DLSLUG Notes, 6-Sept-2007: ATTACK of the Nifties!!!

[Ted Roche]

Bill McGonigle hosted the September meeting the Dartmouth - Lake Sunapee
Linux User Group [1], held as usual on the first Thursday of the month,
but at a different location: the Dartmouth Regional Technology
Center[2]. Seven members attended.

The night was announced as "Nifties:" short presentations that hope to
elicit from the audience just that reaction. Everyone present had
something to show off:

I showed the S5 (Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System) developed by
Eric Meyer of CSS fame [3]. S5 used standards-compliant CSS, JavaScript
and XHTML to generate a slide show with keyboard shortcuts, drop-down
slide lists, handout and slideshow formats, additional notes and more.
Free as in speech, free as in beer. Nifty!

Bill McGonigle showed off pfSense, following up on a blog entry he had
written [4]. pfSense is a spin-off of monowall, the xBSD-based firewall
program. Bill talked about how to configure it off a read-only CR, with
a small (512k) USB fob holding the configuration file, running diskless
on an older computer. The web interface was pretty slick, rich and
intuitive, and exposed a huge number of options. Nifty!

Adam showed off some work he had been doing with WebSphere Community
Edition [C] (aka Apache Geronimo [D]) and a commercial add-on that
provided VT-400 terminal emulation via Java and a browser, to access
some legacy machines he needs to maintain. Nifty!

I mentioned that TheOpenCD [5], september 2007 edition was out and
available via BitTorrent. We talked about some of the neat software on
the disk. PDFCreator seemed most popular, but OpenOffice and WinSCP got
good mentions, too. Nifty.

We did NOT mention the OpenEducationCD [6], a spin-off project, but that
got mention at last week's GNHLUG Board of Director's meeting.

We talked quite a bit about the OLPC project [7] and I showed off one of
the videos available on the RedHat site [8] to great acclaim. Not just
"Nifty!" but "I want to work there!!!" There are more videos here: [9]
[A] and [B]

Many interesting side discussions, too. Sorry if you missed it; it was a
fun night.


[1] http://www.dlslug.org
[2] http://www.den.dartmouth.edu/drtc/index.htm
[3] http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/
[4] http://blog.bfccomputing.com/articles/2007/08/02/pfsense-intervention
[5] http://www.theopencd.org
[6] http://www.theopencd.org/education
[7] http://laptop.org/
[8] http://www.redhat.com/v/magazine/ogg/070321_olpc.ogg
[9] http://www.redhat.com/v/ogg/olpc02Final.ogg
[A] http://www.redhat.com/v/magazine/ogg/olpcEp03.ogg
[B] http://www.redhat.com/v/magazine/ogg/olpcEp04.ogg
[C] http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/zones/was/wasce.html
[D] http://geronimo.apache.org/
-- 
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com