Greetings,

We have been unable to meet due to COVID-19 restrictions and I hope all are well. I’d like to announce that we’ll be doing an online general meeting on Tuesday, November 10th at 7 PM PST in order to attend to our board elections. Our scribe, Frank, will be handling the election process and will shortly send out nomination instructions. A meeting link will follow.

We have not had any speakers come forward since the COVID-19 restrictions started and we do not currently have a talk scheduled so for the moment this is a meeting to handle elections. Our talk email list remains open for conversing, as does our #nblug channel on Freenode Libera.Chat IRC. Thanks,

A.C.
President, North Bay Linux Users’ Group

We keep hearing that Android is based on a modified form of Linux. What does that actually mean? What are these modifications? How does the Android system above the kernel compare to a traditional GNU/Linux system?

There’s plenty of information available about Android from a user or app developer’s perspective, so let’s skip that. Instead, we’ll look at Android’s overall architecture, and see what’s interesting from the point of view of a Linux system administrator or Gentoo hacker.

Lightning Talks: Have something you would like to present, but don’t have enough material for a full talk? Here’s your chance. Talk about anything Linux related.

Hackfest: Bring your hardware or software project to get help with it or just to show it off. A mix of free tech support, show-and-tell, and idle chat.

If you have been programming within the last twenty years or so, you may have heard of Ada and the Department of Defense language that seemed to have flopped and so many people loathed and eventually failed in minds of many programmers. Yet in contrast, you may have come through the university on the Pascal track with fond memories. Ada, brings with it its Pascal influence and has continued to march forward. Or, maybe you saw the video of a C-130J transport plane doing a full loop operating on fly by wire flight controls. Whatever it is, Ada has marched forward and has been making strides in the field of secure software programming. Brian will talk about the use of SPARK/Ada using contracts and Ada’s static software analyzer relative to secure software programming. Second, he will talk about learning Ada using JGrasp and the available learning resources.

Brian Lavender has been a long time GNU/Linux hacker with a passion for secure software programming. His day job is doing Java development for the Bureau of Real Estate Appraisers (Department of Consumer Affairs for State of California). He also teaches at Sac State as a part time lecturer teaching Programming Methodologies and Concepts II.

Lightning Talks: Have something you would like to present, but don’t have enough material for a full talk? Here’s your chance. Talk about anything Linux related.

Hackfest: Bring your hardware or software project to get help with it or just to show it off. A mix of free tech support, show-and-tell, and idle chat.

Partying: OK, so we don’t have prior permission to throw a holiday party at Sonic, but they’ve been extremely generous to us as our host this year and we can quietly leave the folks that matter a few kind notes thanking them for their support. I said partying as a ruse but I really mean sharing some holiday cheer. Who’s with me?

Mike Higgins will give a presentation:

I am looking at upgrading or replacing my old tired servers. One possibility is to replace them with small, nimble, low power systems. I have experimented with a Raspberry Pi, a converted “Thin Client” and a “Mini PC”. All three of these would fit in a shoebox with room for a dozen more. (I’ll bring the shoebox to the meeting for show-and-tell). A stack of them would use about as much power while running as an old server tower uses when it is turned off. I’ll talk a little about my major use of these servers (implementing land in the Open Simulator game) but I’ll talk mostly about my trials and tribulations of getting Ubuntu to run on these small but powerful computers. I know just enough about Linux system administration to be dangerous to myself, so if someone jumps up at the meeting to tell me how stupid I am and how I did everything wrong, I will be overjoyed to hear the correct way to set these up.

Following the presentation we will hold our annual elections. Nominations are currently open on the talk list.

Ever had a system die and then have to piece together what was running on it? Have need to setup a new system in the cloud, or locally that’s just like (or only similar to) an existing system? You have a need for “Infrastructure as Code”. Robert Thille will give an overview of the various software systems for managing a few or a fleet of systems and focus on using Ansible for managing a system or two for personal use.

setenforce enforcing: what SELinux is, why you should use it, and how to make it go.

Lightning Talks: Have something you would like to present, but don’t have enough material for a full talk? Here’s your chance. Talk about anything Linux related.

Hackfest: Bring your hardware or software project to get help with it or just to show it off. A mix of free tech support, show-and-tell, and idle chat.

Yes, this title has been used before but it’s probably still true; JACK is something that most people honestly don’t know but have possibly heard about. Think of JACK as the most powerful audio routing tool you’ve ever seen. When combined with other tools like Ardour it can be a powerful multitrack recording companion. You can connect MIDI devices in unique ways and make a virtual piano with QSynth.

This talk is specifically targeted at users who are unfamiliar with JACK and Digital Audio Workstations but includes some fun advanced topics as I’ll be bringing an 18 channel Behringer XR18 sound board and some other fun toys to show off how it works with JACK. This talk will primarily be focused on a live demo with ample Q&A opportunities.

NixOS is a fully declarative Linux distribution. All system state is precisely described by a handful of configuration files that can be easily backed up or duplicated across machines. The packaging system features fully atomic upgrades and rollbacks, and allows multiple versions of a package to coexist.

A fantastic talk from a local speaker was just on the cusp of being announced when the speaker fell ill. What to do? Why, come hang out and chit chat in the lunch room instead of course — our old standby lightning talks and hackfest returns for a second month in a row out of necessity. Stay tuned for next month’s talk announcement which should be solid and thanks for the flexibility.

Lightning Talks: Have something you would like to present, but don’t have enough material for a full talk? Here’s your chance. Talk about anything Linux related.

Hackfest: Bring your hardware or software project to get help with it or just to show it off. A mix of free tech support, show-and-tell, and idle chat.