The meeting will start with lightning talks (5-10 minute presentations), which will be followed by a general round table discussion of Linux.

Anyone wishing to give a lightning talk should sign-up at the beginning of the meeting, and the projector will be available for anyone who needs it.

This unique talk will cover the NAND part of the open source http://nand2tetris.org/ project, which has an aim of showing how to build a general-purpose computer system from the ground up. This talk will take advantage of the Nand2Tetris hardware simulator running under Linux to delve into how NAND gates alone can be used to build other logic gates and complex circuits. The talk’s focus and depth will be driven by audience feedback and will range from physical gate construction and logic gate simulation to the Nand2Tetris project’s end educational goals.

This meeting will be comprised of two presentations.

1. Introduction to the BeagleBone: an ARM based development board running Linux - by Jezra Lickter

2. NTP - Network Time Protocol: How it works and how to use it to properly synchronize your computer’s clock to an internet time server - by Frank Ball

You used to install Linux with floppy disks or CD-ROM. If you have a lot of servers, want to live in the 21st century, or just don’t feel like getting up from your desk you should abandon that approach in favor of PXE booting over the network. In this talk Kyle will give an introduction to how PXE and kickstart/preseed installations work and follow up with how to adapt Debian and Ubuntu’s preconfigured PXE menus to create your own custom nice-looking PXE menu installer.

NBLUG’s yearly elections will be held on 2012-11-13. For more information on the positions open, see the Elected Officers section of https://nblug.org/bylaws.

After the election is concluded we will have time allotted for lightning talks followed by the announcements of the election result. The remainder of the night will be a hackfest with rumors of a possible code sprint happening.

In this talk Kyle will talk about DNS, the boogeyman in the network troubleshooting world, and explain not only how to tell when DNS isn’t the cause of your problems, but also dive into DNS troubleshooting so you’ll know for sure when it’s to blame. Kyle will cover troubleshooting techniques aimed at the entire DevOps organization. DevOps-style collaboration is great for rapidly developing and deploying software, and when you apply those techniques to troubleshooting, problem solving gets the same benefits.

This is a short talk describing an algorithmic error made by the speaker when writing code to draw some geometric objects on paper. Most of the objects displayed just fine, but some were shifted to wrong places on the page. Finding the cause of the problem was a bit of a mystery until an “Ah ha” event occurred. No sophisticated experience with graphics programming is required of the audience. The main ingredients are scaling and translation, rather basic operations which are explained in the talk.

Instead of a regular speaker, this month we are going to do a hackfest. Like the previous hackfest we will take half of the meeting to conduct lightning talks from the first four people who sign up for one. After that we will spend the rest of the time in a more loosely-structured social setting where everyone can show each other what they have been working on or ask for help. This would be a good meeting to bring your computers.

Also this month we invite you to bring any computer hardware you think other members might be interested in for a hardware swap.

With ongoing court case battles, like with Oracle v. Google, it brings to mind: what is patentable? How did we get to this point? How can legitimate, well-intended inventors work within a legal minefield? This talk explores the breadth and history of patent law. Particularly, the talk focuses on software and software-related patents.

A Raspberry Pi is a low power $35 Linux PC the size of a deck of cards with powerful features including hardware-accelerated h.264 video playback at 1080p. In this talk, Allan will present an overview of the educational mission of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, available hardware variants and accessories, precompiled Linux distributions, and a live demo including a demonstration of XBMC playing back HD video.

I’ll be covering IPv6 basics and using IPv6 on Linux. You can get a 6to4 tunnel and start using IPv6 now, you don’t need to wait for your ISP. How to set up IPv6 networking. How to make some common services work with IPv6.

Kyle just got a 3d printer and loves show and tell. In this talk Kyle will give an overview of 3d printers and then dive into how to get started with 3d printers on Linux. He’ll cover some of the different software choices for firmware, slicing, and overall printer control and also discuss printer calibration, ABS vs. PLA plastic, and some of the 3d printer options out there today. He might even risk a live demo.