The feature presentation at the ALE Central Meeting
at 7:30pm on Thursday, July 15, 2010 will be:
“An OpenSUSE 11.3 Launch Party!”
with Chuck Payne, regional OpenSUSE Ambassador
Come and be one of the first to get copies of OpenSUSE 11.3,
the lastest release from the OpenSUSE Community, plus learn
more about the OpenSUSE Build Service 2.0 and the “Li-F-E”
(Linux For Education) distribution.
Synopsis:
— The openSUSE Project is a community program sponsored by Novell,
AMD and IP Exchange. Its main goal is promoting the use of Linux
everywhere by developing the OpenSUSE Linux distribution and by
providing an environment for open source collaboration through tools
such as the OpenSUSE Build Service. Since it is an open project,
anyone can contribute to the OpenSUSE project by editing the wiki,
translating the distribution, creating software patches, developing
rpm packages, reporting bugs or suggesting features.
The goals of the OpenSUSE project include:
* Make OpenSUSE the easiest Linux distribution for anyone to
obtain and the most widely used open source platform.
* Provide an environment for open source collaboration that
makes OpenSUSE the world’s best Linux distribution for both new
and experienced Linux users.
* Dramatically simplify and open the development and packaging
processes to make OpenSUSE the platform of choice for Linux kernel
and application developers.
* Become the simplest Linux distribution while providing a
maximum number of packages.
Bio:
— Chuck Payne is a Linux System Administrator who has been an
an active member of the OpenSUSE community since October,
2009, becoming an Ambassador for OpenSUSE in April, 2009.
He has given talks at Atlanta, Texas and Southeast Linux Fests
to spread the word about OpenSUSE to the masses while
handing out a few cute stuffed “Geekos”. He was working for
the Travel Channel Media as one of their Linux admin until
June 2010.
Related Links:
— OpenSUSE.org
— SUSE Studio
=============
We will be meeting at Emory Law School in our
usual Gambrel Hall, room 1C venue.
Meeting time frame is 7:30pm to ~9:30pm
Directions to Emory Law School can be found
at http://mail.ale.org/?page_id=2
As a departure from our usual meeting format
(since schedules didn’t mesh for securing a feature
presentation), our ALE Central Meeting for 7:30pm
on Thursday, JUNE 17th will be taking the form of:
An Open Discussion on Desirable Distros:
Measuring Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (& Derivatives)
Against the Many Viable Alternatives
presented by the informed, fair minded opinons of
our many ALE Linux Distro Connoisseurs,
— AND —
Accompanied by Ample Supplies of Ubuntu 10.04
Desktop, Server and Kubuntu discs (courtesy of
Nick Ali via Canonical).
Synopsis:
— The Desirable Distro Discussion will kick off with a
brief, informal presentation on the fabulous features
and faulted frailties of the latest Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
release, including some comparisons to the Linux MINT
Ubuntu derivative distro. From there we will open the
mic, the podium and the projector to anyone wishing
to display or discuss their own preferences in Linux
distributions and software bundles. Demonstrations
of alternative desktops, window managers, widgets
and system extensions will also be welcome.
ALE Event Coordinator (etc) Aaron Ruscetta will
present the introductory Ubuntu evaluations and
serve as moderator for the discussions.
We will be meeting at our usual venue, Emory Law School,
Gambrel Hall, room 1C. Meeting time frame is 7:30pm to ~9:30pm,
(though we may adjourn to Meltons App & Tap for continutation
of the discussions a little earlier than usual).
Directions to Emory Law School can be found at
[http://ale.org/?page_id=2].
The feature presentation for the ALE Central Meeting
on Thursday, May 20th, at 7:30pm will be:
“Seat Belts and Air Bags for Bash”
presented by Michael Potter of
Replatform Technologies, LLC
Synopsis:
— This presentation will focus on the underutilized features of bash
that are critical to building production quality scripts. Demos will
show you how to turn on options and error trapping that expose
the hidden time bombs in the code.
Turning these features on should be considered a requirement,
much like turning on “strict” and “warnings” is considered a
requirement for Perl programs.
Also, as much of the bash syntax has become outdated, the
presentation will explain which syntax is best to use and which
syntax to avoid.
Knowledge of any of the common UNIX scripting languages
will be sufficient to understand the presentation and script
authors at all proficiency levels should find value in attending.
Although the presentation does not address differences between
Korn shell and bash, much of what will be discussed also
applies to Korn shell.
Bio:
— Michael Potter has been working in IT since 1989, when he
switched from programming automotive embedded systems.
Since that time he has been involved in projects related
to moving mainframe applications to UNIX and Linux using
open-source technologies. Projects have included
* a CICS emulator written in C,
* a source code control and configuration system,
* a DFSORT like set of utilities that work similar
to sed/grep/sort tools on unix,
* a JCL to bash conversion scheme, and
* a scheme to add web service interface to
mainframe applications.
Michael recently released his mainframe socket emulation
code as open source. This code will allow socket code
originally written on the mainframe to be recompiled
and run on Linux.
Michael recently moved his mainframe rehosting business,
Replatform Technologies, LLC, from Chicago to Atlanta.
And just for fun you can check out his Atlanta Startup Weekend
project here: www.instantloop.com
You can reach Michael at michael@potter.name
=============
We will be meeting at our usual venue, Emory Law School,
Gambrel Hall, rm 1C. Meeting time frame is 7:30pm to ~9:30pm
Directions to Emory Law School can be found at
[http://ale.org/?page_id=2].
The feature presentation for the ALE Central Meeting of
Thursday, April 15th, 7:30pm will be:
“An Overview of the CentOS Cluster Server”
presented by Ryan Matty of Prefetch Technologies
Synopsis:
— This presentation is geared to providing an introduction to clustering
and the CentOS cluster server by demonstrating the process of setting
up a basic 2-node cluster that utilizes GFS.
Bio:
— Ryan Matteson is a long time Linux user, and has been a member
of ALE for close to 9 years. He has also been a regular ALE presenter
on a variety of Linux topics, last year providing talks on UDEV and KVM.
In addition to hacking code, Ryan thoroughly enjoys evaluating new
technology and sharing his findings with the world through his blog
=============
We will be meeting at our usual venue, Emory Law School,
Gambrel Hall, rm 1C. Meeting time frame is 7:30pm to ~9:30pm
Directions to Emory Law School can be found at
[http://ale.org/?page_id=2].
The feature presentation at the ALE Central Meeting
for 7:30pm on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 will be:
Literate Programming:
Source Code for Human Beings
(Because geeks are people too!)
with Larry Felton Johnson
==
Synopsis:
— Whether you’re writing a full fledged application or a short utility
shell script, really understanding the code and being able to modify
and maintain it (sometimes years after it was originally written) is
an important part of authoring a program. With the rise of group
coding environments, thorough and comprehensible documentation
of program code has become all the more important.
One of the most interesting systems for ensuring robust documentation,
and the quality code which that supports, is the Literate Programming
approach first proposed by Donald Knuth in a 1983 book of that name.
This presentation will be describing the Literate Programming system
and demonstrating some support utilities I’ve written using a combination
of perl and XSL. It will also look at some of the tools available on linux
systems which support Literate Programming.
Bio:
— Larry Felton Johnson has been a Linux user since early 1995, when
he downloaded an SLS distribution sufficient to fill 50 high density floppy
disks. He’s been a sysadmin for the past 15 years, mostly on Solaris, but
with a significant toe in the Red Hat waters. His great love is doing utility
programming in perl, particularly in the general categories known as
“scraping” (web, terminal, etc) and “data munging”.
=============
We will be meeting at Emory Law School in our
usual Gambrel Hall, room 1C venue.
Meeting time frame is 7:30pm to ~9:30pm
Directions to Emory Law School can be found
via the side bar link.