This month we’ll have a talk about how to get Linux installed on a Sun Microsystems box with a SPARC CPU in it. What’s different from a PC? Why on earth would you want to do this? Those questions and more. Oh - and we’ll possibly even have a box that you can get your hands on.

The Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS) is a web-based software application designed to help voter protection organizations identify and respond to situations preventing voters from voting or from having their votes recorded as intended. Taking back our democracy with grass root actions!

This talk will cover the issues at stake, identify the problems that needed to be solved, provide solutions and tips for these issues as well as a live demonstration of the EIRS system.

The technology up for discussion will focus on how we designed, created, and maintain the EIRS back end systems. Including (buzzwords abound!): Distributed Denial of Service/Denial Of Service protection, SSL session key load balancing/distribution, high availability database clustering/replication/load balancing/fail-over, round robin DNS, geographically distinct server locations, centralized monitoring/management, managed firewall policies, hardware RAID, revision controlled/synchronized configuration files, off-site backup systems, custom benchmarking tools, disaster planning, safe semi-automatic system updating, host integrity checking software and discussions of how to compartmentalize security. All of this is achieved with a standard common platform of Debian Gnu/Linux.

Key system elements included: Debian Gnu/Linux with the 2.6 Linux kernel series, Apache2, PHP, MySQL, perl, dist-cache, shorewall, stunnel, sshd, samhain, cvs, djbdns, hardware RAID and many others.

All of these technologies power our EIRS system. It’s built with custom modifications to existing GPL software. Our changes are released back to or by working with each community (of course).

Knoppix is a complete Linux distribution that runs directly from a bootable “live CD” allowing you to run Linux on any PC you happen to be in front of.

Kyle has recently finished a book for O’Reilly, Knoppix Hacks, and his talk will provide an introduction for people who are new to the Knoppix live CD distribution, as well as talk a bit about the features in the new Knoppix installer, and how to use Knoppix to repair other Linux systems.

Matt will be talking about using Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP/Python (LAMP) on Yellow Dog Linux, TerraSoft’s Fedora-like Linux distribution for the Mac architecture.

When the opportunity arose for me to borrow some old hardware from my office, I jumped at it in hopes of running my own webserver from home. I was allowed to use a Mac PowerPC. Naturally, I looked into Linux on the Mac architecture and, fearing Debian, decided to try out Terrasoft’s Yellow Dog Linux. I plan to speak on how it was I came to install YDL on decade-old machine and my experiences with running LAMP on it.

1. ipod on linux
2. General overview of ipod on linux
3. Cover connecting the ipod to linux (ieee1394/scsi interfaces)
4. Interface programs available for use with an ipod on linux
5. Other options provided for the ipod and linux.
6. linux on the ipod.
7. General overview of linux on the ipod
8. How to not void your warranty
9. Step through backing up the ipod and factory settings
10. Do an install and compile of ucLinux kernel
11. Cover different options now available on your ipod
12. Show how to restore the factory ipod software incase of servicing.

This month we have a really awesome and informative talk from Paul Stagnoli; who will be telling is about Drupal, an open source content management system.

I am planning on talking about wireless tools.

I plan on covering Kismet and if I have time, I will also cover some bluetooth stuff.

So if you have ever wanted to map your local wireless networks to a vector map with street names, or you want to superimpose SSIDs on a photo of your state from space, feel free to join us.

Autofs is a kernel option that lets you automatically mount filesystems on your computer when you access them, and then automatically umount them when they are no longer used.

When I was trying to figure out the best way to set up my removable usb drive, I ended up stumbling upon autofs as an excellent solution. After realizing the potential of it, and how configurable it is, I started setting it up to manage other mountpoints on my system. In this talk, I will discuss everything I set up, and how, including dynamically mounted cdroms, usb drives (including cameras), smb, ftp, and ssh mountpoints.

We’ll cover: getting your pictures off the camera with gphoto2 and gtkam; checking them out with gqview; preparing them for the web with imagemagicks’ all-powerful ‘convert’ utility; and displaying them on the web with packages such as webmagick and Gallery. Taking decent pictures will NOT be covered.

There are problems with many mainstream Linux Distributions. One of these problems is the lack of support for users to install encrypted filesystem during the initial installation process.

Jake will offer us a review of what he has been able to create to help with this process.

With the current changes that Red Hat has made to their licensing, and all of the hype and backlash as a result, many people are looking around for a new distribution. In this talk we will give an overview of a few contenders, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Debian, and Mandrake, and discuss their respective strengths and weaknesses.

Tony Stubblebine (author of the O’Reilly Regular Expression Pocket Reference) is to give a talk on using regular expressions under Linux. The talk will likely cover things like some basic grep and vi/emacs regular expressions.

Unix Regex Toolbox: Tony Stubblebine is going to rummage through his Regex Toolbox. Every day, regular expressions save him time and sanity by diverting spam, controlling Apache, and searching, organizing, and formatting reams of data. Regular expressions aren’t just for programmers. They’ve moved from the shell to the editor to the database to nearly every major Linux application. Tony will pull out his favorite vim, shell, MySQL, Apache, and procmail tools, tips, and tricks.

And he’ll have some schwag: a shirt, a mug, and two copies of his book, Regular Expression Pocket Reference.