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WLUG Meeting tomorrow! June 10th, 2021 at 7pm!
by Tim Keller June 11, 2021

June 11, 2021

Hey Everybody, We've got a WLUG meeting tomorrow June 10th, 2021 at 7pm. This will be a totally virtual meeting, but hopefully our last!! Topic: I thought I'd give a quick update on my CNC machine and my quest to have a full FOSS toolchain.. what's worked, what hasn't, etc. I expect that'll only take a couple of minutes and then we'll move on to our usual banter! Location: https://meet.jit.si/WlugMA See ya there! Later, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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PipeWire pro audio support
by Joshua Stone June 7, 2021

June 7, 2021

Hey everyone! The PipeWire project has been an exciting project to follow, as there has been heavy development for broad audio use case coverage: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/home https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/blob/master/NEWS It seems that the developers are currently prioritizing pro-audio use cases as of late: https://twitter.com/PipewireP/status/1401885732587847680 >A little question for our pro-audio friends out there. Now that we got freewheeling and latency reporting implemented, what is at the top of your wishlist for PipeWire features? This should be quite exciting! I've tried several DAWs over the years, and admittedly they seemed to require more effort than necessary to configure correctly with the Linux audio stack. I'm hoping PipeWire will be able to resolve this weakness! What do you think could use more improvement? - Josh

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Fedora 34 updates
by THE HAMMER May 21, 2021

May 21, 2021

I just installed Fedora 34 on a "junk laptop" to play along with. Looked on line and wound up with a couple different answers, and so perhaps they are all correct. My question is when I want to update all the packages in the lap top what is the correct/best command? Also what is the difference between dnf upgrade and dnf upgrade --refresh Thanks Ron

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Carbon-neutral living
by joshua.gage.stone＠gmail.com May 14, 2021

May 14, 2021

Hey everyone! Thanks for another night full of discussion covering many interesting topics! I'm interested to learn more about everyone's longterm plans for carbon-neutral/carbon-negative living! My wife and I have been researching on this topic for some time as we believe there are numerous benefits in reducing energy requirements, and we hope that when it comes time to become home owners we'll be able to start from the ground up with this type of living ingrained in our household! It turns out that there's a *lot* of room for improvement in energy efficiency, and by extension, carbon reduction. While I think transition to green energy is immensely important as a longterm plan, I also think it's important for us to evaluate ways to reduce our carbon footprint as individuals Examples include: - Switching to induction stoves which are more efficient and safer than traditional electric stoves https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pftcQ6NGPfc - Switching to heat pump dryers for reducing energy usage with the added bonus of eliminating the need for vents https://www.energystar.gov/products/heat_pump_dryer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh-j0sWBEJA - Switching to heat pump water heaters https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/heat-pump-water-heaters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omivdhxdGv0 - Switching to air-source/ground-source heat pumps to replacing gas/oil/electric heating for hot water and heating https://www.energystar.gov/products/heating_cooling/heat_pumps_geothermal https://www.energystar.gov/products/heating_cooling/heat_pumps_air_source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zrx-b2sLUs I think heat pump technology could be very promising for a wide number of applications, as it turns out that the most efficient way to work with heat is to simply *move* it around, rather than generate more heat through gas, oil, etc. With climate change and global warming being an existential threat, the last thing we want to do is add more heat to the problem! A more ambitious longterm goal my wife and I have is that we would like to someday have a house built to Passive House standards, which is said to reduce home heating requirements by up to 90%: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=secB3R0sIYU https://phmass.org/ https://www.buildwithrise.com/stories/texas-passive-house-weathered-the-202… https://zeroenergy.com/portfolio/all-projects https://zeroenergyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/RPA_Scranton_Passi… https://www.phius.org/home-page Something I find especially interesting about Passive Houses is that they're often able to achieve net positive energy production and EV charging with even a modust solar panel installation. This means they can give back to the power grid with fewer panels compared to other houses built to code, reducing the total environmental impact from solar panel manufacturing. Of course, there's a high upfront monetary cost to transitioning to eco-friendly living, but at least there are programs in place to help: https://www.masssave.com/ https://multifamily.fanniemae.com/financing-options/specialty-financing/gre… Hope to hear everyone's thoughts! - Josh

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Reminder: WLUG Meeting tonight! May 13th 2021 at 7pm!
by Tim Keller May 13, 2021

May 13, 2021

This is a reminder that we've got a meeting today at 7pm! In the usual location: https://meet.jit.si/WlugMA Topics tonight will likely include the UMN debacle, the encoder/decoder vulnerability stuff, probably some other Linux related stuff! I'd also like to talk about meeting in person. If it's something that people are down for (I know Maddog is!) I'll reach out to Technopia and see what their rules are. Thanks, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Reminder! Meeting Next Week on May 13th 2021!
by Tim Keller May 7, 2021

May 7, 2021

Hey Gang! We've got a meeting on May 13th! For topics, there's a whole lot to talk about! Obviously the UMN stuff, as well as the x86 decoder fun. I think it's worth revisiting having in person meetings.. At some point here in the near future a majority of us are going to be vaccinated. I'll reach out to Kevin (if he's not already reading this!) and see what Technopia's policies are going to be. Whatever we do, I think we've all agreed it makes sense to keep the virtual component going as well. To that point, I'll be getting my second shot on Tuesday so I might be not feeling great, we'll see. What do people think? Later, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Fedora 34 is officially out today
by joshua.gage.stone＠gmail.com April 27, 2021

April 27, 2021

Hey everyone! Fedora 34 is officially out today, and it has a number of new features! Features include: - Updating to Gnome 40 (https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/40.0/) - Switching from Pulseaudio to Pipewire (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ#how-is-pipewir…) - Switching from earlyoomd to systemd-oomd for handling out-of-memory situations - Enabled transparent zstd compression in btrfs (https://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-workstation-34-feature-focus-btrfs-transp…) - Enabling Harfbuzz in FreeType for improved font rendering - KDE using Wayland by default instead of X11 https://fedoramagazine.org/whats-new-in-fedora-workstation-34/ You can try it out today here: https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/download/ Or try the various different spins here: https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/34/ - Josh

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Zeek - from yesterday's meeting
by John Stoffel April 13, 2021

April 13, 2021

Guys, I'm looking into Zeek and unfortunately I don't have a second ethernet port on my main system, so it's not clear how I'd run a span port off my main switch to grab traffic. What hardware do people recommend for a zeek data collection node? I guess I could spin up my old WRAP board (http://www.pcengines.ch) which I used as my main router for years before I replaced it recently. But it's not super fast. It's got three 1gb ports, and 4gb of RAM with a 1Ghz single core AMD CPU. So it might do the job, esp since I can install Debian Buster on there without too much trouble. Sweet! John

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Reminder! We've got a meeting this Thursday (April 8th, 2021!)
by Tim Keller April 5, 2021

April 5, 2021

Hey Everybody, This is a reminder that we have a meeting on April 8th, 2021. Same bat time, same bat channel Date: April 8th, 2021 7pm: Jitsi @ https://meet.jit.si/WlugMA Topic: As of yet, there's no topic for the meeting, however, there's a ton to talk about none the less! The PHP git server hack, the OpenSSL vulnerabilities, turns out the spectre mitigations can be mitigated? I'm sure more stuff will come up as well.. As usual drinks and refreshments aren't being provided as this is a virtual meeting.. But soon.. so soon I hope we'll all be able to get together safely. Thanks for being patient and coming to the meetings, I appreciate it. Tim.

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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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