February 2020 - WLUG - wlug.mailman3.com

WLUG history
by Anderson, Charles R March 13, 2021

March 13, 2021

Not sure we are the oldest, but we /might/ be the oldest still in operation. Is GNHLUG still in operation? If so, they are probably older. I was inspired to dig into my archives: An early email from our founder, Andy Stewart: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 22:22:18 -0400 From: Andy Stewart <astewart(a)world.std.com> To: "Worcester Linux Users' Group" <wlug(a)mass-pc.wpi.edu> Subject: [Fwd: Caldera Inc. IT Forum] OK, gang, tell the man what you think! Remember, he is the gentleman who graciously donated the tee shirts and CDROM discs from Caldera... Andy ---------------------- Date: Wed, 23 Jul 1997 12:30:22 -0600 From: Paul La Fluer <paull(a)caldera.com> Organization: Caldera, Inc. To: astewart(a)world.std.com Subject: Caldera Inc. IT Forum Hello Andy, I hope everything is going good. I am in the process of organizing a conference while in New York. My goal is to rent out a large ballroom in a hotel and have all the usergroups in the area come and listen to Bryan Sparks our CEO and other talk about Linux and OpenLinux. There will be presentations plus a Q&A session. I would like to hear your feedback on the idea and if your group would attend. We would be giving away door prizes like OpenLinux Base and Standard and handing out t-shirts, papers and OpenLinux Lite and OpenDOS to all that attend. Please give me some feedback on this idea. I need to know soon to get things set up. Thanks, Paul La Fleur ---------------------------------------------------------------------- An email about our SECOND meeting (that refers to the first meeting): ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 04 Aug 1997 21:29:13 -0400 From: Andy Stewart <astewart(a)world.std.com> To: "Worcester Linux Users' Group" <wlug(a)mass-pc.wpi.edu> Subject: Next WLUG meeting The next scheduled meeting for the Worcester Linux Users' Group (WLUG) is August 21, 1997, at 7 PM in the Gordon Library on the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) campus in Worcester, MA. We had a great turnout of about 20 people at our very first meeting last month - I hope to see all of you come back, and I'd like to extend a welcome to anybody who would like to attend. I would suggest parking in the "lower library" parking lot and hiking up the 102 stairs to the library (not to mention the 12 or so more stairs in the library to get to the 2nd floor!). For more information, feel free to send me E-mail at: astewart(a)world.std.com Look for the penguin signs! Hope to see you there! Andy Stewart WLUG ---------------------------------------------------------------------- I'd guess our first meeting was about July 23 or 24, 1997, or perhaps the week before, July 16 or 17. But maddog from GNHLUG forwarded this, which says "as always, the meeting are free..." which implies that July 30th is NOT their first meeting. If they had monthly meetings, that would place their first meeting in June 1997 or before. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 21 Jul 97 10:28:09 -0400 From: "Jon 'maddog' Hall, USG Senior Leader" <hall(a)zk3.dec.com> To: gnhlug(a)zk3.dec.com Subject: GNHLUG - Linux Cluster meeting July 30th at Martha's Exchange Hi, We now have a venue for the July 30th meeting of the GNHLUG, with Loki, a cluster of 16 Pentium PRO 200s, running Linux as the topic of the talk. We will be meeting on the *second* floor dining room of the Martha's Exchange Building in beautiful downtown Nashua. I will be picking up the speaker in Cambridge that day and transporting him to Martha's for dinner, arriving about 1730 hours. For those of you who wish to join us for dinner, please RSVP. The meeting itself will start at 1900 hours, with the speaker probably getting up steam about 1915 hours. As always, the meetings are free and open to everyone, and as a FINAL enticement I will be handling out *free* CD ROMS with the V1.2 Debian release for Intel on it. M. Patrick Goda, a principal of the Loki ( http://loki-www.lanl.gov/ ) project at the Theoretical Division of the Los Alamos National Labs, a Beowulf ( http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux-web/beowulf/beowulf.html ) style computer will be our speaker. I have convinced him to present a talk on the Loki project, one of linking together 16 Intel Pentium Pro machines to create a system that has: o high reliability o high throughput and generally 16-node IBM SP2 performance (over 1.2 GigaFlops) at 1/20th the cost (about $60K)!! Pat is a friend of mine that I introduced to Red Hat Linux when he was a graduate student at the University of Hawaii (long story). Due to the fact that Patrick is a rare find, I will invite the Boston Linux User's Group and the Worcester Linux User's group to join us that night, so I have arranged for larger quarters. Some additional Beowulf pages are from my own alma mater: http://einstein.drexel.edu/beowulf/Beowulf_concept.html including exerpts from the original Beowulf story: http://einstein.drexel.edu/beowulf/original_beowulf.html Warmest regards, maddog ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Nevermind, GNHLUG is definitely older by several years according to their web page: http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/PastEvents 1996 When Where What Who How Many 31 Jan 1996 UNH Durham Linux Linus Torvalds 200+ 1994 When Where What Who How Many 19 Oct UNH (?) First meeting Members ??? On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 04:13:25PM -0500, Richard Klein via WLUG wrote: > What do we know about WLUG's history? If it really is one of the oldest > LUGs, it might merit a Wikipedia article. It would be great if we could > flesh that out, too. > > This article seems like it could use a list of LUGs: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_user_group > > On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 1:43 PM Dennis Payne via WLUG <wlug(a)lists.wlug.org> > wrote: > > > The NatickFOSS group uses gettogether.community instead of meetup.com. I > > don't know that it has gotten us any visibility but the software is open > > source. I've been tempted to join meetup to go to Boston Indie Game > > Developer meetings but have so far held off. > > > > The NatickFOSS group also gets a booth at the Science on State Street > > event at Framingham State. It is a free STEM activity fair for kids. My job > > at the event is to generally occupy the time of the kids so the other > > members talk to the parents. First year I had a playstation controller > > hooked up to my laptop and held it out to any kid that walked by. Last year > > I brought the arcade machine assembled by my son's cub scout den. Any idea > > if WPI does any thing similar? Even if it is something only for WPI > > students it might be useful to alert people to the group's existence.

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Greetings
by madserge＠pm.me March 2, 2020

March 2, 2020

Hello, My name is Forrest I am a gamer and a Linux enthusiast that mainly uses a Arch Based distro called Manjaro. My friend reached out to the group for me and then emailed and told me about it so I thought I would create a account and introduce myself. I would also like to say my level of understanding is probably more on the beginners level of things and have been learning slowly and would like to learn more about other things like raspberry pis and servers since I recently obtained a server from a family members work because they upgraded, I will also leave specs of the two custom built computers I own and the name of the server I have down below, I look forward to meeting you all next meeting. Sincerely, Forrest Server: Dell PowerEdge 2950 (Minimal Manjaro XFCE Installed) Raid Slots 6 Hard Disk Drives 6 (2 146GB 10K RPM, 4 600GB 15K RPM) That's all I know atm Custom PC's: Current Rig Case: NZXT H440 (EnVyUs Edition) Mobo: ASRock Fatal1ty Z270 Gaming K6 GPU: EVGA GTX 1080 Ti SC2 (11GB GDDR5X) CPU: Intel i7 7700K Quad Core 4.2 GHz (No Overclock) RAM: 16GB G.SKILL Ripjaws V DDR4 3200 HDD: 2TB FireCuda (SSHD) + 2TB FireCuda (SSHD) + 250GB Samsung 850 EVO (SSD) + 1TB Crucial M.2 NVMe SSD OS: Windows 10 Pro / Manjaro KDE Other Rig Case: NZXT H440 Mobo: Asrock Z75 Pro3 GPU: EVGA GTX 980Ti Hybrid (6GB GDDR5) CPU: Intel Core i7 2600 Quad Core 3.4 GHz (Overclocked to 4GHz) RAM: 16 GB DDR3 1600 HDD: 2TB (7200RPM HDD) + 128GB (SSD) OS: Windows 10 Pro 64Bit

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GRUB failure
by Richard Klein Feb. 16, 2020

Feb. 16, 2020

The other day, my computer crashed to a blank, black screen. On reboot, my BIOS didn't see the SSD that held my OS. I tried swapping the SSD onto different cables and different motherboard connectors. When I started the computer back up, it saw the SSD, but gave me a GRUB rescue prompt. On the next reboot, the BIOS again didn't see the SSD. That's repeatable: warm boots make the SSD disappear; it re-appears on cold boots, but dumps me to the GRUB rescue prompt. I figured the SSD has died and I already requested an RMA, but I can't boot to my Windows drive if I remove the SSD, so maybe it's not actually dead. I don't have the patience to troubleshoot from the GRUB rescue prompt and I wasn't thrilled with Manjaro, so I'm going to try to install good, old Debian to the SSD while I wait to hear back about an RMA. -- Rich

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Reminder: Meeting tonight! Topic: TBD! Open Forum, etc.
by Tim Keller Feb. 13, 2020

Feb. 13, 2020

Hey Everybody, We've got a meeting tonight! Location: WPI Campus Center Room 304 (Peterson Conference Room) Topic: TBD, open forum, etc. I'm going to show off Visual Studio Code for Linux running on my laptop with the emacs, git and python integrations I've been using. That'll probably be pretty quick and then we can open it up to a general discussion around what's going on in linux, what people are interested in and what people would like to see for topics. There will possibly be some new people since I've created the Meetup site. Snacks and refreshments will be provided and we'll head off for dinner afterwards. Later, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Meeting today
by Joshua Stone Feb. 13, 2020

Feb. 13, 2020

Hey all, I'm sorry to say that I won't be able to attend today's meeting because I have some last minute errands to do. Sorry about that! - Josh

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Topics for upcoming meetings..
by Tim Keller Feb. 11, 2020

Feb. 11, 2020

I've got some updates and ideas for the upcoming meetings! I've reached out to Daniel Moghimi about doing a talk regarding his work on the various security issues he's found in modern CPUs. He's agreed to speak either March or April. I'll work to finalize the details with him. I'm definitely interested in doing a Keysigning party, we'll just have to work out the logistics and what additional presentations that we'd like to go along with it. I know a while a go Eric Martin showed off a cool keyfob that had his key stored in it. I recently stumbled across a cool technology called "Node Red" which people are using to do automation stuff with IoT and MTQQ. https://www.nodered.org It allows you to create flows using their graphing engine. Another piece of software that people might find interesting is subsonic <http://www.subsonic.org/>. It lets you run your own music streaming service. This way you're not subjected to whatever algorithm spotify / pandora / etc wants to subject you to! I recently helped a buddy build a home nas to run it and it's pretty damn slick. Let me know if you have any more ideas for meeting topics! Later, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Retro-puters
by Mike Peckar Feb. 11, 2020

Feb. 11, 2020

Some fun reads on retro projects in links to hackaday. I wasn't aware of the book mentioned... https://boingboing.net/2020/02/04/766826.html

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sorry about the spam
by Chuck Anderson Feb. 10, 2020

Feb. 10, 2020

Sorry about the spam. I'm cleaning up spam from the moderator's queue and accidently accepted a 8 or 12 messages.

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Reminder: WLUG Meeting Next Week! Topic: Modernizing the Linux Desktop
by Tim Keller Feb. 9, 2020

Feb. 9, 2020

Hey Gang, This is my usual reminder that we've got a meeting next week. Here's the details... Date & Time: February 13th, 2020 @ 7PM Location: WPI Campus Center Room 304 (Peterson Conference Room) Presenter: Joshua Stone Topic: Modernizing the Linux Desktop with Silver/Blue, Toolbox and Flatpak Our speaker this month is Joshua Stone. He's going to giving a talk about a couple of cool technologies in Fedora! Josh provided me some details about these innovations so I've mashed them up and included them below. Silverblue: https://fedoramagazine.org/what-is-silverblue/ Toolbox: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/toolbox/ Flatpaks: https://flatpak.org/ *Silverblue* s a Fedora variant designed around immutability where a new system image is committed as the new /sysroot without affecting the state of the running system. This is reminiscent of Android A/B updates, although the update backend -- ostree -- has elements of a version control system like git. *Toolbox* is also interesting as it lets you switch into an unprivileged development environment that can be built up and torn down without affecting the host as tools are installed inside a container. *Flatpak* uses the same file storage backend as Silverblue to manage apps and shared runtimes. This app distribution technology allows you to decouple apps and operating systems as everything is built and run inside a sandbox, making upgrades easier. Compare needing only one version of an app to package as a flatpak, versus packaging for different versions. As usual, snacks and refreshments will be provided and afterwards we'll head off for dinner to continue the conversation. Thanks, Tim Keller WLUG President -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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