Notes from CentraLUG, 6-October-2008

[Ted Roche]

Eight people attended our October meeting of the Central New Hampshire
Linux User Group, held as usual on the first Monday of the month, at the
New Hampshire Technical Institute's Library, Room 146, at 7 PM.

We had the usual round of announcements. I had a 'hot off the presses'
set of Apress Fall/Winter 2008 catalogs to pass around, including the
half-page feature of the GNHLUG group as the highlighted user group. I
mentioned the many discounts UG members can get through the various
publishers, especially Apress, O'Reilly and Pearson. As usual, I plugged
the gnhlug.org web site as the place to get the event calendar, and we
reviewed some of the upcoming events, like the SwaNH infoeXchange
and MonadLUG's MySQL meeting tomorrow, the NEAR-Fest the following two
days, and some of the interesting upcoming meetings. Keep an eye on the
calendar and subscribe to the announcement list for future meetings.

Arc Riley was the main presenter. A newcomer to New Hampshire, Arc was
previously active in a FOSS group in Ithaca, NY, and is an active
contributor to several Open Source projects, including PySoy (which he
demoed a few months ago at PySIG). He's also an active member of the New
Hampshire Ubuntu Local Community organization ("Loco"), which is working
its way to formal approval as a Loco with the Ubuntu organization.
Activities such as the Software Freedom Day activism last month and
presentations at the LUG count towards this recognition.

Arc had a presentation on the upcoming version of Ubuntu, 8.10
(Year.Month) due out at the end of the month, code-named Intrepid Ibex.
A list of new features can be seen on the web site [1] and Arc reviewed
them briefly and then demonstrated several of them, including:

Gnome 2.2.4., X.org 7.4, Guest session, Network Manager 0.7, and more.

We also got to break it a bit, perhaps, by testing to see if a USB
device plugged in when the Guest user was active would be readable, and
whether there would be any security implications to that. The USB
subsystem seemed a bit unresponsive, and poking in the logs revealed
that some of the other devices on the bus, like the webcam, weren't
natively recognized (Arc hadn't added drivers yet) so it was possible
the subsystem was unavailable. Did we mention it was a beta? Beta test
reports are welcomed by the Ubuntu team, as they hope to release a final
product at the end of the month.

We got to talk a bit about Ubuntu and the community behind it, the
philosophy surround the distribution, and the activities of the Loco,
including pictures from SFD 2008 [2], which included a Wookie, balloons,
a penguin, Ben Scott and lots of geeks promoting Linux. Ben was heckled
in absentia at the CentraLUG meeting.

The next meeting of CentraLUG will be on Monday, November 3rd, the day
before what may be the most important election of our time (vote early,
vote often!) with a topic TBD, but at the same place and time. Stay
tuned for announcements and updates!

Thanks to Arc for presenting, to Bill for the projector, to Nikki for
the transportation, to the New Hampshire Technical Library for the
facilities and to all for attending and participating!


[1] http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/intrepid/beta
[2] http://flickr.com/photos/nikkiana/sets/72157607400431972/?page=2

-- 

Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com