THE OPEN PITT
What's cooking in Linux and Open Source in Western Pennsylvania
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Issue 6 November 2004 www.wplug.org
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In this issue:
Impressions from Ohio LinuxFest 2004
October Roundup
From the Editors: A Festivus for the Rest of Us
Opinion: Who Cares? We Do!
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Coming Events
Nov. 13: Installfest. 10am to 5pm, 1507 Newell-Simon Hall, CMU
Dec. 4: General User Meeting, Topic: Creating Flexible Documentation with
DocBook. 10am to 2pm, 1507 Newell-Simon Hall, CMU
Dec. 11: Tutorial, Topic: Kernel Configuration. 10am to 2pm, 1507 Newell-
Simon Hall, CMU
Jan. 8: Installfest. 10am to 5pm, 1507 Newell-Simon Hall, CMU
Jan. 15: General User Meeting, Topic: User Mode Linux. 10am to 2pm, 1507
Newell-Simon Hall, CMU
The public is welcome at all events
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Impressions from Ohio LinuxFest 2004
Here's a sampling of LinuxFest sessions, from WPLUGers who made the trip
out to Columbus.
SELinux on Fedora
Colin Walters of Red Hat started with security challenges facing Linux
systems. Perhaps most numerous are attacks on web applications.
Facilities like _chroot_ can keep an application exploit from compromising
the system, but these have their weaknesses.
The National Security Agency funded development of Security Enhanced Linux
(SELinux) to create an operating system enforcing mandatory access
control. Colin demonstrated how the kernel partitions processes and files
from each other, only allowing them to interact as prescribed by the
system's security policy.
SELinux is now included in Fedora Core by default. Setting up a security
policy can be a complex undertaking, so a "targeted" policy has been
adopted starting with Fedora Core 3. Most of the system runs in an
unconfined state, but the administrator can target selected daemons and
potentially troublesome applications as needed.
BoF: MySQL
Jeremy Cole of MySQL AB held a birds-of-a-feather session on his company,
the MySQL database, its emphasis on lightning-fast speed, its dual
licensing model, and improvements made over the past few years.
MySQL didn't start out as a full relational database management system
(RDBMS), and it still lacks many features larger databases offer, like
views and stored procedures. But each new iteration has offered more of
the features that users have come to expect, including transactions,
prepared statements, and subqueries. Still, performance remains a top
priority.
We got the chance to win books and "Transactions: check!" T-shirts. (My
girlfriend won a shirt, then gave it to me as a gift. Thanks, Evelyn!)
--David Ostroske
BoF: The Art of the LUG
Anyone involved in organizing a Linux User Group (LUG) knows how difficult
managing geeks can be. This well-attended birds-of-a-feather session led
by WPLUG's Beth Lynn Eicher provided a forum for sharing ideas on
management, preventing the death of a LUG, and legal issues of forming a
non-profit organization.
In attendance were LUG members and organizers from as far away as Canada
and locals from Cleveland and Columbus. Jon "maddog" Hall also shared his
wisdom with the group.
Much of the discussion focused on keeping people interested and actively
participating. One idea explored was adopting a project to give the group
a sense of purpose. The difficulty of finding meeting space was discussed
as well, with some suggesting brewpubs and the like as a place to allow
the social aspect of a LUG to thrive.
The discussion showed how diverse the Linux community is and how difficult
it can be to accommodate the different needs of all those involved.
--Chris Teodorski
BoF: PowerPC and Linux
Henry Keultjes described why desktop Linux and the PowerPC processor are
the "perfect pair" to challenge the Microsoft/Intel duopoly, and showed
off a demonstration model of his LinuxPC. Look for an interview with
Henry in next month's issue.
Asterisk: VoIP for the Masses
Greg Boehnlein of N2Net detailed how Asterisk, fresh off its 1.0 release,
can turn even a modest PC running Linux into a private branch exchange,
voice over IP switch, voicemail system, and automated attendant.
The Asterisk philosophy is about connecting "anything to anything." If it
has to do with telephones or voice communication, Asterisk will probably
interface with it.
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October Roundup
Oct. 9 General User Meeting: Ryan Brown from The Burgh Live
discussed Asterisk, the popular open source
telephony software. He went into topics like choosing a voice over IP
provider and various system configurations, sharing his real-world
experiences and examples. A PDF copy of Ryan's slides and an audio
recording of the presentation are available at
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Oct. 16 New User Tutorial: Beth Lynn Eicher gave the latest version of her
Linux basics tutorial covering the essentials of selecting, installing,
and configuring a Linux system.
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From the Editors: A Festivus for the Rest of Us
Most of this issue is dedicated to last month's Ohio LinuxFest. While not
quite on the same level as the Ottawa Linux Symposium or LinuxWorld Expo,
it's nevertheless a significant--and growing--regional event.
Several of today's hottest projects like Apache, Asterisk, and Samba were
represented. Distributors Novell and Red Hat sent people as well. And
the final coup was having the closing address given by Jon "maddog" Hall.
But at the same time, the sessions were small enough to have an intimate
feel, and the entire event was obviously community-rooted, not driven by
marketing interests.
Instead of taking up any more space, we'll let the other articles speak
for themselves. Enjoy!
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Opinion: Who Cares? We Do!
by Bill Moran
I had a great time at Ohio Linuxfest, and the talks I saw were very
informative. A number of us from the Pittsburgh area made the journey to
Columbus and I had the pleasure of giving a presentation.
Yes, pleasure. I really enjoy talking about what I do in front of groups
of people. My presentation filled almost a solid hour, so I had to be
sure I started on time and nothing went wrong.
The first thing to go wrong was that while I had requested a laptop for
the presentation, one was not available. I can hardly blame the
organizers for this minor oversight, with all they had to do. And the
solution was to simply ask the audience for one to borrow. Regardless,
this took a bit of time, and I got started late. It wasn't too late, and
I figured I'd still be able to finish until the borrowed laptop froze up
on the fourth slide. Another Good Samaritan stepped forward with his
laptop, but switching over ate up more time.
At the end of the hour, an organizer got my attention and indicated that I
needed to wrap up. Unfortunately, this meant rushing through the last
several slides and glossing over some points that I considered rather
important.
I was pretty upset about all this, because I felt like I let down the
people who sat through my presentation. I felt like I hadn't done my job
as a presenter well enough.
I discussed things later that day with Tom Rhodes of the FreeBSD project.
He had involuntarily volunteered to lead a FreeBSD birds-of-a-feather
session (don't ask me how that happened, just suffice to say that it seems
to happen to Tom a lot). He felt he didn't do as well as he could have,
that there were a lot of questions that he didn't have good answers for.
It may seem odd to start out saying what a great event it was, then go on
to complain about all that went wrong. The point is that I _really_ care
about doing a good job. And I find myself very alone in that feeling in
the world at large. Most importantly, I _don't_ feel alone around other
Open Source advocates.
It seems like Open Source people aren't like others. We seem to care more
about what we're doing. See, I wasn't worried about being embarrassed in
front of a lot of people, or getting in trouble for doing poorly. What
was really upsetting was that I wasn't able to completely teach to others
everything that I had learned.
Imagine if everyone were like this. If every time you called a support
phone number, the person on the other end _really_ cared about getting
your problem solved. If every auto shop _really_ cared about fixing your
car _right_ . . . the first time. Sure would be a different world,
wouldn't it?
I'm not saying that our community is perfect. We certainly have problems
and disagreements. But it is a welcome change from the average day-to-day
community I live in, and I suspect that it is for many other people as
well.
Many of the complaints you hear about the Open Source community are really
our strongest points. We're called fanatics . . . I just think we're very
passionate. Some gripe about fragmentation, yet a close look reveals that
we refuse to accept that the first attempt at something is the best, and
frequently fork our work to try other methods. Often the community itself
is upset at the amount of infighting that seems to occur, but those flame
wars are people standing up for different viewpoints. Imagine what you'd
think if you saw two mechanics arguing over the best way to fix a
particular car up on the rack. I know I'd keep bringing my car back
there.
Someone who understands people much better than I should write a book
entitled _The Care and Feeding of People Who Really Care_ and give us some
advice on how to go on caring about things passionately, without driving
ourselves crazy when it doesn't work out quite like we wanted.
I got a lot of feedback about my talk. It was all thanks and praise for
providing so much useful information. Not one person even mentioned the
technical difficulties or complained that I rushed through the last few
slides. It's almost like I'm the only one who noticed. It really took
the sting out of my disappointment in what happened.
It seems like when you really care about something, it cares back for you.
In conclusion, I say care. _Really_ care. It seems to be worth the risk.
Bill Moran runs Potential Technologies in Plum
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The Open Pitt is published by the Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group
Editors: Elwin Green, Vance Kochenderfer
Copyright 2004 Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group. Any article in
this newsletter may be reprinted elsewhere in any medium, provided it is
not changed and attribution is given to the author and WPLUG.