2004.04.19 Meeting Notes

News

• Open Source Risk Management LLC says they cannot find SCO copyright violations in the 2.4 or 2.6 kernels. Offer indemnification on legal costs, and offers insurance.
• Earthlink found an average or 28 pieces of spyware on the typical PC. (Apparently, though, this includes cookies. Not counting those, it's only 7 pieces). This differs from a recent study by a university that found spyware on one out of every 20 PCs.
• SuSE is apparently upset at RedHat for 'backporting' parts of the 2.6 kernel into the 2.4 version they ship.
• XOrg releases their own X11 server (based on XFree86 4.4), and opens membership and elections
• Bill Kendrick's KDE talk (from the last LUGOD meeting) was mentioned on Slashdot!
• Novell has begun migrating their employee's desktops to Linux
• Mandrake 10.0 is out; it's apparently their first to have undergone quality assurance by the Open Source community
• Lindows is now called Linspire
• Samsung is using Linux in more embedded projects
• The Crepe Bistro in downtown Davis (where LUGOD used to meet after meetings) closed a while back. A new restaurant recently opened in its place: the Thai Bistro
• BALUG meets tomorrow. PostgreSQL talk.
• RoseLUG meets next Monday. Debian.
• DCN will be holding a class on Open Source applications on May 6th.

Project Reports

• Demo - The last demo was last Saturday, April 17th, from 2pm to 6pm at the Davis Food Co-Op. Mike Simons and Daphne Pareas set up the new (Mini-ITX) LUGOD demo machine and a CRT monitor, and Jonathan Stickel brought a laptop running Gentoo. Bill Kendrick and Jonathan staffed the booth. There was more activity this time, compared to last month. We handed out all 10 copies of Knoppix that were recently burned for LUGOD by Tim Riley, as well as numerous handouts and a copy of GNUWinII. $3 was donated for a copy of Knoppix.

• Installfests - The last Installfest was yesterday, Sunday April 18th. Unfortunately, due to Picnic Day on Saturday, the key to Room 1131 couldn't be tracked down, so we used the lobby, and took advantage of tables that were still out from Picnic Day. The IF was small, with only half of the installees, and half of the volunteers showing up. The next IF should be Saturday, May 15th. We should be able to hold it at UC Davis again.

• LERT - No report.

• Library - Henry House mentioned that his ISP changed some settings, and he was not receiving email for a short time. If you contacted him previously regarding checking out a book, please try again!

Other Business

• Whole Earth Festival - We have our Festival ID Number. Trevor Lango has offered to be LUGOD's Point-of-Contact with the WEF staff on Saturday and Sunday. WEF hours will be 12pm-6pm on Friday May 7th, and 9am-6pm on Saturday and Sunday May 8th and 9th.

• Government Technology Conference - Mike Simons has been asked by GTC to call them regarding LUGOD getting a booth there. He will do that early this week.

• CheapBytes - LUGOD has contacted CheapBytes to see if they offer discounts to non-profits. They said that, at a quantity of 500 or more, they can offer us professionally-pressed discs for $0.59 each. We are considering making an order of Knoppix and GNUWinII or TheOpenCD discs to hand out at WEF and GTC (assuming we go). We're also considering either a bootable Linux disc, or (more likely) a collection of Open Source software, for Macintosh, since WEF gets a large number of Mac users.

• CD Burns - Tim Allis donated 300 blank CDRs to LUGOD on Saturday. 100 were given to Mikal Saltveit, and 100 were given to Trevor Lango, to burn some of the above-mentioned ISOs. We will discuss it more on the mailing lists.

• Davis Community Meals - LUGOD has contacted Davis Community Meals to see if they would be interested in some newer hardware, and switching their current software to Open Source. (They're currently running Windows98 and Microsoft Office.) Bill Kendrick and Trevor Lango (and anyone else who is interested) will be meeting with DCM's Bill Pride next Tuesday, April 27th, at 4pm. (Probably at DCM on H Street.) Trevor has offered to manage this project.

• Officer Nominations - Officer nominations closed at tonight's meetings.
  • Ryan Castellucci, Hans Uhlig, Emily Stumpf and Doug Barbieri have been nominated for President (root).
  • Mike Simons was nominated for Vice President (sys).
  • Henry House was nominated (but has not confirmed acceptance yet!) for Treasurer (/dev/null)
  • Daphne Pareas was nominated for Secretary (typescript).
  Since VP, Treasurer and Secretary were running unopposed, the attendance at last night's meeting was asked if there were any objections to them taking their positions. There were none, so Mike Simons remains Vice President, Henry House (assuming he accepts) remains Treasurer, and Daphne Pareas has taken over Stephen Matthew Helms' position as Secretary.

  Voting for president will take place online between the end of tonight's meeting and the just before the beginning of our next meeting (Tuesday, May 4th).

• Financial Report - $14.40 in voluntary dues were collected.

Presentation

• Steve Caruso, a senior High Performance Computing engineer at Silicon Graphics, Inc., discussed SGI's Altix family of Linux-based servers and superclusters. He was accompanied by Darrow Wahara from SGI.

  Presentation slides (PDF)

Photos

• Photos of this meeting

Attendance

• Mike Simons
• Bill Kendrick
• Scot Albert
• Ryan Castellucci
• Chris
• Seth Nagao
• Richard Harke
• Bill Broadley
• Daphne Pareas
• Jonathan Stickel
• Mikal Saltveit
• Paul
• Ken Herron
• Emily Stumpf
• Dmitriy Ivanov
• Darrow Wahara
• Steve Caruso
• Doug Barbieri
• Bruce Wolk
• Stephen Matthew Helms
• Trevor Lango
• Tim Schafer
• Tim Allis
• Kevin Murakoshi
• ...and 5 others