Notes from CentraLUG, 4-Oct-2010, Patent Absurdity

[Ted Roche]

Five people attended the October meeting of the Central NH Linux User
Group[9], an affiliated chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User
Group[8]. We met at the NHTI Library, Room 146.

We had an attendee with a tech support question we weren't able to
answer on the spot, but gave him some resources to pursue. He was
plugging his camera into his Ubuntu  machine, and he wanted to set the
mount point to be a fixed mount point rather that something dynamically
created by dbus. He made some changes, but wasn't sure of exactly what
he had changed, and the device no longer appears when he plugs it in. It
does appear on other machines, Linux Mint and Windows, so the device is
unlikely to be broken. No one present was sure where the settings might
be stored for this. We suggested joining the gnhlug-discuss list [6] as
well as the support forums provided by Ubuntu Linux [7]. I look forward
to some of our experts helping our friend out.

I let folks know that I've reserved the room for November and December.
After that, we'll likely start meeting with the ManchLUG group, unless
someone else wants to keep running meetings in Concord. We reviewed the
GNHLUG wiki for upcoming meetings. Especially noted were the upcoming
DLSLUG meeting "About Lisp -or- Lambda, the Ultimate Lecture, presented
by Yoni Rabkin" [3] and the New Hampshire High Tech Council's [4]
TechWorld 2010 [5] conference ($25 - $210) coming up next Thursday and
Friday. We discussed the idea that a nicer-looking forum software, like
Drupal, would be nice to implement on the GNHLUG site, and talked about
the past efforts to do that, and some of the challenged past projects
have run into.

We mentioned that there's a effort to create a community-driven site to
support and distribute a new fork to OpenOffice.org named LibreOffice
[10]. Some of the other projects involved in the MySQL - Sun - Oracle
mergers have been making interesting news as well.

Thanks to Dave Rose for providing the projector. We used a Live USB
version of Fedora 14 beta which shipped last week [1] and saw a pretty
remarkable "It Just Works" effect: plugging in the running ThinkPad (a
T61, 1680x1050,  with an nVidia controller), the open source nouveau
driver recognized the Sharp projector and automatically reconfigured the
display (1400x1050) for side-by-side ("twinview") layout with the
internal screen. No xrandr, no rebooting of the machine! Wow. We brought
up the Gnome display properties dialog and moved them around and finally
settled on a mirrored display for the main presentation. This is a huge
time saver and convenience for doing presentations!

Our main presentation was a viewing of the documentary, "Patent
Absurdity, How software patents broke the system" [2] and a discussion
afterwards on what you can do (contact your Congress-person, contribute
to organizations, etc.). Everyone learned something from the show, and
perhaps from the discussion afterwards.

Thanks to all for attending to Dave for providing the projector, and to
NHTI for providing the facilities!


[1]
http://press.redhat.com/2010/09/28/fedora-14-beta-emerges-with-latest-in-open-source-software/
[2] http://patentabsurdity.com/
[3] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.linux.gnhlug/20351
[4] http://www.nhhtc.org
[5] http://techworld2010.com/
[6]
http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/MailingLists#General_Discussion_gnhlug_discus
[7] http://www.ubuntu.com/support
[8] http://gnhlug.org
[9]http://www.centralug.org
[10]
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/your-office-saved-openofficeorg-forked

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