Portland State University Fourth Avenue Building (FAB) Room FAB 86-01

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)

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.

Meet up with fellow Portland-area Rust programmers, give a lightning talk on your own project, find something interesting to collaborate on, or just enjoy talking shop with your fellow Rustaceans!

This is our first meeting since the pandemic! (Remember the pandemic?) We don't have any big topics planned to present, so this will just be a hack night. Brainstorming talk ideas for future meetups is definitely on topic.

Kindly hosted by Portland State University, we'll be meeting in Computer Science Conference Room FAB 086-01. Calagator has an entry for this venue: https://calagator.org/venues/202394217

(I'm a bit unclear on the security details; we may have someone at the door to let people in, in which case arriving late might be difficult, since we'd of course like that person to come down and join the group eventually. When I have more details I'll update this. -JimB)

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.

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: 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: 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: 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.

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 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.

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: 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.

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 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 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.

Title: Drucker-Prager Elastoplasticity for Sand Animation Speaker: Joseph Teran, UCLA

Abstract: We simulate sand dynamics using an elastoplastic, continuum assumption. We demonstrate that the Drucker-Prager plastic flow model combined with a Hencky-strain-based hyperelasticity accurately recreates a wide range of visual sand phenomena with moderate computational expense. We use the Material Point Method (MPM) to discretize the governing equations for its natural treatment of contact, topological change and history dependent constitutive relations. The Drucker-Prager model naturally represents the frictional relation between shear and normal stresses through a yield stress criterion. We develop a stress projection algorithm used for enforcing this condition with a non-associative flow rule that works naturally with both implicit and explicit time integration. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on examples undergoing large deformation, collisions and topological changes necessary for producing modern visual effects.

Bio: Joseph Teran is a professor of applied mathematics at UCLA. His research is focused on numerical methods for partial differential equations arising in classical physics. This includes computational solids, computational fluids, multi-material interactions, fracture dynamics and computational biomechanics. Exciting applications include computer graphics and movie special effects at Walt Disney Animation. Professor Teran was a recipient of a 2011 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) and a 2010 Young Investigator award from the Office of Naval Research. In 2008, Discover Magazine named him one of the 50 “Best Brains in Science” which lauded him and other young scientists as “young visionaries who are transforming the way we understand the world”.

Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS) is a student aerospace engineering project at Portland State University. We're building ultra-low-cost, open source rockets that feature some of the most sophisticated amateur rocket avionics systems out there today. Our long term goal is to put a tiny satellite into orbit.

D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG, and CSS. D3’s emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework, combining powerful visualization components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation.

We will have a few people lined up to give short talks on specific parts of D3 and data visualization in general. Those who are interested in showing off the cool things they have created with D3 will have a platform to share, and hopefully the rest of us can gain some cool ideas or inspiration.

PDX OpenStack Hackathon

Bring ideas for items you want to hack on and each morning we will break out into groups to hack on them.

This is a two day unconference like sprint for openstack developers. We will focus on upstream development. At the beginning of each day we will propose topics in an unconference style and will pick things to hack on for the rest of the day.

When: March 26th and 27th, 9am - 5pm

Location: Portland; 1900 SW 4th Ave Room 8601. This is on the Portland State University campus. Lunch/food: There are a number of food carts across from the building that have delicious lunch in all dietary formats. Social events: We have not planned anything formal, but count on having a drinkup at a bar on wednesday and friday nights.

Contact [email protected] for details. Code of Conduct: http://www.openstack.org/legal/community-code-of-conduct/

PDX OpenStack Hackathon

Bring ideas for items you want to hack on and each morning we will break out into groups to hack on them.

This is a two day unconference like sprint for openstack developers. We will focus on upstream development. At the beginning of each day we will propose topics in an unconference style and will pick things to hack on for the rest of the day.

When: March 26th and 27th, 9am - 5pm

Location: Portland; 1900 SW 4th Ave Room 8601. This is on the Portland State University campus. Lunch/food: There are a number of food carts across from the building that have delicious lunch in all dietary formats. Social events: We have not planned anything formal, but will probably do something after the hack day on Thursday.

Contact [email protected] for details. Code of Conduct: http://www.openstack.org/legal/community-code-of-conduct/

Parking: The fourth avenue lot is the most proximal. Spring break will be going on so probably parking will be very easy to find. Reference:

http://www.pdx.edu/transportation/hourly-visitor-parking

Etherpad: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/pdx_hackathon_kilo

Flask is a small and easy-to-use, yet fully featured open source web framework written in Python. It is considered a micro-framework, but don't let the "micro" part fool you; Flask can do everything the others can do, many times in a simpler, leaner way. This presentation will introduce you to Flask through several examples that you can download and try.

Miguel Grinberg has over 25 years of experience as a software engineer and leads a team of engineers that develop software for the video broadcast industry. He is the author of the O'Reilly book "Flask Web Development", and blogs at http://blog.miguelgrinberg.com about a variety of topics including web development, robotics, photography, and the occasional movie review. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, four kids, two dogs, and a cat. Follow @miguelgrinberg on Twitter.

RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/python-web-development-with-flask-tickets-11668297191

ACM @ PSU

"Bitcoin is the world's first decentralized, peer-to-peer, digital currency and payment system. At its heart is an open source value-transfer protocol that facilitates currency transfers among users without relying on a trusted third party. The protocol employs provable-cryptography to prevent counterfeiting, censorship, double-spending, and account seizures.

We'll learn how the bitcoin protocol works, discuss some of its strengths and weaknesses, and dispel some common misperceptions. No prior knowledge of cryptography is required, but a basic understanding of mathematical functions (ie: surjectivity, injectivity, domains, images, preimages, etc) will be assumed."

Columbia Gorge Community College (CGCC) is looking for a full-time permanent instructor for the Computer Science program they're starting up. The instructor will be responsible for taking a lead role in developing a curriculum for the CGCC CS program, and for initially teaching most or all of that curriculum; it looks like Bart Massey will be helping out initially. There's lots of opportunities for innovation in a beautiful setting only about an hour from Portland. For more details or to apply, consult the position description.

PSU Prof. Bart Massey and Mary Kramer of CGCC would like to invite any potential candidates to a "meet-and-greet" information session at PSU. We'd like to talk with you about the proposed program and help you understand what fit there might be and how you might apply. We look forward to chatting with you about this unique opportunity!

This will be an introduction to Android Programming using Eclipse and Java with the Android SDK.

This is the first event in a series of Android programming talks which will inevitably lead to the production of a classic board game, such as Sorry!

All skill levels are welcome, and no prior Android Experience is necessary.

About the Speaker: Sean Walsh is the Chairman of the Association for Computing Machinery at Portland State University. Sean has extensive experience with User Interface design and undergraduate Artificial Intelligence programming. He is finishing his undergraduate degree in Computer Science, while concurrently taking graduate classes toward a Masters of Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence track.