2002.08.06 Meeting Notes

News

• Job - Michael Dunham of Kestrel Works

• LinuxWorld Conference and Expo next week - August 12-15 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. Some members of LUGOD are carpooling on Thursday. Post to LUGOD's "vox" list if you're looking for (or can offer) a ride. See www.linuxworldexpo.com for more.

• Picn*x 11 - Linux Picnic - SVLUG, LUGOD, EBLUG and sbay.org are holding a free Linux Picnic and Barbecue to celebrate Linux's 11th birthday. August 17th (the Saturday following LinuxWorld) in Sunnyvale. RSVP required. Food is free. See www.linuxpicnic.org

• Linux Weekly News (lwn.net) calls it quit. They ran out of funding, and decided against running on a volunteer basis.

• The House of Representatives has voted overwhelmingly to create a life imprisonment punishment for malicious hackers.

• Larry Ellison (CEO of Oracle) says the US should use more databases.

• Forgent seeking licensing revenue for use of JPEGs!

• Yahoo! admits to intentionally mangling e-mail. In an attempt to curb viruses, "java" becomes "coffee," "eval" (a JavaScript keyword) becomes "review." Hence, "medieval" became "medireview" and "evaluate" became "reviewuate"!!!

• Yale accuses Princeton of hacking. Complained to FBI over 18 unauthorized accesses to their admissions office computers. Princeton admits the breakins, and claims they just wanted to "know how secure the Yale system was"...

• ACLU targets DMCA, on behalf of a 22-year-old programmer who evaluates Internet security software. DMCA is so broad, that it interferes with researchers' ability to evaluate software.

• Kernel 2.5.58 released - major rewrite of IRQ system, and major PowerPC and Motorola 68000 updates. 2.4.19 released - tons of changes.

• UK goes Open Source. "Office of Government Commerce" mandates all IT deployments where interoperability is an issue must use Open Source and open specifications.

• Debian Woody goes stable. Happy 3rd birthday!

• PHP 4.2.0 and 4.2.1 have a DoS vulnerability on x86, and full remote compromise on Solaris.

• Norway canecelled an exclusive contract with Microsoft, because of the monopoly it gave them over government office software.

• MS finally admits Linux's "Total Cost of Ownership" (TCO) is NOT more expensive than Windows. MS's new stance is "it costs more because it's worth more."

• Forbes recently ran an article stating "Linix is here to stay."

• Largest Linux cluster announced by "Linux Networx." 1920 2.4GHz XEONs were sold to Lawrence Livermore National Labs. It's in the top 5 fastest supercomputers in the world.

• USA Today reports on Linux, citing recent adopters of Linux for mission-critical servers: Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Oracle, First Boston, Reuters News Service, Disney, Dreamworks, Pixar, France, England, Spain, Singapore, US military and intelligence, China's postal system, and Germany's ministry of the interior.

• AOL is creating a Linux client!

• AOL discovers pop-up ads make users unhappy. Removing pop-up ads makes users happy.

Project Reports

• Demo - The last demo was July 20th. Along with our Demo box, we also had a Sharp Zaurus and a PlayStation2 running Linux! Since there was no demand, we didn't end up using the Co-Op's conference room for lectures. Our next demo will be this Saturday, August 10th from 3:15pm to 5:30pm.

• Installfests - Our last Installfest was on July 21st. For the first time in a long time, we had more installers than installees. The LUGOD demo box was brought and used as a Debian mirror. We were also able to get networking, which helped immensely! The next Installfest will be on August 18th.

• LERT - No LERT news.

• Library - Jim Lowman donated a copy of Slackware 8.1, 'The Linux Bible (4th ed.),' 'Slackware Linux Installation / Getting Started,' and 'Linux: The Complete Reference (7th ed.)'!

Other Business

• California 4-H Presentation - Handouts are made, and the speakers will meet one more time to decide who will do which parts of the talk. (The event is Saturday, August 10th)

• Class with DCN - No news. We should look into holding more classes on our own, as well.

• Financial Report - $19.79 in voluntary dues were collected.

Presentation

• Stephen Helms brought a Sparc Ultra 5 running Linux, a PC running Linux and Windows, and a Macintosh running MacOS 8 to do a talk on "Networking Linux in a Heterogenous Environment." Topics included VNC, Samba, Cygwin, Putty, SSH, remote X, Netatalk and AFS, NFS, and more!

  Presentation notes are available

Attendance

• Bill Kendrick
• Melissa Hardenbrook
• Stephen Helms
• Tim Tyler
• Evan
• Joel Baumert
• Amada
• Mark Holmes
• Andy Campbell
• Steven
• Alexandra Thorn
• Jeremiah Armstrong
• Hans
• Rusty Minden
• Marc Hasbrouck
• Jim Lowman
• Richard Harkey
• Ryan Castelluci
• Pete Salzman
• Rod Roark
• Jeff Defay
• Nicole Carlson
• Mike Dunham
• Jeff Newmiller
• Cordell Newmiller
• Daphne Pareas
• Foo Lim
• Mike Simons
• Karsten Self
• Cheuk Wong
• Erik Schultz
• Christine Scobee
• Dave
• Dick
• ...and two others

Photos:

• Photos of this meeting.