The date for our next Installfest has been confirmed: Saturday, March 17th at O’Reilly Media in Sebastopol (directions).
If you are interested in attending, please pre-register on our Installfest page. If you would like to help out, please send an email to installfest[at]nblug.org. If you’d like to help promote the event, we will also have a flyer that you can print out and post in useful places (watch this space and the announce list for a link to the flyer when it is ready).
Also: In conjunction with the installfest the March General Meeting (Tues., March 13th) will be a discussion geared towards new Linux users. Watch this site and the mailing lists for more info!
As a predecessor to NBLUG’s upcoming InstallFest (Saturday, March 17th), the NBLUG Panel will be answering all of your basic Linux questions at tonight’s meeting. Topics range from multimedia (sound, video, burning, ripping), installing software, desktop managers (KDE, Gnome, et cetera), setting up printers, wifi networks, security, and much more. We will first start with the list of questions asked on our mailing list during the past weeks, and time permitting, will end with questions from the audience. Bring your friends and anybody you know who is interested in learning more about Linux for this new user-friendly talk!
The Linksys NSLU2 (Network Storage Link Unit) is a small NAS devices
(Network Attached Storage). The NSLU2 is most often referred to as the
“SLUG” by the Linux community built around it, due to the appearance of
its acronym. The NSLU2 runs Linux out of the box, due to this Linksys
was forced to release the source code under the GPL, opening it wide
open for anyone looking for a cheap/silent/small server. This talk
will cover Firmware Options, Installation of Firmware, Overclocking,
Installing a full version of Debian, and some cool uses for a “Slug”.
As a small side note, I will also show how to use Linksys’s new
Wireless G camera (WVC54G) in Linux. The talk will also feature the
Linksys WRT54G,and some related differences between it and the
“Slug”. Please leave the salt at home.
Chris will be briefly going over the history of Asterisk. He’ll discuss a few available protocols like h.323, SIP, and IAX2. He’ll go into a little more detail about IAX2 since it’s simple and has low over head. Chris will be demonstrating a simple SIP device. Then make a call from one Asterisk server to another. Maybe even a couple servers hooked to each other. Possibly a call into his home PBX that goes over a VPN tunnel.
NBLUG members are invited to call my PBX by dialing: (707)703-1982 or connecting to: guest@odunix.org with their SIP or IAX2 client.
Radio Requency Identification tags are used by Walmart and the Department of Defense to track supplies. RFID tags are also used by hospitals, prisons and schools to track people. Libraries use them to track books and soon, they’ll be in passports and maybe even on our drivers licenses. Come learn how the technology works and who’s got big plans for RFID in our big brother future.
Scott Doty from Sonic.net is going to present on how to use Kino to connect to a Sony Firewire camcorder and pull down videos, along with other interesting Kino tidbits.
Radio Requency Identification tags are used by Walmart and the Department of
Defense to track supplies. RFID tags are also used by hospitals, prisons
and schools to track people. Libraries use them to track books and soon,
they’ll be in passports and maybe even on our drivers licenses. Come learn
how the technology works and who’s got big plans for RFID in our big brother future.
As a Linux geek who always like to experiment with the latest Linux distributions and tinker around with local servers, my closet looked a lot like a used computer store. Old discarded desktops were perfect platforms to try out Linux. Now that power has gotten more expensive, I’ve replaced a lot of local machines with virtual ones, and with the introduction of VMware Server, I have all but replaced my physical test platforms for virtual ones.
In this talk NBLUG president Kyle Rankin will introduce how to install and configure the free VMware Server software and demonstrate some of its features including how to create new virtual machines, how to manage a group of VMs with the VMware console, and how to backup virtual machines.
The NBLUG panel is back and this time they will follow up their discussion of cool Linux desktop environments with cool Linux multimedia applications. Apps covered include mplayer, amarok and others.
Linux on the desktop gets more and more buzz as time goes on. In this presentation, a panel composed of NBLUG members will describe and demonstrate some of the major desktop environments/window managers available for Linux including Gnome, KDE, Fluxbox, and others.
These days most modern computers support PXE (Preboot eXecution Environment) booting—booting from the network. Booting from the network allows you to do all sorts of interesting things including setting up thin clients, automate kickstart environments and more. In this talk Kyle Rankin will discuss how to set up a PXE boot server and will cover thin clients, kickstarting computers completely over the network, PXE booting rescue discs, and how to throw it all in a menu system that lets you choose what to boot.
Sometimes it seems like as a community we take ourselves too seriously. We
run serious applications and our most important economic demographic is
large corporations with men in very expensive suits. Maybe the reason there
aren’t many Linux based home computers is that we’re all not playing enough games.
Stephen Cilley and Paul Peterson present gaming in GNU/Linux. They will
discussing several modern (and not so modern) games and bitch about ahem
… discuss the difficulty involved in their use. They will present the
modern alternatives in video cards, processors, and do their best to avoid
the holy war while discussing distribution and windows managers. They will
demonstrate the use and futility of win32 API implementations in Linux along
with native free games and native non-free games.
You might learn something, you might not, but you will have fun.
