Author: grantbow

On December 9th, 1968 a team of researchers in Menlo Park from SRI’s Augmentation Research Center put on a live, remote demo in San Francisco of their custom built computer system conceived to help solve the world’s complex, urgent problems. The capabilities they showed are still in some ways more advanced than all the marvelous technology that has come since then. The demo was later called the Mother of All Demos. Some of the firsts they showed were the mouse, chording keyset, video conferencing, and resizable computer windows.

Please join us today on the second Sunday of December at Bobby G’s Pizzeria in Berkeley from noon to three if you wish to celebrate this anniversary or just talk about anything related to Linux.

Who cares about Linux? You should. Do you use Google, Yahoo or Facebook? Do you use Windows 8? Ever flown in a plane in the US? You are trusting your data and your life to Linux every day. The Linux operating system is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) like many of the programs that run on it.

This 20th anniversary youtube story of Linux has some eye popping, validated claims. 75% of stock exchanges and 95% of supercomputers run Linux. Many TVs now use Linux internally. Every Android or iOS/Darwin phone or tablet is a unix computer.

Our berkeleylug.com group meets on the second and fourth Sundays from noon to three at Bobby G’s Pizzeria. Please join us for our meeting Sunday, Nov 25th to learn more. Happy Thanksgiving!

The Linux world stands still for no one. New releases of Fedora, Ubuntu and others are always in the works, each a unique mixture of upstream software versions and patches. It takes more than just a kernel to make an operating system. This is why each version of Linux is a little bit different even if almost all the software comes from the same sources.

Behind the scenes many people are involved in the releases, making all these parts work together smoothly. While all Linux distributions organize their own events the Ubuntu community has the most opportunities for public participation. The reason Ubuntu and Canonical was founded in 2004 by Mark Shuttleworth and his team was to create an easy-to-use Linux desktop based on Debian. For example, during the six months after an Ubuntu release the community puts on quite a range of events in a synchronized cadence. Some events are focused on helping newcomers.

As we approach the ’12 October release of Ubuntu 12.10, code name Quantal Quetzal, release parties are being planned by country and (in the US) state wide local community (LoCo) teams. Each volunteer run LoCo team participates in local events representing Ubuntu. Some teams host Ubuntu Hours. Currently the California Team hosts monthly Ubuntu Hours in San Francisco, San Jose, Mt. View, Palo Alto, Santa Cruz, Pasadena and San Diego. Volunteer team members sometimes give talks at local user groups (like BerkeleyLUG) about the new features in new releases based on the prepared release notes like these for 12.04. LoCo teams help enthusiasts collaborate with one another and are an on ramp for participation in the broader Ubuntu community. The California team holds IRC meetings every other Sunday evening at 7 PM and keeps a list of projects.

Shortly after an Ubuntu release, the next Ubuntu Developer Summit is held to plan the following release in six months. UDS-R in Copenhagen held Oct 29 – Nov 1, 2012 will plan for Ubuntu 13.04. Attendance is free and online participation are available at no charge. Travel and hotel expenses the responsibility of the attendee. Both in person and remote participation is highly encouraged. Some online IRC based events are hosted during each six month release cycle: App Developer Week, Developer week for packaging and software developers.

Global Jams are held online and in small group meetings where community members are encouraged to contribute to Ubuntu in some way of their choosing. The California Team hosted an event on Sept 7th in San Francisco at the Wikimedia Foundation offices. For full time Ubuntu developers and Canonical staff sprints are held to work together supplementing the usual remote work style.

Annual and one time events held in California and beyond include:

• SCALE February in Los Angeles
• Juju charm contest for the cloud Apr 25th
• Software Freedom Day (and wikipedia) September in many locations
• Linux Picnic August in Sunnyvale

I hope this post makes people aware of the many ways one can contribute back in some way making the operating system we use a little better. Berkeley LUG meetings continue every second and fourth Sunday each month at Bobby Gs Pizzeria from noon to three in Berkeley. Please join us this Sunday.

This is going to be a series of blog posts on trusting open source. I am first introducing some questions that newcomers ask when first trying to understand the nature and model of open source software. These questions are crucial to getting answered adequately so that people can move on to using the software. I will talk about the security and reliability of open source and then alternatives to open source.

When you think about it, how can anyone trust the open source process and the code it produces? You don’t know who is coding what is running on your computer. If you aren’t a coder you aren’t looking at the code. Why does this work so well?

Few technical folks will use something they do not understand and/or trust. For others they need to know they have someone who can answer their questions. Tim O’Reilly calls these people alpha geeks. You may call them your nephews or nieces. Since nobody is born knowing everything about technology and because it changes we all need to learn sometime.

Some people still are trying to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) about open source. These efforts have largely been shown to be specious. While science, technology engineering (somtimes art is included) and mathematics (STEM fields) is now the hot topic for the US education system, the scientific method itself seems to be under attack in some newspapers giving fact based arguments equal or less standing to conjecture.

Is open source right for you? I look forward to seeing your comments.

As a reminder for those in our area, our 4th Sunday meeting at Bobby G’s Pizzeria is going on now.

What is this? Some vendors want to lock down the new UEFI boot loader on machines they sell you. It seems Red Hat and Fedora have some arrangement with Microsoft. Our own zareason will ship all systems with UEFI Secure Boot disabled until a more workable solution is found. The story has evolved quickly.

http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/12368.html

http://boingboing.net/2012/05/31/lockdown-freeopen-os-maker-p.html

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/06/06/1232243/red-hat-clarifies-doubts-over-uefi-secure-boot-solution

Our usual second (and fourth) Sunday meeting is today too. Please join us.

They’re here! Following up an excellent January berkeleylug blog entry by goosbears, the Raspberry Pi (raspberry_pi on twitter) is a $25, tiny cheap ARM computer for kids. The $35 version has an extra USB port and built in wired ethernet. USB wifi adapters can be used with it. Just add a monitor, keyboard, mouse and network and it’s a decently powered Linux computer with headers for experimentation. It was created by a UK registered charity and is now starting to ship to the backlog of thousands of orders. Much more is known now than was in January. People are starting to put them to good use.

The demo unit we had in our booth at Maker Faire was the star of the show. People came from all over the faire to our booth in order to try out the increasingly famous Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi Foundation spoke at the Faire twice but I am not sure how many other exhibitors had one running live in their booth for people to see and use. The 1080p video we played raised some eyebrows for both the current movie trailer content as well as the strong performance of the little Raspberry Pi.

The North Bay LUG will be hosting a talk June 12th in Sebastopol by Allan Cecil on this incredible little computer. We are finalizing arrangements for a Raspberry Pi speaker for the Bay Area LUG on June 19th in San Francisco.

Since it’s only a printed circuit board (PCB) some additional parts are required to use one. I’ve seen some cool thingiverse 3D printed cases for these small computers. I need to get to noisebridge.net during an appropriate introductory event with the downloaded patterns and make my first 3D printed item on their rep-raps.

Debian is the recommended Linux distribution with Arch and QtonPi also available. Fedora is also supported. Unfortunately Ubuntu does not run on it because it is an ARM v6 board and Ubuntu currently only autobuilds for ARM v7.

A local nonprofit, Partimus, provides repurposed hardware and open source software to schools in San Francisco and Oakland. Full disclosure: one of the hats I wear is as a Partimus Director. We are taking suggestions for how to make best use of a donated Raspberry Pi from james2_0. Keep your eyes on the comments for what we decide to do with it.

Eben gives us the scoop in this Make Faire video.

//www.viddler.com/embed/79adb98a/?f=1&offset=22.288&autoplay=0&secret=76752710&disablebranding=0&view_secret=76752710

The btrfs is a new Linux copy-on-write filesystem that will replace ext4. As the author of ext4, Theodore Ts’o agrees this is the right direction. The new filesystem is pronounced as either "butter F S", "better F S" or "B-tree F S".

The main site is hosted by kernel.org.
The biggest problem I heard about was that a user space tool was missing, however that was released in Feb, 2012 for use by sysadmins and Linux distributions.

https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Getting_started#Enterprise_distributions_with_btrfs_support
Two distributions support it right now, Oracle (where btrfs is developed) and openSUSE. This Chris Mason video recorded April 2012 provides a current overview of the filesystem’s status.

We hope you have enjoyed our regular meetings at Bobby G’s in Berkeley on the second and fourth Sunday of each month. Our next meeting is May 27th. We also talked to an incredibly fun group of faire goers about Bay Area Linux all weekend at Maker Faire May 19th & 20th.