Notes from CentraLUG, 2 Aug 2010: Joseph Smith and coreboot.org

[Ted Roche]

Nine people attended the August meeting of the Central NH Linux User
Group[1], held at the Hopkinton Town Library [2] on August 2nd. Joseph
Smith presented some information on the Coreboot[3] project, had some
hardware to show off, and had a lot of insights into the workings not
only of the machines but of the vendors in the space.

We had a couple of announcements, mentioning upcoming meetings on the
gnhlug.org web site. We had a round of introductions. We then asked for
questions, announcements, job searches or job postings, etc. One
attendee had a problem with having Ubuntu insisting it was updating grub
with newer kernels, but the kernels were never appearing in the menu.
The group had several very good suggestions to follow up on, including
the suggestion to join the -discuss mailing list [4] for more help and
support.

I mentioned that the CentraLUG is affiliated with several publishers who
offer discounts on their books (see [1]), and that InformIT/Pearson
Education (Addison-Wesley, Cisco Press, IBM Press, Prentice-Hall, Que,
Sams) sends out a newsletter and holds a monthly user group
contest/raffle for good stuff on their web site [5].

Finally, Joseph Smith got to do his presentation. You can find his
slides here: [9]. Joe is an AS400 Administrator for a local well-known
retailer's headquarters, but had always enjoyed tinkering with hardware.
It was frustrating to find that set-top boxes and other devices were
restricted in what they could do (or run) due to defective or
proprietary locked-in BIOSes. He was delighted to find the coreboot
project and has been contributing ever since. Joe attended NHTI to
polish up his software skills and earn a certificate. He brought along
several boxes to show us what he was working on. He talked about the
sequence of events that occur within the BIOS and how coreboot can
replace them. He demonstrated booting a machine with a serial console
and minicom  monitoring a fully-verbose debugging session. He talked
about the issues with getting coreboot running on a new machine, how
vendors cooperated and contributed to the project (or not!) and the
problems with turning a BIOS chip into a brick and how to recover. It
was a fun and interesting presentation.

Thanks to Joe for his presentation, to Bill Sconce for supplying the
projector, and to the Hopkinton Town Library for use of the great
facilities. Note that CentraLUG will not have a September meeting due to
the Labor Day holiday (come on up and see the Hopkinton State Fair [7]!)
but plans to meet in October, November and December at the NHTI Library.
Stay tuned for announcements.


[1] http://www.centralug.org
[2] http://www.hopkintontownlibrary.org
[3] http://www.coreboot.org
[4] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
[5] http://www.informit.com/user_groups/index.aspx
[6]
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/how-to-configure-sendmail-to-use-gmail-as-smtp-server-802815/
[7] http://www.hsfair.org/
[8] Announcement:
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.linux.gnhlug/20095
[9] http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/IntroToCoreboot

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


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