[ale] ALE CENTRAL MTG for Thursday, April 16, 2009

Aaron Ruscetta arxaaron at gmail.com
Mon Apr 13 16:40:41 EDT 2009


[ Sorry for delays in posting this months meeting notices,
but BOTH of the presenters we had originally lined for
this month had to cancel short notice, though for very
valid reasons.  A couple of generous volunteers have
come through, though, so here's the plan... ]

Our ALE Central Meeting on Thursday, Aprl 16, 2009,
7:30pm,  at Emory Law School (Gambrell Hall Room 1C)
will feature two topical presentations:

==========
A Demo of the Opensuse Build Service (OBS)
  with Greg Freemyer

-- plus --

A Look at the Current ALE "OSPREX" Deck
  with Stephen R. Blevins
==========

Synopses:
--  Opensuse Build Service:
The OBS is distro agnostic and can be used to build rpms and debian
packages without requiring the user to install the various distros.  It is
targeted at people packaging projects for publishing.   The following
distros are currently supported: Fedora, Red Hat, Debian, OpenSUSE,
Mandriva, xUbuntu.  Intel (32bit and 64bit) and PPC builds are fully
supported.  ARM support is being introduced now, with other embedded
cpu architectures to follow.

The build service is leveraged by the opensuse studio service to allow
custom opensuse live CDs / bootable USB images to be created via
the web.

-- The ALE OSPREX Deck:
OSPREX (for Open Source OS Presentation) is the working project
name for an effort by several ALE volunteers to create a consistent,
portable presentation package targeting general public audiences
that  concisely and effectively promotes the numerous profound
advantages of GNU Linux OS and FFOSS software alternatives.

Stephen Blevins has taken the lead in this effort by locating and
adapting a distributable presentation slide deck that can serve as
an aid to Linux evangelists for delivering a brief but informative
talk on the various FFOSS topics.  Stephen vetted the OSPREX
Deck at a recent ALE organizational meeting and, having
incorporated those suggestions for enhancement, is anxious to
present the OSPREX Deck to the general ALE membership.

Bio Info:
-- Greg Freemyer is currently employed as the CTO  of The Norcross
Group.   He has been involved with UNIX since 1983 and with Linux
since 1996.  Greg served as a Senior Internet Engineer on several
major projects for international corporations such as Siemens and
Ford Motor Company.  His current job focuses on Computer Forensics
and eDiscovery, but he continues to work with Linux systems for both
work and pleasure.  His use of the OBS evolved out of trying to connect
a linux PC up to a weather station.

--  Stephen R. Blevins has been an I.T. professional for over 20 years,
including 15 years workin with various UNIX systems (AT&T 5.2.2, SVR4,
HPUX, SunOS, Solaris).  In 2003 he became a philosophical convert
to GNU Linux and Open Source software due to the influences of
Pamela Jones, of GROKLAW fame.  He currently runs a triple-boot
computer system that can wake up as an MS XP box, or greet the world
as a secure and functional CentOS or Ubuntu Linux system.  Slowly,
but surely, Stephen's wife, his wife's son, and his own son are
becoming Linux converts as well (and not just in philosophical sense)!


============================
The ALE 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 always, these details are also available
at the < http://ALE.org > web site.

peace
Aaron Ruscetta
ALE Event Coordinator (etc.)
arxaaron at gmail.com


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