linux, Cloud, Virtualization and hundreds other buzz words are out
 there to blow your mind. The session will share real life examples
 that actually make sense and deliver meaningful easy to use services to
 end users with minimum efforts from cloud administrators.

 A deeper introduction to Containers technology will be presented and
 will be helpful to anyone, especially for people familiar with any
 other virtualization solution for Linux.

 Overview of Parallels Commercial management tools for Containers and
 clouds with open command line and XML APIs will show how to put an
 infrastructure cloud solution to life.

 About the speaker:
 Alec Istomin is an Enterprise Solution Architect at Parallels, 
 Renton,WA and originally joined the company (called SWsoft at 
 the time) as a developer in early 2000. He has been involved 
 with Linux and Virtualization all these years and led numerous 
 cloud deployments. He has an M.S. in physics and applied 
 mathematics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology 
 (MIPT), Moscow.

DRBD stands for Distributed Replicated Block Device. Mainline in the Linux kernel since 2.6.33, it is used to replicate data at the block level over the network in a "network RAID1" fashion. It is generally deployed as a cost effective, shared-nothing alternative to a SAN and used as the building block for high availability clusters. Pacemaker is currently the de facto open-source cluster resource manager (CRM) for Linux HA clustering. With it, nodes and services can be monitored and managed to ensure maximum uptime in the face of the most severe service and hardware level failures. Combining the two allows admins to %99.999 uptime at a fraction of the price of proprietary alternatives.

In LINBIT's second PLUG Advance Topics installment, Adam Gandelman will give a more in-depth view of DRBD and Pacemaker and demonstrate how they work closely together to keep applications running and consistent. During the second half of the presentation, Adam will provide attendees with a real-world example by configuring a highly-available LAMP cluster from the ground up. Though geared toward web services, the concepts presented can easily be expanded to provide the HA gaurantee to virtually any Linux service.

Agenda: - Brief re-introduction to DRBD, Pacemaker and HA clustering concepts. - Overview of various use cases and interesting deployments - Configuration and implementation of a highly-available LAMP cluster using DRBD for data redundancy and Pacemaker for resource management.

Adam Gandelman is an expert in open-source clustering and high availability. Originally from New England, Adam lives in Portland, OR where he has been working at LINBIT, developers of DRBD and maintainers of Heartbeat. Aside from providing top-level Linux High-Availability and Disaster Recovery consulting for customers in the Americas, he leads LINBIT training courses in the US, doubles as a technical writer and regularly contributes to related open-source projects.

                             PRESENTATION

                       Puppet - An Introduction

                                  by

                              Teyo Tyree
                          www.puppetlabs.com

 Puppet is a powerful configuration management tool that makes life 
 easier for people managing systems and applications. This tutorial 
 gives you an in-depth and hands-on introduction to Puppet that is 
 ideal for beginners to Puppet and configuration management.

 Teyo is Co-Founder of Puppet Labs and the former Director of IT 
 for 20/20 Research and professional systems administrator. Over the 
 past 12 years Teyo has been using and promoting the use of open 
 source tools to enable scaling and efficiency in IT operations. 
 Teyo joined Puppet Labs in July of 2008 and has been traveling 
 the world providing Puppet Labs’ customers with training and consulting.

                             PRESENTATION

                    Open Source Car Entertainment

                                  by

                             Kevron Rees
                        [email protected]

 This presentation will discuss the innovation and excitement 
 that open source software can bring to the car to make travelling 
 more enjoyable and also save you money. The session will go into 
 depth on what you need to do to turn your car into an open 
 source super-car including what hardware is available and the
 open source software needed to make it all work.

PRESENTATION

Server Sky - Data Centers in Orbit

           Power for computation on a Moore's Law schedule

                Keith Lofstrom, http://server-sky.com

 The EPA estimates US data centers (not including desktops)
 consumed 1.5% of total US electrical consumption in 2006.
 They predict a doubling to 3% of base load by 2011.  Our
 work as programmers and technologists continues this
 runaway exponential growth, and we will be stopped by
 environmental and resource limits soon.

 Server sky is a proposal to use newly emerging solid state
 technologies to build large arrays of 3 gram paper-thin
 solar-powered computation satellites in 6400km Earth orbits.

 A single server-sat replaces 15 watts of ground-based
 electrical generation, cooling, and power conversion, as
 well as the computation and communication hardware itself.
 Orbital server farms may start out as expensive as current
 approaches, but design improvement and cheaper launch will
 decrease costs exponentially over time, much as transistor
 cost has plummeted over the last four decades.

 This is open technology, responsive to public input, and
 the project needs volunteer software and engineering help
 to stay that way.  Eventually, Server Sky will create
 thousands of open technology jobs in the Portland area,
 and permit unbounded computation growth in space, while
 reducing energy demand and environmental damage on Earth.

 Earth can return to what it is good at green and growing
 things while we fill space with gray and computing things.

PRESENTATION

                           An Overview of
                              Berkley DB

                                  by

                            David Segleau

Director Product Management - Berkeley DB

 Berkeley DB originated at the University of California, 
 Berkeley as part of the transition (1986 to 1994) from 4.3BSD 
 to 4.4BSD and of the effort to remove AT&T-encumbered code.
 It has evolved a great deal since then and is now part
 of Oracle where it is distributed with source code under 
 a dual use license.

 Berkeley DB (BDB) is a computer software library that provides 
 a high-performance embedded database, with bindings in C, C++, 
 PHP, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, Smalltalk, and other languages. 
 BDB stores arbitrary key/data pairs as byte arrays, and supports 
 multiple data items for a single key. BDB can support thousands 
 of simultaneous threads of control or concurrent processes 
 manipulating databases as large as 256 terabytes, on a wide 
 variety of operating systems including most Unix-like and 
 Windows systems, and real-time operating systems.

A Presentation by Allan Foster of ForgeRock.com

I will give a presentation on ForgeRock, how and why we were founded, and a little of the events and decisions that led up to the founding.

I will also discuss some of the various Open Source Business Models, and why we chose ours.

I will cover some of the unique situations in which we find ourselves, and how we chose to address them.

I will also discuss how Open Source is becoming more relevant in Enterprise, and how this shift seems to be reaching a tipping point.

Allan works at ForgeRock with former Sun Microsystems Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps. Visit www.webmink.com for more about Simon.

                             Presentation
                    Open Source Desktop Publishing
                                 with
                               Scribus

                                  by

                          John Jason Jordan

 Scribus is just a few years old, but has already achieved 
 most of the features of the expensive commercial desktop 
 publishing apps, and a few they don't have. If you need to 
 do fliers, brochures, or whole books, Scribus is now the 
 preferred tool.

 The presentation will start with a brief introduction to 
 some of the terms of desktop publishing, especially how to 
 get your computer to produce something that a print shop can 
 put on a press. This will include matters such as typography, 
 color management, banding and line screens, transparency, 
 imposition, and several other issues.

 Then we will spend a few minutes on an overview of Scribus, 
 how it is different from word processors, TeX, and advantages 
 and disadvantages.  This will include the basic features of 
 Scribus, including typographical controls, master pages, render 
 frames, PDF forms, PDF export options, scripting, collect for 
 output, and lots more. It will also cover how Scribus is the 
 end tool in a process that starts with other programs.

 Finally we will reproduce the PLUG flier that was created 
 in Scribus.  This will be presented on the screen showing 
 the steps and features of Scribus necessary to produce it. 
 Each member of the audience will have a paper copy of the 
 flier to assist in following the process.

                             Presentation
                          Mini Presentations
                                  by
                            Daniel Hedlund
                                 and
                           hopefully others


 Daniel Hedlund will give a little ad hoc mini-demo on 
 setting up a VPS on Linode.com.

 David Mandel will discuss a couple ways of using virtualbox
 in a teaching environment.

 We invite others to join in with their own short little 
 mini-presentations on simple little "hacks" that you find
 useful.

Cooper Stevenson is rescheduled to give his talk: Artificial Neural Networks: Principles and Applications

Cooper will cover how the topic is relevant to Open Source as ANN's may be used for a host of practical applications and serve as an introduction to ANN's running on Open Source.

Emphasis will be placed on the financial industry's use of ANN's for market prediction but other uses will be addressed.

Cooper Stevenson's Bio: Cooper is a leading expert in Information Technology systems for business automation. His award winning designs focus on expanding business intelligence and automation for medium and large industry. He moved Legislation through the Oregon Legislature and has written over ten publications for online resources. He is also featured in CNET News, Linux Today, and Linux.com. Recently, Cooper developed the first automated artificial neural network system for predicting financial securities price fluctuations and business process intelligence.

Free Geek: 1731 SE 10th Avenue: Two blocks south of Hawthorne, not far from the Lucky Lab. If lost: 503-232-9350

Big news and reason for the delay of this announcement: we have a new, dedicated keyholder!

                             Presentation
                            What is Open?
                                  by
                             David Mandel


 David Mandel is interested in distilling the core ideas 
 from the philosophy of Open Source Software and extending
 these into other areas like music, publishing, farming, 
 and education.  In the past he has given presentations
 on Open Source Agriculture.

 In this presentation, David wants to discuss Open Source
 in education.  This is not a presentation about using 
 Open Source Software in traditional classrooms as much
 as it is a discussion about using Open Source Philosophy
 to change traditional classrooms.  We will discuss the 
 work of John Gatto author of "Dumbing Us Down", the Moore 
 Method of teaching mathematics, and David Mandel's personal 
 experience teaching mathematics and computer classes in 
 community colleges.

Presentation Free Content and the Data Revolution by Daniel Hedlund

The amount of information available on the Internet has exploded in recent years and shows no sign of slowing down. Most of this information is freely available to anyone with a web browser --- but what does free mean? Daniel Hedlund will lead a discussion on the meaning of open data and explore how the open source movement is no longer constrained to the realm of software.

March PLUG Advanced Topics:

Embedded Hardware Developer Eric Thompson

Release your hardware hacker potential with gEDA

This session will take you step-by-step through the process of creating an actual printed circuit board using the gEDA suite of electronic design automation tools. From schematic to gerber files, you can do all with the open source tools in gEDA.

The gEDA project is a full GPL’d suite of electronic design automation tools. The suite includes tools for schematic capture, attribute management, bill of materials (BOM) generation, netlist creation, analog and digital simulation, and printed circuit board (PCB) layout.

This session will cover: - Drawing a block diagram - Creating parts and drawing a schematic - Netlist creation and import into the printed circuit board tool - Layout of the printed circuit board - Outputting gerber files - Design verification - How to have your printed circuit board built

This session will be presented for the beginner and will assume no previous hardware experience. gEDA website: http://www.gpleda.org/

7PM Tuesday, March 15th at Free Geek: 1731 SE 10TH AVE

                         MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT

          PLUG Meeting will be different than normal

                       Richard Stallman
                        is speaking at
                  Portland State University
              during PLUG's normal meeting time.

     So, instead of having a PLUG meeting we will attend
            Richard Stallman's talk at 7:00 PM at

     The PSU Native American Student and Community Center
                      710 SW Jackson St
                    Portland Oregon 97201

 And if Stallman's talk gets out early enough we will 
 go over to The Lucky Lab Northwest Beerhall at 1945 NW Quimby
 Portland, Oregon afterwards.

 *******************************************************************

                           Abstract
                             for
                    Richard Stallman Talk

                         Presented by
                  Portland State University
                          Chapter of
              Association of Computing Machinery

 The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users' freedom 
 to cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software 
 Movement developed the GNU operating system, typically used with 
 the Linux kernel, specifically to make these freedoms possible.

 The Portland State University Chapter of the Association for 
 Computing Machinery and the Computer Science Department are proud 
 to welcome Richard Stallman to PSU for this general-interest talk. 
 Mr. Stallman is the father of the free software movement and the 
 concept of 'copyleft', the original author of GNU Emacs, the GNU 
 Compiler Collection, and many of the utilities used in the GNU/Linux 
 operating system.

 This event is free and open to the general public. Mr. Stallman will 
 be available for a brief Q&A session following the talk.

 *******************************************************************

                        Presentation

              Comments on the IPv6 Transition
                             by
                      Ted Mittelstaedt
                             of
                       Portlandia IT


Ted Mittelstaedt of Portlandia IT will talk about IP addressing
in general and how the IPv4 to IPv6 transition is being received
by the Internet community. This talk is part of a series of
timely IPv6 PLUG talks that Ted is giving over the coming months.

                         Presentation

                   Introduction to OpenEMR
                              by
                        Tony McCormick
                     <[email protected]>

 Introduction to OpenEMR, maybe the most downloaded open source 
 Electronic Heath Records system in the world.   This presentation 
 will discuss how one of the first web based, php projects became 
 a government certified EHR.  We'll demo the system, talk about 
 the good, bad and ugly of a 10 year old project with ~500,000 
 lines of code and get feed back on ways to move forward with 
 out breaking the existing use.  ie: upgrade paths and models, etc.

                            PRESENTATION

                         Rapid Discussions

                                 on

                             Any Topic

                                 by

                         Anyone & Everyone

 Instead of having a formal presentation, we will get together and
 discuss anything anyone wants to discuss in brief sessions of no
 more than a few minutes each.  If we have enough people involved
 we can break into smaller groups to handle each topic.

 One very short topic that I will be prepared to discuss for
 a few minutes will be:
      -  Open Source at Two Year Colleges
         Why are text books so damn expensive?

AND YES - We are looking for speakers for upcoming months.
          Volunteers and Recommendations are welcome.

                         PRESENTATION

                     Open Source Software

                              in

                        State Agencies

                              by

                        Michael Smith

  Michael Smith works for the State of Oregon.  He will discuss 
  his experience introducing and trying to introduce Open Source
  Solutions into state government agencies.

  Note:  We may update this description as we get more details.

                             PRESENTATION

                          Rapid Discussions

                                  on

                              Any Topic

                                  by

                          Anyone & Everyone

  Instead of having a formal presentation, we will get together and
  discuss anything anyone wants to discuss in brief sessions of no
  more than a few minutes each.  If we have enough people involved
  we can break into smaller groups to handle each topic.

  AND YES - We are looking for speakers for upcoming months.
            We have been having trouble finding speakers lately.
            Volunteers and Recommendations are welcome.

                       PRESENTATION

                          Arch Linux

                              by

                        Daniel Hedlund
                    <[email protected]>

 Arch Linux is an independently developed, i686- and x86_64-optimised 
 Linux distribution targeted at competent Linux users. It uses 
 'pacman', its home-grown package manager, to provide updates 
 to the latest software applications with full dependency tracking. 
 Operating on a rolling release system, Arch can be installed from 
 a CD image or via an FTP server. The default install provides a 
 solid base that enables users to create a custom installation. 
 In addition, the Arch Build System (ABS) provides a way to easily 
 build new packages, modify the configuration of stock packages, 
 and share these packages with other users via the Arch Linux 
 user repository.

The Portland Linux / Unix Group Holds its Linux Clinic on the third Sunday of every month at Free Geek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, 97214 from 1 to 5 pm. Bring your Linux computer that's being a brat and we'll make it behave like a model of decorum. Or bring your computer and we'll turn it into a beautiful Linux box. It's also acceptable just to show up and look over shoulders to see what Linux is all about.

We have mice, keyboards and monitors, so normally all you need to bring is the box.

For further information e-mail [email protected].

The Portland Linux / Unix Group Holds its Linux Clinic on the third Sunday of every month at Free Geek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, 97214 from 1 to 5 pm. Bring your Linux computer that's being a brat and we'll make it behave like a model of decorum. Or bring your computer and we'll turn it into a beautiful Linux box. It's also acceptable just to show up and look over shoulders to see what Linux is all about.

We have mice, keyboards and monitors, so normally all you need to bring is the box.

For further information e-mail [email protected].

The Portland Linux / Unix Group Holds its Linux Clinic on the third Sunday of every month at Free Geek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, 97214 from 1 to 5 pm. Bring your Linux computer that's being a brat and we'll make it behave like a model of decorum. Or bring your computer and we'll turn it into a beautiful Linux box. It's also acceptable just to show up and look over shoulders to see what Linux is all about.

We have mice, keyboards and monitors, so normally all you need to bring is the box.

For further information e-mail [email protected].

Michael Dexter will talk about bootstrapping the bhyve hypervisor community: How to take a project from a collection of experimental code in a repository to a fledgling community.

BHyVe is a legacy-free type 2 Hypervisor for FreeBSD and its derivatives such as PC-BSD and NanoBSD

General discussion to follow

Eric Harrison has over 15 years experience with Linux in primary and secondary education environments (Kindergarten through High School). Topics will include designing, building, and maintaining your own Linux distributions (K12LTSP & Edubuntu), infrastructure (clustering, virtualization, web filtering, etc), large scale Asterisk telephony deployments, IPv6, and more.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab NW after the meeting.

Mozilla Socorro: an Open Source crash reporting system evolves.

Socorro collects and analyzes three million crash reports a day employing PostgreSQL, HBase, Hadoop, and ElasticSearch glued together with Python. Socorro's data analysis drives the stability and development priorities of Firefox. Five years ago, Socorro was a system that ran on three machines and was tended by just one person. In 2013, it has evolved to become a distributed system running on 120 machines and serving hundreds of terabytes of data. Meanwhile, companies all over the world are adopting Socorro for crash reporting. This talk, an update of one given several years ago, will track the evolution of Socorro and its future in the upcoming world of FirefoxOS.

K Lars Lohn is the Herd Patriarch of the Mozilla WebTools Group. As the author and curator of the Mozilla Socorro Crash Reporting System, Lars has driven its evolution. Formerly with the OSUOSL, Lars telecommutes for Mozilla from a farm near Corvallis. While preferring Python, PostgreSQL and Harleys, Lars is versed in C++, MySQL and Subarus.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab NW after the meeting

Graphite - Scalable Realtime Graphing http://graphite.wikidot.com/

This talk will be my choices as to why I selected collectd / Graphite for performance monitoring my environment at home (email / web / database and test systems). The discussion will include what I looked at, why I discarded the software I did, and show some demonstrations of Graphite, Munin, and if I can get it working again, Ganglia for a comparison of some of their features. I will also discuss some of the hicups I found in configuring some aspects of collectd and Graphite.

Biography

Tim Bruce has been involved in computers since 1981 when he first fell in love with computing. He's done computer training, computer security, programming, systems administration and data management. For the last 14 years he's worked as a Database Administrator with Sybase, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL at employers such as Providence Health Systems, Fiserv, FlightStats, and currently with Northwest Evaluation Association.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne after the meeting.

Thank you Igal. We will never forget you.

What is up with Linux guys buying MacBook Pros? This is depressing-- how can you put a penguin sticker next to your Apple logo?

In the wake of tragic national and local losses in the open source community to depression, Yshai Boussi of Portland Family Counseling will discuss all aspects of depression including signs and symptoms, origins, solutions and treatments, how to help others if you're concerned that they may be depressed. Yshai has family in the tech community and insights into why we may have a different relationship with depression than most communities.

Yshai has been practicing as a psychotherapist since 2003. Over the years, he has worked with many different types of individuals, couples, adolescents and families. He has seen how depression affects individuals but also friends and family as well. He is a Licensed Professional Counselor operating a private practice with his wife called Portland Family Counseling. Our practice is in NW Portland. http://portlandfamilycounseling.com

Many will head to the Lucky Lab NW after the meeting

Jacob Riddle will discuss the KURB (Kernel/UseRspace Bridge) project. The goal of KURB is a kernel independent driver subsystem for Linux. The talk will include the architecture of KURB, the reasons for KURB, and how to get involved.

Jacob Riddle is in the Game Development program at Lane Community College. Prior to that he was a Nuclear Machinist Mate in the Navy. He as a passion for all things Computer Science with a particular focus on Artificial Intelligence and kernel operations.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne after the meeting.

Hacking on the new Beagle Bone Black

Description:

Russell recently spent some time working on porting a house-monitoring system from the Beagle Bone (an $89 embedded, ARM-based, I/O rich device running linux http://beagleboard.org/) to the new Beagle Bone Black, a $45 device which is faster, includes video and 2G of onboard flash. The sensors required a one-wire bus, one of which the original Beagle Bone had configured out of the box. The Beagle Bone Black had none. This talk is a description of what it took to get one-wire (specifically w1-gpio) going with his own custom "cape" (a daughter-board for the Beagle Bone).

Biography:

Russell Senior has been a GNU/Linux user for over 20 years, since the 0.99plN days, using it both recreationally and professionally as a research programmer/scientific data analyst. Since 2005, Russell has become involved as a principal volunteer with the Personal Telco Project (https://personaltelco.net), during which he has worked on embedded systems, primarily network routers. He contributes to the development and improvement of the OpenWrt project. In the last couple years, he has worked on monitoring systems involving Arduino and, since last year, the Beagle Bone and has learned a bit about the Angstrom distribution of linux for embedded devices.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab NW after the meeting

The Portland Linux/Unix Group Advanced Topics meeting

For want of a venue keyholder, we will congregate at the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne for the topics of your choice.

This month's 1st Thursday Portland Linux/Unix group meeting is moved to July 11th at the same time and place.

Have a happy and safe 4th of July!

Steve Pasco will be discussing many aspects of physical security and the realities of our emerging surveillance culture.

Steve is a seasoned Telecommunications and security professional, with more than 27 years experience, capable of managing and maintaining operational oversight of global, enterprise wide facilities and security command and control centers. Proficient in establishing policies, procedures, standards, and personnel training programs. A Telecommunications security expert in CALEA and J-STD-25 protocols. Expert in Security Systems, Access Control, Alarm Monitoring Video Surveillance, Asset Monitoring, Tracking and Protection. Operational experience in running 24/7 Command Control and Communications system with emphasis on Intelligence (C3I).

Many will head to the Lucky Lab NW after the meeting

The Portland Perl Mongers and Portland Linux/Unix Group are pleased to welcome world-renowned Perl trainer and developer Paul Fenwick

The Perl Renaissance is in full swing. Object frameworks and syntax have been undated, web frameworks are easy and powerful, and modules are easy to manage and install. We will cover:

• Overhauling Perl’s Object Oriented framework with Moose.
• Using MooseX::Method::Signatures for beautiful classes.
• Building web applications using Dancer
• Not worrying about web servers by using Plack.
• Critiquing your code with Perl::Critic
• Write amazing regexps with named captures.
• Install new modules quickly and easily with cpanminus
• Manage Perl installations easily with perlbrew
• A whole swag of new features with perl 5.10–5.16
• Much, much more!

About Paul

Adventuretarian. Enjoys Perl, social hacking, mycology, scuba diving, coffee, cycling, FOSS, meeting new people, and talking like a pirate. World famous in NZ.

As usual, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub NW at 1945 NW Quimby

The Portland Linux/Unix Group Advanced Topics meeting

Software Verification and Performance Analysis using Valgrind

by Stephen Dum

Valgrind is a collection of tools to validate your (typically C or C++ compiled) program. It can validate correct usage of memory, profile your program, profile heap usage and verify proper thread usage. This talk gives an overview of valgrind and how it can be used, with emphasis on memory usage verification and profiling.

http://valgrind.org

About Steve: Spent decades dealing with large projects (multi-million lines of code) writing code, automating build processes and automated testing of the code.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne after the meeting.

Portland's 12-month, three-track open source conference

The Portland Linux/Unix Group meets three times a month:

First Thursday General Meeting at PSU Third Tuesday Advanced Topics Meeting at Free Geek Third Sunday Clinic at Free Geek

We try announce our speakers two weeks in advance but some times it is last minute. They're usually conference-quality none the less.

Many attendees will break for a social hour at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub NW at 1945 NW Quimby

See you there!

Virtual Private Networking

Our illustrious IPv6 authority, Ted Mittelstaedt, will give a talk on popular Virtual Private Network options, including:

1) standard IPSec clients - require static IP at each endpoint, and are supported out of the box by Windows, Cisco IOS, Mac, and Unix using raccoon and similar programs.

2) Modified IPSec VPN clients - example is the Cisco IPSec VPN client. This is a proprietary modification used to allow one end to have a dynamic IP number.

3) SSL VPN clients. Cisco has one they call AnyConnect that is proprietary. OpenVPN is another example.

4) PPTP. This was supposed to have died years ago but since Microsoft ships the PPTP client with Windows it is still very useful in situations where the network admin is forced to provide VPN services to clients that she has no control over.

5) L2TP. This is what PPTP morphed into, Microsoft supports it natively, so it has the same benefits (to the network admin) as PPTP plus the Microsoft implementation allows for encryption using IPSec with certificates.

Ted is the Co-Owner of Portlandia IT and author of the FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide

Many attendees will break for a social hour at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub NW at 1945 NW Quimby

See you there!

Michael Faunce of Memorytime will talk about the Qt GUI toolkit and how and why he used it on a recent project.

Mike is the owner of Memorytime and has been involved with technology since 1972 has seen and used a Slide Rule. He came to oregon in 1976 to work at Tektronix and taught classes at Wilsonville Tektronix plant. While there he deisgned Memory boards for the ATARI computer and also taught at PCC for a short time. Mike has designed a number of memory board and SBC (single board computer) systems.

Mike has three patents and recently served as an expert witness in a recent patent infringement case and currently involved in a number of design projects including a customizable LED sign and a PXE Boot server.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne after the meeting.

See you there!

FreeNAS is an open source Network Attached Storage system powered by FreeBSD that features the ZFS filesystem.

Michael Dexter will demonstrate the FreeNAS 9.1.1 Plugins architecture using the Plex Media Server and various virtual machines.

For more information: http://freenas.org

Many attendees will break for a social hour at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub NW at 1945 NW Quimby

See you there!

Who: Daniel Hedlund, Michael Dexter and a few special guests What: Virtual Machine Fair: Erlang/ocaml/Haskell VMs, bhyve, Xen & LXCs! Why: The pursuit of technology freedom

Contain yourselves!

Daniel and Michael have been working with various virtual machines technologies and would like to have a roundtable style talk with micro presentations about each one, including:

Erlang VMs bhyve BSD Hypervisor VMs Xen VM's Haskell VMs (hopefully) and Linux Containers if we can rattle a familiar PLUG face's cage

We've invited a few guests and will give you a survey of some of the great things going on with open source virtualization technology.

Links: http://halvm.org/ http://www.openmirage.org/ http://bhyve.org

Many attendees will break for a social hour at the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne after the meeting

See you there!

Brian Martin will talk about his early experiences with Samba 4

Samba provides open-source support for the Microsoft file sharing protocol. Version 4 of Samba was released late last year. It represented years of work and a major, some would say massive upgrade to Samba to include the ability to be a fully functional Active Directory server. Given the large scale changes, many people have been avoiding production Samba 4 use while waiting for the bugs to be worked out. Brian Martin has now started migrating production environments to Samba 4 and will discuss his early experiences.

Bio: Brian Martin is the chief consultant for Martin Consulting Services, Inc. Martin Consulting has provided system administration services in Unix, Linux and Windows systems in the Portland metro area and across the country since 1996. Brian is a frequent attendee at PLUG. His past presentations include VMWare, production grade scripting, disaster recovery experiences, Linux containers, and logical volume management.

Many attendees will break for a social hour at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub NW at 1945 NW Quimby

See you there!

Who: Rogan Creswick
What: Multi-App Security Analysis: Looking for Android App Collusion
Where: Free Geek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland
When: Tuesday, November 19th, 2013 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom

The Android permission model opens up a number of opportunities for apps to bypass the established single-app permission checks that Android users rely on to control data flow and application behavior on their devices. I'll do my best to terrify the Android-using audience by describing the attack surface for colluding applications and showing interactive visualizations of multi-app data flow. We'll look at the Android permission model, the user-interface it results in, and I'll show just how easy it is to make apps that look innocuous.

Bio:

Rogan Creswick develops unique tools and techniques for software development and security analysis at Galois, Inc. His research interests focus on improving the state of the art in software engineering tools and user interfaces. His experience also reaches into the areas of user interface automation and customization via integrated assistants and automated documentation aides at IBM Research. He has striven to provide natural interfaces to ease communication with complex and semi-sentient agents through existing tools that have already become trustworthy and familiar to their users.

Many attendees will break for a social hour at the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne after the meeting

See you there!

Portland's 12-month, three-track open source conference

The Portland Linux/Unix Group meets three times a month:

First Thursday General Meeting at PSU Third Tuesday Advanced Topics Meeting at Free Geek Third Sunday Clinic at Free Geek

We try announce our speakers two weeks in advance but some times it is last minute. They're usually conference-quality none the less.

Many attendees will break for a social hour at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub NW at 1945 NW Quimby

See you there!

PLUG Advanced Topics:

Implementation and use of the Lustre file system within a research institution.

Lustre is a type of parallel distributed file system, generally used for large-scale cluster computing. (http://lustre.org)

Rob Stites - Research Associate OHSU

Rob works with several compute clusters, each using the Lustre file system at OHSU. He works with three distinct groups at OHSU; Geonomic testing, electron microscope image analysis and speech analysis.

Many attendees will break for a social hour at the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne after the meeting

See you there!

Carlos Aguayo will talk about about Advanced OpenSSH:

• Basic Usage, on Various Platforms
• Authentication Methods
• Keys and Agents
• Client configuration overview
• Server configuration overview
• Tunnels and port forwarding
• Remote X Windows

Carlos Aguayo is a veteran of the Silicon Valley's startup boom that produced both the Internet and the open-source movements as we know them today. He spent the 90's at companies like Sun Microsystems, Infoseek, General Magic, and Marimba, and was a major contributor at Hobnob, a mobile wireless networking venture. With a background in computer science and engineering, he has focused on corporate and datacenter infrastructure, networking and scalability. He is presently working as a systems engineer at XO Communications in Beaverton, and when not wrangling virtual machines, sings barbershop with the Bridge Town Sound.

Many attendees will break for a social hour after the First Thursday meeting at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub NW at 1945 NW Quimby

See you there!

Portland Linux/Unix Group Advanced Topics Meeting Announcement

Who: Brian Rohan and Michael Dexter

What: Speaking in Public is Easy

Where: Free Geek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland (Left Entrance)

When: Tuesday, January 21st, 2014 at 7pm

Why: The pursuit of technology freedom

You read that right: Speaking in public is easy and there is nothing stopping you from giving the next informative and compelling PLUG talk.

• You are guaranteed to have a unique topic, experience and perspective
• Audiences are far kinder than you expect (only pros get boo'd!)
• Visuals are always optional
• No one was born a public speaker
• There are great resources out there to help you
• Most things that go wrong have nothing to do with you (Tsunamis!)
• Live demos are... risky, but cool
• The OSCON and LFNW CFP's close shortly (hint hint)

Brian and Michael will give you a pragmatic tour of exactly what is involved in open source conference speaking and explain precisely how nothing is stopping you from getting involved thanks to local organizations like the Portland Linux/Unix Group.

Brian says:

In 2007 I made the switch from being a machinist to a real estate agent, shortly thereafter I was invited to investigate a Toastmasters club, in order to become a better communicator. Through 5 years and over 40 speeches in Toastmasters I reached the highest level of Distinguished Toastmaster. Simply stepping out of my comfort zone has given me the opportunity introduce dignitaries, and MC fund-raising events for worthwhile causes (notably a record breaking Clark County Republican Party Lincoln Day Dinner auction). Currently I am a recognized top 2% leader in AdvoCare International, helping others achieve their physical and financial goals.

I enjoy using Linux on a personal level for the freedom that it represents.

"You never get rid of public speaking butterflies, you just get them to fly in formation: ~Marv Serhan

Michael says:

Never in a 1,000 years will I speak in public yet I find myself doing it several times a month in Portland and at conferences around the world. I guarantee I'm no Brian Rohan but I fill rooms and get applause. The secret is finding the right room and just doing it. I will talk about the absolute worst that can happen (rarely what you think it would be), the open source conference community and how to get from submitting a proposal to stepping down from the stage.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne after the meeting.

The Portland Linux/Unix Group: Portland's monthly, three-track tech conference, celebrating its 20th anniversary this spring!

• Who: Brian Rohan and Michael Dexter
• What: Public Speaking is the Greatest Skill You Can Possess
• Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
• When: Thursday, February 6th, 2014 at 7pm
• Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
• Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live/

Brian and Michael are back to teach you everything you ever wanted to know about speaking at an open source from PLUG (hint hint) to OSCON.

Brian has years as an experienced Distinguished Toastmaster (beer available at the Lucky Lab NW after the meeting) and Michael has just submitted his paper for the upcoming AsiaBSDCon conference on a topic he had previously known nothing about.

Why should you give a talk?

• You are guaranteed to have a unique topic, experience and perspective
• Audiences are far kinder than you expect (only pros get boo'd!)
• Visuals are always optional and are flexible in format
• No one was born a public speaker, it's simply a learned skill
• There are great resources out there to help you
• Most things that go wrong have nothing to do with you (Tsunamis!)
• Live demos are... risky, but useful
• The LFNW and other CFP's close shortly (hint hint)

Highlight from our Advanced Topics talk: (paraphrased) "My mom got more value out of learning to community with Toastmasters than two years of a (VERY impressive school) scholarship."

YOU may change careers a dozen times in your life and need a new skill set for each job but will ALWAYS need to express yourself and communicate on behalf of yourself and your team. Let PLUG be that first step in what could be worth more than a (VERY impressive school) scholarship!

Brian says:

In 2007 I made the switch from being a machinist to a real estate agent, shortly thereafter I was invited to investigate a Toastmasters club, in order to become a better communicator. Through 5 years and over 40 speeches in Toastmasters I reached the highest level of Distinguished Toastmaster. Simply stepping out of my comfort zone has given me the opportunity introduce dignitaries, and MC fund-raising events for worthwhile causes (notably a record breaking Clark County Republican Party Lincoln Day Dinner auction). Currently I am a recognized top 2% leader in AdvoCare International, helping others achieve their physical and financial goals.

I enjoy using Linux on a personal level for the freedom that it represents.

"You never get rid of public speaking butterflies, you just get them to fly in formation: ~Marv Serhan

Michael says:

Never in a 1,000 years will I speak in public yet I find myself doing it several times a month in Portland and at conferences around the world. I guarantee I'm no Brian Rohan but I fill rooms and get applause. The secret is finding the right room and just doing it. I will talk about the absolute worst that can happen (rarely what you think it would be), the open source conference community and how to get from submitting a proposal to stepping down from the stage.

PLUG has been lucky. Some volunteer efforts and organizations face onslaughts that drive off their core volunteers and can hijack or snuff the organization. Hear the lessons learned from five such examples and share your own stories of how to recognize and respond to such behavior.

Early segue into tech topics or refreshments recommended!

Many will head to the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne after the meeting.

See you there!

Michael Dexter PLUG Volunteer

The Portland Linux/Unix Group

pfSense by Jeff Carmichael and Brian Rohan

Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live/

pfSense offers an open source solution to replace commercial routers, firewalls, security, proxys, dns/dhcp/nat and more. It can be a single solution for most all network resources for a soho, and has been used successfully in small to medium sized businesses. When you are ready to replace your moon infected linksys router, pfSense offers a mature, flexible and capable solution.

Many attendees will break for a social hour after the First Thursday meeting at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub NW at 1945 NW Quimby

See you there!

Daniel Hedlund will be giving an intermediate to advanced level talk on DTrace and SystemTap.

DTrace (http://dtrace.org/blogs/about/) is a dynamic tracing framework, originally developed for Solaris, has been released under the CDDL license and ported to many other Unix-like OSes including FreeBSD, OS X and Linux. SystemTap (https://sourceware.org/systemtap/) provides similar functionality to DTrace but is Linux specific and released under the GPL.

Dynamic tracing tools make it possible to safely inject instrumentation points (probes) into running applications on production environments; no recompilation is necessary and there is only minimal performance overhead when being used, and no overhead when not. Probes can be used to gather performance metrics to identify bottlenecks, create aggregate statistics such as the size distribution of filesystem writes, or to introspect arguments passed to individual functions in a running application without ever taking it offline.

Many attendees will break for a social hour after the Third Tuesday meeting at the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne after the meeting

PLUG: Portland's monthly, three-track tech conference!

First Thursday: General Meeting at PSU

Third Tuesday: Advanced Topics at Free Geek

Third Sunday: Hands-on Clinic at Free Geek

See you there!

Date: March 24th, 1994
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.help
Subject: Linux Users Group!!!

There is a Linux users group forming in Portland Oregon, 
if you are interested, email me at: ... our first meeting 
date has not been set, but will be in April sometime.
Have Fun,
Sean

The Portland Linux/Unix Group is turning 20!

We are celebrating with a Q&A session with the person who inspired this group of Linux and Unix users to come together and meet monthly for two decades: Linus Torvalds

Seating is limited and you can RSVP at: http://plug.eventbrite.com

We cannot guarantee a place for everyone and priority will be given to those who RSVP. You can try to watch the live stream from the lobby.

Live stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live/ IRC: #pdxlinux on irc.geekshed.net

Many will head to the Lucky Lab NW at 1945 NW Quimby after the meeting. Rideshares available.

Portland Linux/Unix Group Advanced Topics Meeting Announcement

Who: Ted Mittelstaedt

What: Heartbleed: It's cause, the solution, lessons learned plus apcupsd

Where: Free Geek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland (Left Entrance)

When: Tuesday, April 15th, 2014 at 7pm

Why: The pursuit of technology freedom

The "Heartbleed" OpenSSL bug potentially impacts everyone who has used the Internet but was simple enough to explain in an XKCD cartoon.

http://xkcd.com/1354/

Ted Mittelstaedt will enlighten us about it and the issues surrounding it. Ted has also been experimenting with APC's new UPC interface and apcupsd. He will share his findings on this.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne after the meeting.

See you there!

Who: Ward Cunningham

What: Federated Wiki

Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)

When: Thursday, May 1st, 2014 at 7pm

Why: The pursuit of technology freedom

Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live/

UNIX introduced the notion of software tools, small programs assembled together as pipelines. Almost as innovative what its notion of a workbench, a place where work in progress could be shared by passing references, file paths, among collaborators.

I draw huge inspiration from these contributions, both of which happened within my professional lifetime. In this talk I will describe analogous structures in Federated Wiki, a project that hopes to host the doing of things as well as the talk about doing things.

Ward Cunningham has worked for and consulted to daring startups and huge corporations. He has served as CTO, Director, Fellow, Principle Engineer and Inventor. He is best known for creating wiki. He leads an open-source project rebuilding wiki to solve more complex sharing situations addressing some of societies toughest problems. Ward founded movements in object-oriented, agile software, extreme programming and pattern languages. Ward lives in Portland, Oregon and works for New Relic, Inc.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab NW after the meeting.

Who: Sean Mathews

What: Hands-on Internet of Things

Where: Free Geek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland (Left Entrance)

When: Tuesday, May 20th, 2014 at 7pm

Why: The pursuit of technology freedom

Sean Mathews will present Hands-on Internet of Things: Building the next “Internet Of Things” device using a Raspberry Pi or Beagle Bone Black and simple electronics.

Sean will take us though how to prototype and build a Raspberry Pi GPIO board for as lows as $6 per board and under a month.

Learn about the Raspberry Pi GPIO header and how you can use it to talk to your card.

Sean has built assembly line automation solutions for over 20 years

Sean Mathews has over 30 years of computer hardware, software and database design and development. Sean started writing assembly language and Basic on TRS-80 and Pet computers in the late 70's at the age of 9. At 16 he started his first company writing software written in C to help developers keep track of revision history of C source code for MODCOMP computers in the mid 80's. Currently he designs embedded and cloud based solutions at NuTech Software Solutions which he founded in 1996 and sells a line of embedded alarm devices for consumers that are sold worldwide.

Many attendees will break for a social hour after the Third Tuesday meeting at the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne after the meeting

See you there!

Who: Steve Dum

What: Security and OpenSSH

Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)

When: Thursday, June 5th, 2014 at 7pm

Why: The pursuit of technology freedom

Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live/

We will look at the security provided by OpenSSH and how the environment it is used in affects it's security. When can SSH security improve network security and when can't it.

This presentation assumes you have a basic understanding of SSH and how it is setup. Those topics will be reviewed very rapidly as we dig deeper into the security aspects of SSH. The discussion concentrates on SSH authentication using asymetric or public key encryption.

SSH is widely used to provide convenient and secure access to multiple machines on a local network, and to tunnel into remote networks to access machines on those networks that aren't directly visible to your local machine. We will analyze various use scenario's of SSH in these two usage scenario's and also the advantages and disadvantages of using an agent to facilitate SSH connections. For each of these scenario's, we will discuss the privacy aspects of one's passphrase and private keys, how secure the transmitted data is, and the ability of others to 'borrow' your credentials.

You should walk away from this presentation with a better understanding of what actions you need to take to maximize your privacy, while reaping the benefits of using SSH.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab NW at 1945 NW Quimby after the meeting.

Who: Alan Olsen

What: Git 2.0

Where: Free Geek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland (Left Entrance)

When: Tuesday, June 17th, 2014 at 7pm

Why: The pursuit of technology freedom

On May 28th, version 2.0 of the Git version control software was released. This talk will be on the changes and new features that come along with the 2.0 release, as well as the changes the steps to build and install the software.

Alan Olsen started using Linux in 1994 with the Yggdrasil distribution. He has been involved with PLUG for far to long and ran Advanced Topics for 8 years. He has been programming since 1972 and working in the computer industry since 1984. He is old. He has built a log of software, hacked a lot of kernels, written too many scripts and is still finding more to learn and do in the Linux environment.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne after the meeting.

See you there!

Who: Michael Dexter

What: Lowest Common Denominator Coding with vi and sh

Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)

When: Thursday, July 3rd, 2014 at 7pm

Why: The pursuit of technology freedom

Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live/

There are countless available text editors, programming languages and Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) but few are guaranteed to be present on any given system. On POSIX Unix systems, the vi(1) text editor and sh(1) shell are required by the POSIX (opengroup.org) standard and might be the only development tools at your disposal. While some developers may consider these tools equivalent to a doughnut spare tire that should not be used over 50MPH, others embrace them and have used them for decades. Some would also argue that you should learn the rules before you break them in order to appreciate higher-level languages.

This talk will be a crash course in vi(1) and sh(1) with examples from a 2500 line virtualization management project that uses a number of scripting techniques.

Michael provides independent Unix support and organizes PLUG.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab NW after the meeting.

We will not be having a meeting tonight but you are welcome to meet at the Lucky Lab.

See you at OSCON!

PLUG: Portland's monthly, three-track tech conference!

First Thursday: General Meeting at PSU

Third Tuesday: Advanced Topics at Free Geek

Third Sunday: Hands-on Clinic at Free Geek

PLUG will celebrate 20 years of delivering conference-quality Linux, Unix and technology speakers this year! Most speakers are announced about two weeks in advance but some are last minute. Watch Calagator and the PLUG mailing lists for the latest news.

Many attendees will break for a social hour after the Third Tuesday meeting at the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne after the meeting

See you there!

Who: Beth 'pidge' Flanagan

What: Open Sourcing the Modern Battle Rifle: Legal and technical implications in home building the semi-automatic AK-47

Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)

When: Thursday, August 7th, 2014 at 7pm

Why: The pursuit of technology freedom

Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live/

A look at the technical and legal issues surrounding home construction of firearms, focusing on semi-automatic AK-47 style rifles.

Home gun building brings interesting legal and technical challenges needed to keep someone both safe and on the right side of the law. This requires an individual to be both an amateur metalsmith as well as knowing the ins and outs of firearms and international patent law. This talk will discuss the building of the semi-automatic AK47 rifle from a technical perspective, from demilling parts kits to the construction of a fully functional semi-automatic weapon.

We will also discuss the origins of the AK design, the history of it’s variants and its current patent status as a public domain firearm design, delving into Soviet and Russian Federation patent law as well as US firearms law.

Bio:

Beth 'pidge' Flanagan is an embedded linux geek who works at Intel's Open Source Technology Center on the Yocto Project.

Beth also gave a keynote at OSCON 2014, "Yes, Your Refrigerator Is Trying To Kill You..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vd8dXzAL-W8

Many will head to the Lucky Lab NW at 1945 NW Quimby after the meeting.

Who: Jared Boone, Kenny McElroy and you
What: Software-Defined Radio Hack Session
Where: Free Geek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland (Left Entrance)
When: Tuesday, August 19th, 2014 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live
IRC: irc.geekshed.net #pdxlinux

Software-Defined Radio Hack Session

Want to get into software-defined radio hacking but don't know where to start? Bring your laptop and an RTL-SDR dongle, HackRF, BladeRF, USRP, or other SDR hardware to this hack session and get expert help.

Jared Boone and Kenny McElroy will be on hand to help install and configure software and explain concepts. Do try to install GNU Radio on your computer before you come, since it can be a long, slow process. If you get into trouble, we will do their best to get you unstuck. For those who come with GNU Radio already functional, we will advise you on things to experiment with. If you do not already own a software-defined radio, purchasing an RTL-SDR dongle from HackerWarehouse.com or NooElec.com is recommended. They are quite inexpensive ($15 to $20) but very functional and a great way to get started in software-defined radio.

Bring some radio-based toys to hack on! If you can't make this meeting, be sure to watch Calagator, where Jared and Kenny will be starting an SDR meetup in the next few weeks.

Jared Boone has an ongoing obsession with software-defined radio. He helped with the design and coding of the HackRF SDR and has done some privacy-related work, particularly around automotive tire pressure monitors. He is a frequent user of GNU Radio, baudline, and radio signal processing techniques.

Kenny McElroy is a computer security researcher, focused on improving understanding and visualization of how the ones and zeros of computer security move around in the real world.

Organizer's Notes: Ham Radio Outlet in Tigard has a number of good magazines including the July/August QEX which features an article on GNU Radio. You may also want to read:
http://www.csun.edu/~skatz/katzpage/sdr_project/sdr/grc_tutorial1.pdf
I can also help you set up FreeBSD-current with GNU Radio.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne after the meeting.

Many attendees will break for a social hour after the Third Tuesday meeting at the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne after the meeting

See you there!

Who: Louis Kowolowski
What: Private Encrypted Communications: The Blackphone
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, September 4th, 2014 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live/

This talk is an overview of private encrypted communications, focusing on software from Silent Circle, LLC and hardware from SGP, the makers of Blackphone. If the network cooperates, there will be demos of both the voice and text services.

Louis Kowolowski is a 16 year veteran in the fields of UNIX, networking, and security. He is the Technical Operations Manager of Silent Circle, a communications company headquartered Geneva, CH, providing simple yet secure encrypted voice, video, text and file transfer. He has a passion for automation and scalable internet architectures and when not working, enjoys amateur photography and traveling with his wife.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab NW at 1945 NW Quimby after the meeting.

Meeting cancelled for want of a key holder.

See you in October!

Who: Jennifer Davidson
What: Diversity in Open Source: What We Can Do
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, October 2nd, 2014 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live/

If you're involved in tech and/or open source, you know the community suffers from a lack of diversity. The big question is: Why? Even more powerful is: What can each of us do to build a community that is welcoming of contributors from all backgrounds? Jennifer Davidson will shed light on these issues and discuss what ChickTech is doing locally in Portland. Expect actionable steps we can take as a community to increase diversity in tech.

Jennifer Davidson is a User Experience Researcher and Designer at Intel. She received a PhD in Computer Science with an emphasis in Human-Computer Interaction from Oregon State University in June 2014. She is the Interim Board President for ChickTech (http://chicktech.org). Her passions include studying open source communities, designing software that works for humans, and doing outreach to build women in tech communities. Jennifer has given talks at OSCON, Open Source Bridge, Open Source Systems, Code n' Splode, and many academic conferences.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab NW at 1945 NW Quimby after the meeting.

Rideshares Available

See you there!

Michael Dexter
PLUG Volunteer

Who: Leander Harding
What: Living Desktop Environment-Free
Where: Free Geek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland (Left Entrance)
When: Tuesday, October 21st, 2014 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live/

KDE, Unity, even XFCE, are massive, complex software environments that achieve simplicity of user experience through rigid adherence to a given paradigm - and once you can write a shell script, they do remarkably little for you. We'll discuss philosophy, tools, and practical advice for simpler, more reliable, and more powerful computing without a desktop environment, surveying everything from non-annoying network profile handling to the wide world of mouse-free window management and everything in between.

Leander Harding is a developer at Cloud Four and a longtime Linux user. He's been running desktop environment-free since 2007.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd. after the meeting.

Rideshares Available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

See you there!

Michael Dexter
PLUG Volunteer

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: Jesse Bufton
What: ownCloud
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, November 6th, 2014 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live/

Web-based file hosting, synchronization, and collaborative editing services have made sharing files easier than ever. While these features aren't new, the web 2.0 cloud context they are being offered through has brought them to the reach of the average user with low barriers to use. These freemium services often come at a hidden price of control, privacy, and usually security. This presentation will give an overview of what ownCloud is, why one might use it, what technologies it employs, the services & features it offers, how to set it up, and discuss the use case the presenter has deployed.

Jesse Bufton is an independent web designer/developer and sometimes graphic designer. Jesse began his journey to *nix operating systems in 2000. In his most zen of moments, Jesse forages wild plants, hunts mushrooms, and ferments both food and beverage with friends--all accounted for on the blog Fermentemptations.com

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares Available

PLUG Page with information about all PLUG events: http://pdxlinux.org/ Follow PLUG on Twitter: http://twitter.com/pdxlinux

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

No Advanced Topics meeting this month. Feel free to meet at the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne.

Who: Michael Dexter and YOU
What: Conference Warrior
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, December 4th, 2014 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live/

I do not think of myself as a big conference goer though I have been to various instantiations of PLUG, OpenSourceBridge, OSCON, CLS, Monitorama, DjangoCon, LinuxCon, Linuxfest Northwest, SCALE, MySQL, FOSDEM, LinuxTag, CeBIT, Systems.de, BSDCan, EuroBSDcon, AsiaBSDCon, OpenCON, bhyveCon, Slackathon, Supercomputing, MeetBSD, NYCBSDCon, InfoBALT, various Latvian events, that IT expo that used to come through Portland and a few I am completely spacing. I have also spoken or exhibited at some of these plus organized a few of the tiny ones.

At the public prompting of Brian P. Martin, I will discuss why on Earth someone would do such a thing over and over. Including:

How to and why attend

How to and why speak

How to and why exhibit

How to and why organize events

How to put on the best event possible on really short notice

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares Available

PLUG Page with information about all PLUG events: http://pdxlinux.org/ Follow PLUG on Twitter: http://twitter.com/pdxlinux

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group Advanced Topics Meeting Announcement

Who: Michael What's His Name
What: CFPs from Announcement to Reimbursements
Where: Free Geek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland (Left Entrance)
When: Tuesday, December 16th, 2014 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live/

CFPs or Calls for Papers/Participation are something you generally are oblivious to or schedule your whole year around. A CFP is what conference organizers use to formally announce their desire for speakers at an upcoming event. They often set guidelines and requirements for the talk and the organizers of successful conferences can find themselves rejecting hundreds of proposals. Michael will analyze a number of prominent open source community CFPs and will step through every stage of a CFP that requires an extended abstract, paper and presentation. Attendees will hear repeatedly how astonishingly easy some CFPs (like PLUG's) are to respond to and in will fact have their proposals ready by the end of the talk.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd. after the meeting.

Rideshares Available

PLUG Page with information about all PLUG events: http://pdxlinux.org/ Follow PLUG on Twitter: http://twitter.com/pdxlinux

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

For want of a response to the CFP, the PLUG meeting will be an informal meeting at the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne for those who need to get out of the house.

Who: Louis Kowolowski
What: Escaping GMail
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, February 5th, 2015 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live/

If you’ve wanted to run your own mail server, but held back because it sounded complicated, fear no more. In mere days you too can have a GMail-like experience. Using common household tools such as Postfix, Dovecot, and MySQL, you can have a pointy clicky UI for your mail administration and webmail needs.

I’ll be showing a demo that utilizes Postfix, Dovecot, PostfixAdmin, Sieve, MySQL, and RoundCube. Account manipulation (creating domains and users) through a webby, webmail, and server side mail filters. All of this is done on FreeBSD but can also be done on others such as Linux, Solaris, or even Irix (if you love pain).

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares Available

PLUG Page with information about all PLUG events: http://pdxlinux.org/ Follow PLUG on Twitter: http://twitter.com/pdxlinux

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

For want of a response to the CFP, the PLUG meeting will be an informal meeting at the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne for those who need to get out of the house.

Enjoy!

Who: Bradley M. Kuhn
What: Considering the Future of Copyleft: How Will The Next Generation Perceive GPL?
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, March 5th, 2015 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live/

Copyleft licenses, particularly the GPL and LGPL, are widely used throughout the Free Software community. However, recent for-profit corporate interest in Free Software development has led to a renewed preference toward non-copyleft licensing by for-profit entities. Meanwhile, many for-profit entities that do use copyleft for their own software now do so in a manner that most copyleft aficionados find, at best, distasteful and at worst, abusive.

A long-standing truce exists in our community between fans of non-copyleft licensing and copyleft. No one in the copyleft communities disputes that non-copylefted Free Software is an important part of our community. However, copyleft faces new challenges that make past debates about the appropriateness of copyleft seem quite minor by comparison.

This talk will discuss all aspects of the complicated situation facing copyleft, including younger developers apparent preference for non-copyleft licensing (as expressed, in part, in the "post-open source" debates), the widespread and common failures for companies to comply with GPL's relatively easy requirements, and how licensing choices are today, unlike in the past, rarely in the hands of individual developers, but instead their corporate employers.

Bradley M. Kuhn is the President and Distinguished Technologist at Software Freedom Conservancy (sfconservancy.org) and on the Board of Directors of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Kuhn began his work in the software freedom movement as a volunteer in 1992, when he became an early adopter of the GNU/Linux operating system, and began contributing to various FLOSS projects. He worked during the 1990s as a system administrator and software developer for various companies, and taught AP Computer Science at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati. Kuhn's non-profit career began in 2000, when he was hired by the FSF. As FSF's Executive Director from 2001–2005, Kuhn led FSF's GPL enforcement, launched its Associate Member program, and invented the Affero GPL. From 2005-2010, Kuhn worked as the Policy Analyst and Technology Director of the Software Freedom Law Center. Kuhn was the primary volunteer for Conservancy from 2006–2010, and has been a full-time staffer since early 2011. Kuhn holds a summa cum laude B.S. in Computer Science from Loyola University in Maryland, and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Cincinnati. Kuhn's Master's thesis discussed methods for dynamic interoperability of FLOSS programming languages. Kuhn received the O'Reilly Open Source Award in 2012, in recognition for his lifelong policy work on copyleft licensing.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares Available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

The March Advanced Topics will be an informal meeting at:

Lucky Labrador Brew Pub 915 SE Hawthorne Boulevard

Enjoy!

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: Latham Loop
What: MP4 Metadata Editing
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, April 2nd, 2015 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live/

Latham Loop will present an overview of adding and editing text based subtitles and metadata to the popular MP4 video file format. This can be beneficial to those desiring an alternate language translation when watching video, and to the hearing impaired. Open source tools Subler, Subtitle Edit, FFMPEG, Plex for Mac, Windows and Linux, will be discussed.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares Available

PLUG Page with information about all PLUG events: http://pdxlinux.org/ Follow PLUG on Twitter: http://twitter.com/pdxlinux

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Who: Michael Dexter
What: FreeBSD Virtualization Options
Where: Free Geek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland (Left Entrance)
When: Tuesday, April 21st, 2015 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom

Learn about the latest developments in FreeBSD virtualization including EC2 and Hyper-V guest support, Xen Dom0 and DomU support and bhyve, the native FreeBSD Hypervisor.

Learn about the latest developments in FreeBSD virtualization including EC2 and Hyper-V guest support, Xen Dom0 and DomU support and bhyve, the native FreeBSD Hypervisor.

FreeBSD invented the modern Unix container with jail(8) in the year 2000 and today operates as an EC2 and Hyper-V guest, Xen Dom0 and DomU and now includes bhyve, the native FreeBSD Hypervisor. Michael wrote his first jail(8) management system in 2005 and has since operated NetBSD/Xen in production and was the first community user of bhyve, the FreeBSD hypervisor introduced with FreeBSD 10.0. bhyve is a modern, emulation-free hypervisor that relies on the Extended Page Table feature found in modern Intel and AMD CPUs. bhyve provides bare-metal performance for Unix virtual machines and an in some cases will in fact provide better than bare-metal performance.

FreeBSD Xen Dom0 support has been many years in the making but is beginning to see the light of day. Michael is working with Xen developer Roger Pau Monné and aims to have a real-world report on the status of this unique effort.

Combined, these technologies are establishing FreeBSD as an emerging first class virtualization platform with an increasing adoption by "cloud" service providers.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd. after the meeting.

Rideshares Available

PLUG Page with information about all PLUG events: http://pdxlinux.org/ Follow PLUG on Twitter: http://twitter.com/pdxlinux

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group: Block Storage Device Life Cycles

Who: Michael Dexter
What: Block Storage Device Life Cycles
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, May 7th, 2015 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live if lucky

Block storage has joined electricity as one of the fundamental technologies on which we are completely and irrevocably dependent. The two technologies are in fact becoming inextricable now that computers control virtually every electrical system from the distribution grids on up, and computers themselves are completely dependent on electricity to operate. Both technologies have undergone countless innovations yet still operate largely on their original basic principles. While high in capacity, fast and affordable, the modern hardware block storage device or “hard disk” operates on the same principles as the original 1956 IBM 350 disk storage unit and most solid-state alternatives emulate hard disks. Beginning with the Berkeley Fast File System, the BSD family of operating systems has played a key role in the evolution of general purpose block storage and continues this innovation with technologies like virtual block storage devices, GEOM, UFS2, ZFS, GELI, HAST, GEOM Journaling, FUSE, tmpfs and the NAND Flash framework. This paper will survey the available block device options in the FreeBSD operating system and explore their practical uses in modern storage architectures.

FreeBSD is unique in that it provides the reference platform for the Unix File System and is now a tier one Zettabyte File System or ZFS platform. The 10.0 release of FreeBSD is particularly unique in that it includes in-kernel iSCSI network block device sharing, the NAND Flash framework, a FUSE implementation and the bhyve hypervisor which can leverage and help test most FreeBSD storage technologies. The FreeBSD ports collection also includes support for guest file systems such as ext2 and NTFS, which provide new opportunities to "round trip" virtual and physical machines using bhyve and tools such as the iBFT iSCSI boot framework.

Finally, while an unprecedented block storage toolkit can enable extensive experimentation, there are pragmatic issues surrounding production storage architectures. This paper will touch on real world block storage solutions built with FreeBSD and its derivatives. These derivatives include the FreeNAS storage appliance, which provides networked block and file storage to a myriad of Unix and non-Unix clients. Pragmatic issues surrounding verifiable data integrity include: understanding and embracing ZFS behavior and limits, observing disk and partition health in addition to data integrity, understanding the implications of file naming, maintaining backups and restoring desired data in a timely manner.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares Available

PLUG Page with information about all PLUG events: http://pdxlinux.org/ Follow PLUG on Twitter: http://twitter.com/pdxlinux

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

PLUG Advanced Topics

Who: Brian Martin
What: Life of (Raspberry) Pi
Where: Free Geek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland (Left Entrance)
When: Tuesday, May 19st, 2015 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

Learn:

• How to assemble and configure a Raspberry Pi
  
• How to use it as a remote desktop client
  
• How to configure it to use an NFS-provided root file system
  
• and How to share the same root file system with multiple Raspberry Pi's
  

In this meeting Brian will be discussing his recent experiences using the Raspberry Pi to meet personal and business needs. Brian will demonstrate building and configuring a Raspberry Pi. He'll also demonstrate using the Raspberry Pi as a Windows remote desktop client. Afterwards, he'll demonstrate how to drink a beer at the Lucky Lab.

Bio: Brian Martin is the chief consultant for Martin Consulting Services, Inc. Martin Consulting has provided system administration services in Unix, Linux and Windows systems in the Portland metro area and across the country since 1996. Brian is a frequent attendee at PLUG. His past presentations include VMWare, production grade scripting, disaster recovery experiences, Linux containers, logical volume management, and Samba 4.

Who: John Hawley
What: Open Hardware and why it matters - MinnowBoard MAX case study
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, June 4th, 2015 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

Open Hardware is starting to change the way the world works, giving more people access to customizable hardware, and giving more power to smaller entities. I intend to give a general overview of open hardware, focusing on the MinnowBoard MAX, and use it as a case study of what people are doing with it and why the open hardware is important to the space it's entering.

John 'Warthog9' Hawley led the system administration team on kernel.org for nearly a decade, leading a team including four other administrators. His other exploits include working on Syslinux, OpenSSI, a caching Gitweb, and patches to bind to enable GeoDNS. He's the author of PXE Knife, a set of interfaces around common utilities and diagnostics tools needed by an average systems administrator, as well as SyncDiff(erent) a state-full file synchronizer and file transfer mechanism. He currently works for Intel working on Open Hardware, and the Minnowboard. In his free time he enjoys cooking extravagant meals and watching bad movies.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares Available

PLUG Page with information about all PLUG events: http://pdxlinux.org/ Follow PLUG on Twitter: http://twitter.com/pdxlinux

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group Advanced Topics

Who: Ken Eshelby
What: OpenNMS
Where: Free Geek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland (Left Entrance)
When: Tuesday, October 20th, 2015 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

OpenNMS is one of the most mature, scalable and flexible enterprise network management platforms in existence. This presentation will cover essential architecture, features and workflow. We will also cover new features including new massively scalable time series data store using Apache Cassandra, new measurements API, new Minion distributable collector and poller in development, and new mobile application.

Ken Eshelby had been a network engineer for nearly 20 years in public service, involving development and deployment of an advanced enterprise network for the State of Oregon. I have covered technologies such as early MPLS development and deployment with Cisco, QoS, data center design and high speed scalable and redundant enterprise and service provider networks. I have maintained a focus in network management while doing engineering duties and support in a NOC and data center environment. In 2014, I joined The OpenNMS Group as a consulting and support engineer. The OpenNMS Group has maintained the OpenNMS open source project for 11 years. We sell free software.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd. after the meeting.

Rideshares Available

PLUG Page with information about all PLUG events: http://pdxlinux.org/ Follow PLUG on Twitter: http://twitter.com/pdxlinux

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

See you there!

Michael Dexter
PLUG Volunteer

Who: Galen Seitz, Tim Bruce and Michael Dexter
What: ARM mbed Development and a Virtualization Roundtable
Where: Free Geek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland (Left Entrance)
When: Tuesday, November 17th, 2015 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

The mbed platform provides free software libraries, hardware designs and online tools for professional rapid prototyping of products based on ARM microcontrollers.

The platform includes a standards-based C/C++ SDK, a microcontroller HDK and supported development boards, an online compiler and online developer collaboration tools.

https://developer.mbed.org/explore/

The illustrious embedded developer and long-time PLUG member Galen Seitz will give an overview of the mbed development environment.

Virtualization Roundtable

By request of long-time PLUG member Tim Bruce, we will segue to a Virtualization roundtable discussion in which Michael is happy to share his recent experiences with Windows on bhyve and the PROMOX KVM alternative to XenServer/ESXi.

Who: Michael Dexter
What: FreeNAS 10 CLI
Where: Free Geek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland (Left Entrance)
When: Tuesday, December 15th, 2015 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

With over seven million downloads and hundreds of thousands of users (if not more) around the world, FreeNAS is easily the world's most popular software-defined Network Attached Storage (NAS) software.

FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD and the ZFS enterprise grade open source file system. The FreeNAS graphical user interface has evolved from being PHP-based, followed by Django/JavaScript based and is now moving to an all-JavaScript, asynchronous and Websockets-based framework that allows for both graphical and command line interfaces.

This hands-on demonstration will explain how the new Cisco/Vyatta-like FreeNAS CLI works for basic storage server configuration. It will also show the built-in interface debugging tools which show what is going on under the hood.

Michael provides FreeNAS support with Gainframe and does way, way too much in the BSD community.

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group Advanced Topics

Who: Roundtable discussion, moderated by Brian Martin and Michael Dexter
What: Smarter S.M.A.R.T. and related storage challenges
Where: Free Geek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland (Left Entrance)
When: Tuesday, January 19th, 2016 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live/

We are addicted to storage devices like hard and solid state disks.

Modern computing begins with storage and could survive quite some time without the computing part, as demonstrated by past storage devices like the Rosetta Stone for which we struggle to decode.

This means HDD's and SSD's are reliable, right?

Alas, they are not. In fact the situation is somewhat terrifying. File systems have made significant progress in the last decade but remarkably, there are still significant issues surrounding the devices they inhabit.

Storage devices are inconsistent, to put it politely, about notifying the user of existing, potential and impending problems. Built-in, standard-ish reporting mechanisms like S.M.A.R.T. exist but pose as many challenges as they address. Some storage "health" monitoring data is straight-forward, some is not:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

Bring your storage-related questions, war stories and gadgets!

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd. after the meeting.

Rideshares Available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Who: Kevin Kaelar
What: Linux as a security camera monitoring platform
Where: Free Geek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland
When: Tuesday, 16 February 2016, at 7PM
Why: Because combining physical and digital security is an interesting puzzle
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

Setting up a camera in Linux is relatively easy. With any luck, you plug in the USB cable and it "just works". But what if you need ten cameras? What if you need to store increasingly large amounts of footage for liability purposes? What if you need to be able to access the realtime feed from any (or all) of those cameras from anywhere in the world? What if you need fine-grained motion detection for some of the cameras, scheduled recording capabilities for others at certain times of day, and provide varying levels of access to multiple users?

This problem set is normally solved in a business environment by purchasing expensive (and frequently proprietary) security camera systems at a significant cost. However, it's possible to accomplish all of these things with a Linux-based application called ZoneMinder. During this talk, you'll be walked through the process of setting up a fully featured security camera and monitoring system, and will have the opportunity to learn about and/or discuss some of the supportive tech such as an Apache proxy, firewall and router configuration, and pruning and backing up video archives.

About Kevin

System administrator, game designer, software developer, open source contributor, Soylent drinker, wood carver, small electronics prototyper, blacksmith, poet, machinist, musician, and martial artist. Currently working as a full time web application developer for a music publishing company, Kevin spends most of his spare time babysitting a 3d printer and doing fun (and occasionally strange) things with Arduino at his startup in the Pearl District of Portland, Oregon.

Portland Linux/Unix Group Advanced Topics

No organizer or speaker this month! You are welcome to congregate and hack at the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne.

Enjoy!

Who: Josh Berkus
What: What's new in PostgreSQL 9.5
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, April 7th, 2016 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live (PSU WiFi Permitting)

PostgreSQL 9.5 has many new and cool features for database users, making the venerable RDBMS suitable for even more workloads. Among them are:

• UPSERT for high-concurrency insert/update operations
• Row Level Security, integrated with SELinux, for ultimate data security
• CUBE and ROLLUP for sophisticated analytics
• FDW partitioning for data federation
• BRIN indexes for big data
• More JSON goodness

PostgreSQL Core Team member Josh Berkus will take you on a tour of the new features, including demos of many of them, and field questions about PostgreSQL in general.

About Josh

Josh Berkus is on the Core Team of the PostgreSQL Project, and was a professional database geek for 18 years. Today, he works for Red Hat as the community lead for Project Atomic, which means he's all about the containers. He has used a Linux desktop since 2001.

Rideshares Available

PLUG Page with information about all PLUG events: http://pdxlinux.org/ Follow PLUG on Twitter: http://twitter.com/pdxlinux

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group Advanced Topics Meeting Announcement

Who: Moderator Michael Dexter, PLUG Volunteer
What: Enduring Communities Roundtable
Where: Free Geek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland
When: Tuesday, April 19th 2016, at 7PM
Why: Live Long and PLUGsper
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

Why do some user groups endure for decades while others do not? What organizational structures and personalities are needed to maintain interest, attendance and participation?

Share your experiences on why the groups you have been involved with have or have not survived. Was it a Y2K preparedness group that served its purpose? Did group leadership not successfully transfer between generations? Beyond organizing the last 100 or so PLUG speakers, Michael has been involved in student and neighborhood government, plus the Oregon Latvian Society for nearly 30 years. During this time he has seen the brightest and darkest moments of volunteer organizations.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd. after the meeting.

Rideshares Available

PLUG Page with information about all PLUG events: http://pdxlinux.org/ Follow PLUG on Twitter: http://twitter.com/pdxlinux

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group Advanced Topics

Who: Roundtable Discussion
What: Installerfest!
Where: Free Geek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland
When: Tuesday, May 17th 2016, at 7PM
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live
From a mailing list discussion: Let's talk installers.

Not installations, installers. The things that install operating systems to persistent and bootable storage.

Many of us have written our own over the years and at a bare minimum, Michael can show what he's been doing with his virtualization things.

On deck: OpenBSD, FreeBSD, (thing you bring)

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd. after the meeting.

Rideshares Available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group Advanced Topics

Informal meeting at the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne

See you next month!

Portland Linux/Unix Group Advanced Topics Meeting

Who: Moderator Michael Dexter, PLUG Volunteer
What: Internet Mirroring Roundtable
Where: Free Geek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland
When: Tuesday, July 19th 2016, at 7PM
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

What's in a mirror?

If you've spent any time GNU/Linux distro hopping or testing virtualization strategies, you have probably spent a non-trivial amount of time in the "nearest" download mirror. Such mirrors vary in speed, quality and navigability. The burden for upholding quality in each of these respects falls both on the often-volunteer mirror maintainers and the often-volunteer project maintainers. Failure from a mirror's perspective is obvious: You can't access the materials you want to download or what you download is corrupt. In the case of the downloads themselves, THIS:

mirror.org/releases/amd64/20160704/livedvd-amd64-multilib-20160704.iso

I was cleaning up my local mirror and came across this path and installer ISO and... HAVE NO IDEA WHAT OS IT IS.

This roundtable will discuss the good, the bad and the ugly of such mirroring and what to do about it, ideally resulting in a draft proposal for a conventions that projects and mirrors could follow.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd. after the meeting.

Rideshares Available

PLUG Page with information about all PLUG events: http://pdxlinux.org/ Follow PLUG on Twitter: http://twitter.com/pdxlinux

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

See you there!

Portland Linux/Unix Group Advanced Topics

Informal meeting at the Lucky Lab on Hawthorne for those who need to get out of the house.

Enjoy!

Portland Linux/Unix Group Advanced Topics Meeting

Who: Kimberly M.
What: Building a Private Cloud with CloudStack
Where: Free Geek, 1731 SE 10th Avenue, Portland
When: Tuesday, October 18th 2016, at 7PM
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

This presentation is a report from an evaluation of using an open source cloud environment in a small or home office situation. The project compared Apache CloudStack with OpenStack, plus the XenServer and KVM hypervisors. We will walk through the deployment of CloudStack and KVM and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the various design choices.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd. after the meeting.

Rideshares Available

PLUG Page with information about all PLUG events: http://pdxlinux.org/ Follow PLUG on Twitter: http://twitter.com/pdxlinux

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

See you there!

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: Michael "you break it you bought it" Dexter
What: An Introduction to Data Protection
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, August 3rd, 2017 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

You probably have a good sense of data protection in the sense of "backups" but alas, there is more to it. This talk will cover ten key aspects of Data Protection and discuss open source technologies that address them.

Is your data...

1. Integrous – Maintaining integrity and consistency
2. Resilient – Resistant to mechanical failures/outages
3. Versioned – Accessible in a previous state
4. Replicated – “Backed up” to local and remote locations
5. Archived – Versioned and replicated for long-term storage
6. Secure – Resistant to unauthorized theft or destruction
7. Private – Available for authorized purposes only
8. Available – Accessible in a timely manner
9. Usable – Equally available now and in the future
10. Compliant – with legal and regulatory requirements

Bring your questions and experiences for a livid^H^H^H^H^H vivid and vibrant discussion.

Bonus: Discussion about the future of PLUG Advanced Topics and other PLUG housekeeping, planning and fun!

Super bonus: Michael will not be here in September and see Bonus one.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: Aaron Parecki
What: OAuth 2.0 Simplified
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

The OAuth 2.0 authorization framework has become the industry standard in providing secure access to web APIs. OAuth allows users to grant external applications access to their data, such as profile data, photos, and email, without compromising security. However, OAuth can be intimidating when first starting out. In this talk, Aaron Parecki will break down the various OAuth workflows and provide a simplified overview of the framework, highlighting a few typical use cases.

About Aaron

Aaron Parecki is the editor of the W3C Webmention and Micropub specifications, and maintains oauth.net. He is the co-founder of IndieWebCamp, a yearly worldwide conference on data ownership and online identity. He has spoken at conferences around the world about OAuth, data ownership, quantified self, and even explained why R is a vowel. You can find more about his work at aaronpk.com.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: Josh Berkus
What: Fedora Atomic Host: Your Next Linux
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

Fedora Atomic Host: Your Next Linux

Our current model of RPM-and-config-management for Linux systems has done well for us over the last decade and more, but is starting to show its age. Come learn about Atomic Host, which is a new model for managing software and maintenance for large clouds of hosts.

Josh Berkus of Red Hat will explain the Atomic Host "ostree" model for binary updates, and how that ties in with container deployments of applications. He will demo deploying and updating a cluster of Atomic Hosts running OpenShift, and answer questions about this architecture. He'll then speculate about what the future could hold, in the form of modularity, Flatpaks, and more.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: Russell Senior
What: How to get a Municipal Broadband network in the City of Portland
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, February 1st, 2018 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

How to get a Municipal Broadband network in the City of Portland

As many of you know, Russell has been kind of passionate about building an open-access Internet infrastructure in Portland for the last decade or more. No privately owned network would voluntarily allow open-access, and hasn't since the DSL days (when they were required to), and the Feds, namely the FCC has been steadfast in its refusal to enforce line-sharing (essentially the same thing as open access) on infrastructure built since 1996. Many of you may have heard about the FCC action in December rescinding the relatively new Title II regulation of ISPs and the Network Neutrality rules that went with it. With the consciousness raising this event has provided, there is a new window of opportunity from the groundswell of interest to create pressure on our political systems, namely City Council in Portland OR, failing that, an initiative petition to provide a local solution.

Russell will describe the problem and what a solution would look like, where the user ends up in the driver seat.

Bring your Net Neutrality questions!

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: Steve Dum
What: Meltdown and Spectre Vulnerabilities
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, March 1st, 2018 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

Seemingly simultaneously multiple people discovered these vulnerabilities that exploit CPU data cache timing to cause protected information to be leaked. I'll start with a review of modern CPU design features like parallel execution, out of order execution, speculative execution, branch prediction,cache access and side channels leading up to the 3 flaws, called Meltdown and Spectre. Including a simple understandable example of the flaws, and show an actual Proof of Concept.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: Ted Mittelstaedt
What: Upgrading your business phone system with Asterisk
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, April 5th, 2018 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

Most medium to larger businesses use central PBX phone systems to save money on telephone lines. Over the last decade the business PBX has gradually evolved towards Voice over IP hardware and away from traditional digital phones. Proprietary VoIP PBX systems such as Panasonic, Cisco and Mitel are available but costly. This presentation will cover how companies can take advantage of open standards such as SIP and LDAP and software such as Asterisk to have an inexpensive PBX that has features of the large, expensive and proprietary systems. An Asterisk system will be demonstrated and used as a sample system for the presentation.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: You!
What: UnPLUG and more!
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, May 3rd, 2018 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

Our speaker from the OSI had to leave Portland earlier than expected leaving us with an UnPLUG open discussion.

There is a chance I will bring my favorite computer books. You can too!

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: Daniel Hedlund
What: YaCy Distributed/P2P Search Engine
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, June 7th, 2018 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

YaCy (https://yacy.net/) is an open-source distributed/peer-to-peer search engine, where no central server is in control of the search index or ranking of results. It can be used to search the Internet through peer-to-peer nodes, or set up to search your own intranet. Daniel will provide an introductory overview of the architecture walk through setting it up for several use cases. He will also give an overview of what is coming with YaCy Grid, a second-generation implementation of YaCy.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: Keith Dechant
What: OpenStreetMap
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, July 5th, 2018 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

More details to come.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: Robin Haberman
What: OpenStreetMap
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, August 2nd, 2018 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

To fight global warming on the local level requires a change in thinking. We need to consider how new systems can be easily deployed and used by local groups. Supported by regional groups of academics, scientists, citizen scientists, journalists, environmental hackers, communities from the DIY and Maker movements. Systems that can aid local populations in their understanding of environmental and climate changes and help them deal with those changes. Our systems are aimed at the area that is the difference between today's weather and long-term climate changes ahead. These systems are designed to be the “last mile” of climate change monitoring, allowing local communities around the world to monitor their climate and take steps to mitigate changes. The systems will be owned and run by these communities with limited outside technical support, and can either stand alone or be tied together into an ad-hoc network similar to a small network of cellphone towers. Using our system to ask three questions: What is happening to our climate and environment? What does it mean? And what can we do about it? The hard data collected from the system, leaders in communities can begin planning how they will adapt and stay in place in their decision-making process. The GMIBS-Project will design, develop, and produce low-cost systems to aid local groups efforts to monitor and mitigate climate change. By this we hope to foster an ecosystem of users, developers, contributors, and competitors in an open global marketplace for climate change intelligent aid tool systems.

About Robin

Robin’s current work is on development of an Early Warring System for local climate changes. Graduated from a private high school housed at Reed College and staffed by students from Reed. His academic training includes several degrees with an international focus as well as information management and telecommunications (BS/AA and 3 Cert’s) Along with over 10,000 hours of professional training in intelligent networks and information storage, which gave him the skills and capabilities needed to work for two multinational and three foreign corporations. Other careers have been: Academic research for non-profit R&D organization; musical bands and llght show logistics.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: Randal L. Schwartz
What: OpenStreetMap
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, September 6th, 2018 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

Flutter makes it easy and fast to build beautiful mobile apps. Flutter is a new mobile app SDK to help developers and designers build modern mobile apps for iOS and Android. Deliver features faster: refresh times so fast, you can "paint" your app to life on hardware, emulators, and simulators. Craft beautiful UIs: dDelight your users and make your brand stand out with rich motion, smooth scrolling, and beautiful customizable components. Used by Google: Flutter is used by Google and others in production, works with Firebase and other mobile app SDKs, and is open source. Flutter's hot reload helps you quickly and easily experiment, build UIs, add features, and fix bug faster. Experience sub-second reload times, without losing state, on emulators, simulators, and hardware for iOS and Android. Delight your users with Flutter's built-in beautiful Material Design and Cupertino (iOS-flavor) widgets, rich motion APIs, smooth natural scrolling, and platform awareness. Easily compose your UI with Flutter's modern reactive framework and rich set of platform, layout, and foundation widgets. Solve your tough UI challenges with powerful and flexible APIs for 2D, animation, gestures, effects, and more.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: Michael Dexter
What: Open Source and POSIX Environments for Windows
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, October 4th, 2018 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

Windows has a hard-earned reputation for appalling security and reliability but, better late than never, has matured into a relatively stable and secure desktop and server problem. Windows can run many popular open source desktop applications and has an incredibly-long history of on-again and off-again supporting Unix/POSIX environments such as Interix/SFU and Cygwin, and now ships with Linux emulation. These tools vary wildly in their depth of frustration to Unix users but do provide a gateway to some extremely-interesting yet intentionally-vague open source opportunities that will be demonstrated.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting

Featuring Special Guest Chris Fisher of Linux Action Show and Tech Snap!

Who: J. Hart
What: Carnivorous plants and other technologies
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, November 1st, 2018 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

New York-based PLUG member J. Hart is passing through town and will discuss his adventures with carnivorous plants and other technologies.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting

Who: Nathan Brenner
What: Rapid web application development with Angular
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, December 6th, 2018 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

Rapid web application development with Angular: Catch a glimpse of what a full stack web application looks like that is built with open source resources like Angular, NgRx, GraphQL, and AWS Amplify. A lot has changed since the version of Javascript changed in 2015. Open source client side frameworks have dramatically changed to provide opportunities to build large client side applications that are performant while also cloud infrastructure has made scaling javascript possible with the availability of powerful tools without investing in expensive servers.

About the Speaker

Nathan Brenner is a self-taught full slack web application engineer, currently as a contractor at Nike. He’s worked on a range of small to enterprise level projects over the past 4 years, covering grounds such as but not limited to Angular and React on the client side. Prior to working in software, he worked in public education for several years and has degrees from the University of Nevada, Reno and Portland State University.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

PSU is not in session yet and we have no guarantee of a room.

See you at the Clinic or in February!

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting

Who: Russell Senior
What: PGP Key Storage with a Yubikey 4
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, February 7th, 2019 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

This presentation will walk through the use of a Yubikey 4 to hold an RSA PGP private key. Public key encryption requires protection of the private key. If control of the private key is lost, all reasoning about signatures and encryption is compromised. Storing private keys on a hard disk and processed by the PC makes the private key vulnerable to compromise. A Yubikey promises to key your private key secret. There will also be a digression during the presentation into so-called true Random Number Generators, e.g. ChaosKey and InfiniteNoise.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting

Who: Joshua Elsasser
What: Coreboot!
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, March 7th, 2019 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

Coreboot is an open-source, flexible firmware platform for x86 and other architectures. Primarily intended to be used by hardware OEMs, it has also been ported by volunteers to a small number of existing motherboards. This presentation will walk through the process of building and flashing Coreboot on a Thinkpad x220.

Joshua Elsasser is a sysadmin, software developer, and esoteric software enthusiast. He is happiest when hacking on software five layers down from wherever everyone else is working.

Organizers's notes: This is a PLUG talk I have been hoping to host for several years now. Thank you Joshua!

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting

Who: Heather Wilcox
What: Software Quality Engineering
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, April 4th, 2019 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

There is no magic bullet for quality. Nor is there a right tool, script, or any amount of automation that can replace actual thought and effort. Building quality in requires that you first understand what it is. This talk will focus first on defining quality, then we will move to strategies for building the goodness in, and finally ways to test to ensure that both you and your "customers" are getting what they want.

About Heather

Heather Wilcox has spent 24 years working and learning in the software industry, choosing to focus primarily on start-up and small companies. As a result, she has had a broad range of job descriptions which include, but are not limited to: Tech Support Engineer, IS Manager, Technical Writer, QA Engineer, QA Manager, and Configuration Management Engineer. This has given Heather a wide range of experiences to draw from in her current roles as a Senior Quality Assurance engineer and Scrum Master.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting

Who: You!
What: UnPLUG!
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, May 2nd, 2019 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

UnPLUG! Quick talks and open discussion.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting

Who: Tony Bourke
What: Why Packets Die
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, June 6th, 2019 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

Why do packets die? What happens inside data center switches and WAN routers that cause packets to die? In this talk, Tony does packet walks explaining in simple, relatable terms what happens when a packet leaves a server and doesn't make it's destination. Network congestion and its affects on buffering, queuing, QoS, rate limiting and shaping are all topics covered. Topics that can be scary to server administrators, but Tony breaks them down to very simple components. Also discussions on why protocol overhead doesn't much matter, and why jumbo frames don't matter to the network for performance are discussed.

Tony Bourke is a networking instructor teaching primarily Cisco and related technologies. He is also a certified skydiving instructor and parachute rigger. He lives in Portland, Oregon but can be found all over the world teaching or skydiving (or both).

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting

Who: Larry Brigman
What: Introduction to Ansible
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, August 1st 2019 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

Automation and configuration management is hard when the tools you use don't provide the basics. Ansible is built from the ground up to always handle and check the error conditions. Come learn a little Ansible and see how you can start on your path toward using Infrastructure as Code.

About Larry

First Experience with computers was a TRS-80 with a cassette tape. Since then used or developed on everything from microcontrollers to mainframes. Currently developing on for Linux using Ansible and OpenShift.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting

Who: Andrew Hewus Fresh
What: Open Sourcing DBIx::Class::Events, a Perl module
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, September 5th, 2019 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom

While I will explain about what DBIx::Class::Events does and how it works as well as some of the underlying technologies it builds on, this talk is primarily about open source contributions being driven by the folks in a company who care about them and how it is up to those people to provide the resources and knowledge to everyone else in order to create an open source culture in the workplace. As far as I know, no request to open source something has ever been denied by my employer, and while the company has always had the same "go for it" attitude, the folks writing code are only just starting to gain momentum releasing things publicly. I'll talk about showing other folks in the company the benefits of sharing code internally, how that exposed the benefits of open-source in general, and how we as a company progressed to getting DBIx::Class::Events onto the CPAN.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting

Who: You!
What: Contending With Our Culture of Discouragement
Where: PSU, 1900 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, October 3rd, 2019 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

The Free Software/Open Source community appears to be at a crossroads.

A brave woman declared that "enough is enough" with the disturbing statements of a pivotal figure in the community and it rightfully cost that figure a number of prominent positions. Remarkably, she wasn't the first woman to challenge a foundation leader this year and help usher them to the door.

Responses to such confrontations have ranged from false narratives to the proposal of morality-enforcing licenses for software.

One theme however, is the chilling effect that disturbing, and at times unlawful behavior in the community causes, and the efforts to content with it. Why participate in communities with these issues? This passive discouragement is often combined with direct discouragement and countless forms of divisiveness.

Yet we press on, and work to resolve these bugs, one by one.

This meeting will be an open forum to share your experiences with discouragement in the free software/open source community. Trolls need not attend but will be educated by a panel of experts if they do.

ATTENTION! Thanks to a new security policy, attendees will need to enter through the 1900 SW 4th entrance by 8PM, just North of the 1930 SW 4th entrance adjacent to Hawaiian Express, formerly Taco Del Mar:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/1900+SW+4th+Ave,+Portland,+OR

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Ride shares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group Advanced Topics Meeting

Who: The Clear Linux Team
What: Beyond the Introduction to Clear Linux OS
Where: Intel, 5200 NE Elam Young Pkwy, Building 3 Auditorium, Hillsboro
When: Tuesday, October 15th, 2019 at 6:30pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

Intel's Clear Linux OS team will talk about their operating system!

Many will head to the Orenco Taphouse, 1198 NE Orenco Station Pkwy, Hillsboro

Ride shares available

PLUG is open to everyone but does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: Athan Spathas
What: Glass Beatstation
Where: PSU, 1900 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Left Entrance, Lower Level)
When: Thursday, November 7th, 2019 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

Glass Beatstation: An open source mobile and modular musical interface for Linux machines and musicians that don’t know how to use Linux

As a self-taught/amateur programmer, I was able to use open source programs to start building the versatile music workstation I’ve long dreamed of. The fact that I have been able to get this project functional to any degree is a great credit to the FLO (Free/Libre/Open Source) community. In the process I’ve learned about many of the benefits and learning curves of FLO hardware and software. I primarily used Python, Open-Stage-Control, Sooperlooper, Ardour, Puredata and the Kxstudio repositories, and have iterated an extra portable version of the project on raspberry pi. I will share the perspectives I have gained in the process how I was able to receive AND share knowledge with Linux users both new and experienced alike. Because of this, I’ve learned much about bridging the gap between those people already familiar with Linux/FLO technology, and those who aren’t familiar – yet.

Athan Spathas teaches robotics to kids and supports open source software however he can: one is as likely to find him performing on his linux based portable studio as much as find him performing on it, doing demos, or educating others about the benefits of open source technology.

ATTENTION! Thanks to a new security policy, attendees will need to enter through the 1900 SW 4th entrance by 8PM, just North of the 1930 SW 4th entrance adjacent to Hawaiian Express, formerly Taco Del Mar:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/1900+SW+4th+Ave,+Portland,+OR

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Ride shares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

PLUG Advanced Topics Is Back!

Who: Beth Dean and Otavio Pontes
What: System Stacks Usecases and Swupd Client
Where: Intel, 5200 NE Elam Young Pkwy, Building 3 Auditorium, Hillsboro
When: Tuesday, November 19th, 2019 at 6:30pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live (Hopefully)

Beth Dean will present a System Stacks Usecases demo, and Otavio Pontes will talk about Swupd Client, the Clear Linux OS core update system.

https://calagator.org/events/

It will be at the Hawthorne Farms auditorium at 6:30pm. Afters will be at Orenco Taphouse, 1198 NE Orenco Station Pkwy, Hillsboro.

PLUG is open to everyone but does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

See you there!

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: Steve Dum
What: Do you still use ASCII?
Where: PSU, 1900 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Left Entrance, Lower Level)
When: Thursday, December 5th, 2019 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

A look at the journey from ASCII to UTF-8. I'll discuss the ramifications of the results of this journey for users and highlight cautions for developers. We have gone from the simple, a character is a byte, to a character may be tens of bytes, and worse monospace characters are not always the same width when displayed. This is a overview of features every GNU/Linux user should be aware of. It also highlights some issues programmers and sysadmins will face.

I am a UTF-8 neophyte trying to fix a broken program that now needs to use UTF-8. I've spent decades porting large programs to new environments. Now I'm planning on integrating a large library to a small program. ATTENTION! Thanks to a new security policy, attendees will need to enter through the 1900 SW 4th entrance by 8PM, just North of the 1930 SW 4th entrance adjacent to Hawaiian Express, formerly Taco Del Mar:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/1900+SW+4th+Ave,+Portland,+OR

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Ride shares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: Russell Senior What: Reading wireless temperature sensors with RTL-SDR and rtl_433
Where: PSU, 1900 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Left Entrance, Lower Level)
When: Thursday, January 2nd, 2020 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

Russell has been measuring an array of temperature sensors in and around his house since October-ish 2011, primarily Dallas Semiconductor DS18B20 one-wire sensors (previously talk: 2013-06-06 Hacking on the Beagle Bone Black). For years, he's had a few Oregon Scientific wireless temperature sensors outside, but no way to log the temperatures for posterity. About a year ago, in early December 2018, he discovered a project called rtl_433 that uses a software defined radio to receive and decode the signals coming from these and similar sensors. so that they can be logged. This talk will describe a few of the things that are possible with rtl_433 and what Russell does and doesn't do with the data.

About Russell:

Russell has been a Linux user since 1992. He worked for a few decades doing data management, programming, and analysis for a small scientific consulting firm. Since 2005 he has been deeply involved in the Personal Telco Project and trying to bring about telecommunications in the users interests, while also hacking on router firmware. For two years, he's been involved in an active effort to bring publicly-owned fiber infrastructure to the Portland metro area (in furtherance of the Personal Telco goal). He has a possibly unnatural love for serial consoles and RS-232, but is too smitten to be ashamed. He describes himself as self-under-employed. Will work on Linux'y things for money. Will work on Science'y/measurement'y things for money, as long as Linux is or can be involved somehow. He's very interested in trying to solve your telemetry problems with off-the-shelf wifi equipment and some elbow grease, if you've got some.

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Ride shares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: Josh Lifton, Co-founder & President, Crowd Supply
What: Linux, Open Source Silicon, and Crowdfunding
Where: PSU, 1900 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Left Entrance, Lower Level)
When: Thursday, February 6th, 2020 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

A guided tour through 7+ years of adventures in crowdfunding open hardware, from the Novena and Librem laptops to high-end software-defined radios and pentesting tools. What does it mean for hardware to be open? How does it relate to software and Linux in particular? Can we replicate the successes and avoid the pitfalls Linux has been through? Where does open silicon fit into all this?

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Ride shares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: You!
What: UnPLUG: Home Lab Show and Tell!
Where: PSU, 1900 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Left Entrance, Lower Level)
When: Thursday, March 5th, 2020 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: http://pdxlinux.org/live

Many PLUG members have home labs and a case could be made for every PLUG member having a home lab, however humble. Fortunately, recent hardware advances such as hardware-assisted virtualization have made a virtualized home lab accessible to users of every budget.

Please bring your favorite home lab stories and hardware for whatever presentation you are comfortable with. We are guaranteed to have an abundance of information and stories!

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Ride shares to the Lucky Lab available

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings.

Our regular venue is unavailable this month, so we're going to have an informal UnPLUG, just hang out and chit chat on and off-topic. You are welcome!

Who: Ted, Michael, YOU...
What: New Year Show and Tell
Where: 5500 SW Dosch Rd, Portland
When: Thursday, February 1st, 2024 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom

Ted: Bandwidth monitoring OpenWRT and DD-WRT routers with MRTG

Michael: Managing Windows from FreeBSD Environments

You: What have you been working on this last few months?

Rules and Requests:

Masks are encouraged but not required. CCC in Germany sent a LOT of people home with COVID-19. 19 as in 2019 and please people, it's not something we want to hang on to.

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings

Do not leave valuables in your car

Who: Russell Senior
What: Part 1: A Network Relay via Cloud Instance ; Part 2: Retro Linux Tape Recovery Show and Telll
Where: 5500 SW Dosch Rd, Portland
When: Thursday, March 7, 2024 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom

The first part is going to be a description of how I relay network connections from the Internet to my low-volume home-based email server to evade potential ISP blockages.

The second part is going to be a show and tell about my resurrection of an ancient Linux version in order to recover data from Quarter Inch Cartridge tapes and ancillary topics. It will also include a short demo of my MS-DOS 5.0 environment also (resurrected from tape) the month before I installed Linux for the first time in December 1992.

About Russell:

I am a person for whom the Year of the Linux Desktop started in 1992 and has continued annually, uninterrupted. I worked for a couple decades in scientific data management and analysis. Since 2005, I have been involved with the Personal Telco Project, a volunteer-based 501c3 non-profit trying to unscrew telecommunications policy in the Portland metropolitan area. I did a short stint in data management for an Oceanographic organization when it was housed at OH&SU. I also volunteer at Portland State Aerospace Society working on their OreSat program. My name, misspelled in glorious circuit board silkscreen, has literally been in orbit for most of the last 2 years. I have done a bunch of PLUG talks over the years.

Rules and Requests:

Masks are encouraged but not required.

PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its mailing lists or at its meetings

Do not leave valuables in your car

The Portland Linux/Unix Group has been meeting since 30 years ago this month. Please join us for a celebratory gathering to recognize our continuing longevity. It isn't possible to say right now who the speaker will be, but we'll work something out. More important than who is speaking is getting together to recognize the community of helpers that we are. Whether you are an old timer, there at the beginning, or someone who just started attending recently, or someone who has never attended before, we welcome you and hope that you can join us.

Date: March 24th, 1994
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.help
Subject: Linux Users Group!!!

There is a Linux users group forming in Portland Oregon, if you are
interested, email me at: ... our first meeting date has not been set,
but will be in April sometime.
Have Fun,
Sean

Ever wondered how many package updates were released for your favorite distro in the past month? Or how many times you have had to upgrade Firefox?

The Linux Changelog Project is an attempt to present statistics for the development and maintenance of Linux Distributions based on publicly available changelog data. By creating a distro-agnostic view of all changelog updates for a given project, we can see how the size and activity of a given distribution compares to its peers. At the moment only Fedora and Slackware are supported, but over time more distributions will be added. The end goal is to provide a web interface that will allow people to search for and browse the millions of package updates across all major Linux distributions.

As someone who is largely self-taught in the world of GNU/Linux, projects like this are how I learn about the Linux ecosystem and practice skills that I apply to my career in IT support. While my experience goes all the way back to the dark days of HAL I'm still surprised by what I find hiding in the various corners of the Linux world. Working with the changelog formats of different distributions has challenged hat I thought I knew, and I hope other users (new and old) will find it interesting as well.

There are many commercial wifi access point (AP) controller setups, ie a single management interface to control multiple APs. Until recently there wasn't a FLOSS method of doing this. OpenWISP (https://openwisp.org/) is a modular and programmable Open Source Network Management System for OpenWrt. In this presentation we will go over the simple installation and setup process, including connection to multiple OpenWrt access points.

Bio:

Eldo Varghese is a constant nomad that has settled in Portland as of 3 years ago. Recently turned 40 and looking for more community in his old age. Currently works in an SRE/Devops role at a small non-profit academic journal (https://plos.org). Involved in Linux community in some fashion since 2007, and have used OpenWrt for the past 15 years.

A quick overview of the build system for OpenWrt on supported devices, followed by a demonstration of installation and configuration. If you have a device you'd like help installing OpenWrt on, bring it along, perhaps we'll have time to address it. At a minimum there will be a Watchguard Firebox M300.

Russell Senior has been building OpenWrt from source for a variety of purposes since about 2006 and has considerable knowledge about the ins and outs and what-have-yous.

For background, you can watch a presentation he gave at Open Source Bridge in 2014:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOsRAxToyiM

(some of the information in that talk from a decade ago is stale, so beware)