The North Bay Linux® Users' Group is a computer users group serving the San Francisco North Bay and surrounding areas. We are dedicated to Linux, Open Source and other related topics. We strive to promote Linux, Free Software, open standards and to generally have a good time by hosting social events that educate, allow members to share ideas and knowledge and to build friendships.

We hold regular meetings on the second Tuesday of each month with a selected topic presented by a guest speaker. We also hold other meetings and events on a regular or semi-regular basis. Meetings and membership are free and open to the public. Please sign up for the announce email list to receive notifications of upcoming events. Or the talk list to get help with Linux.

Introduction to KDE 4

Date&Time: Confirmed | General Meeting | Speaker&Topic: Confirmed
2008/05/13 - 7:30pm
2008/05/13 - 9:00pm

Introduction to KDE4

KDE 4 was released on April 2, 2008 and is the newest version
of the K Desktop Environment.

Fabio Locati will speak on the history of KDE and Qt(the toolkit
behind KDE) and he will also discuss the framework of KDE.

Plans for the upcoming 4.1 release will be revealed and there
will be a live KDE demo.


Fabio A. Locati

General Meeting -- OpenVPN

Date&Time: Confirmed | General Meeting | Difficulty: User
2008/04/08 - 7:30pm
2008/04/08 - 9:00pm

OpenVPN - Adding Trust to Untrusted Networks

Virtual Private Networks allow you to connect two networks securely.

A traveler with a laptop frequently uses a random internet connection but
wants to connect securely to a home or office network.

Traditional solutions are not well suited to the random connections of the
traveler with a laptop.

OpenVPN is a versatile cross-platform open source solution that's easy to set up.

This presentation will have an overview of the lingo and components of VPN and
a how-to demonstration of an OpenVPN server and laptop client.


O'Reilly Media, Sebastopol

Bob Blick

General Meeting -- Scaled-Down Laptops - Asus EeePC and OLPC XO

Date&Time: Confirmed | General Meeting | Speaker&Topic: Confirmed | Difficulty: User
2008/03/11 - 7:30pm
2008/03/11 - 9:00pm

The Asus EeePC and the One Laptop Per Child XO are two small laptops with very
little in common. This month we have two presenters, Allan Cecil and Brandon
Williams.

Allan will talk about the One Laptop Per Child Project XO laptop, which
is technologically very unusual and supports some exciting educational and
networking applications. A mesh networking demo of multiple XOs is planned, so
if you are one of the lucky ones to already have an XO, bring it along and join
in the demo.

Brandon will be discussing the EeePC, its hardware specifications,
capabilities, the default operating system, and its great suite of open
source software. He'll discuss some of the niche distros popping up
specifically for the EeePC, some of the popular hardware hacks floating
around the web, and discuss some available options to the potential
buyer. We'll also hear about upcoming Ultra-Mobile Pc's, why their popularity
will continue to grow, and upcoming technology that are going to keep making
them cheaper, smaller, and more portable.


O'Reilly Media, Sebastopol

Brandon Williams and Allan Cecil

General Meeting -- Introduction to Forensics

Date&Time: Confirmed | General Meeting | Speaker&Topic: Confirmed | Difficulty: Advanced
2008/02/12 - 7:30pm
2008/02/12 - 9:00pm

In this talk Kyle Rankin will provide an introduction to performing forensics analysis on Linux machines using the popular Sleuthkit tools with their easy-to-use Autopsy web-based front-end. The talk will cover initial installation and configuration of Sleuthkit and Autopsy, basic concepts and considerations for a forensics investigation, and at the end there will be a demo with a compromised Linux image.


O'Reilly Media, Sebastopol

Kyle Rankin

General Meeting -- Advantech FWA-660 Network Appliance

Date&Time: Confirmed | General Meeting | Speaker&Topic: Confirmed | Difficulty: User
2008/01/08 - 7:30pm
2008/01/08 - 9:00pm

Paul Stagnoli and Brian Davidson, of Exchange Bank, will be discussing
hacking the Advantech FWA-660 network appliance. The FWA-660 specs
include four Ethernet ports, a Celeron processor, up to 512 meg of ram,
on-board USB and printer support, compact flash support, and a 30 gig
hard drive.

Paul will demonstrate how to install Ubuntu server onto the box via PXE.
Brian will discuss case mods he made to add USB and Printer support to
the box.


O'Reilly Media, Sebastopol

Paul Stagnoli and Brian Davidson

General Meeting -- Virtualization Panel

Date&Time: Confirmed | General Meeting | Speaker&Topic: Confirmed | Difficulty: Basics
2007/12/11 - 7:30pm
2007/12/11 - 9:00pm

Curious about virtualization? In this talk a panel of NBLUG members will highlight a number of different virtualization technologies including but not limited to VMware, OpenVZ, Solaris zones, and more!


O'Reilly Media, Sebastopol

NBLUG Panel

Board Meeting Minutes

Board Meeting Minutes

Meeting attendees: Frank, Bob, Kyle & Dave.

Not much on the Agenda this month, just upcoming meeting topics:

December: Panel discussion on various Virtualization methods, such as vmWare, OpenVZ, Xen and more. Panel participants will include Kyle, Frank, Aaron, and a co-worker of Aaron's whose name escapes me.

January: Paul Stagnoli and Brian Davidson have volunteered to talk about a net-bootable device that they hacked at his work.

Storage, Sharing and Backup: Samba, Rsync, and the MyBook World NAS

Date&Time: Confirmed | General Meeting
2007/11/13 - 7:30pm
2007/11/13 - 9:00pm

This talk covers storage and backup in a home or small office where files
are stored on a single server running Linux or on a Network Attached
Storage device. Files are shared to Windows, Linux, and OSX using Samba.
Every day all files are backed up to an external USB hard drive using
Rsync.

Network Attached Storage drives can save space and electricity by serving
files to multiple clients without the need for a computer. The Western
Digital MyBook World is a NAS with gigabit ethernet, a USB host port, and
500GB to 2TB of storage. It runs Linux internally and has a full system
and GNU development environment preinstalled.


O'Reilly Media

Bob Blick

General Meeting -- Tom Haddon from Canonical

Date&Time: Confirmed | General Meeting
2007/10/09 - 7:30pm
2007/10/09 - 9:00pm

Tom works for Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, etc. as a
Systems Administrator for Launchpad (https://launchpad.net) and
Landscape (https://landscape.canonical.com).

From Tom :

"The main topic of the talk will be about a volunteer project undertaken
by the SF-LUG to resurrect a housing authority's computer lab using
Edubuntu. How the project started, where we are now, and where we go
from here. Possibly with a demonstration of LTSP (the Linux Terminal
Server Project) on my laptop. I'll also be happy to answer any questions
I can about Ubuntu, Canonical, Launchpad, Landscape, etc."


O'Reilly Media

Tom Haddon

Board Meeting Minutes - 9/18/2007

Board Meeting Minutes

The board meeting was attended by Paul (VP), Aaron (Treas.), Dave (Scribe), Bob (Dir. @ Large) and Frank (Dir @ Large).

I forgot to post the last minutes, so I'll congratulate Frank now for stepping up and accepting the 2nd Director at Large position (hooray!).

Our upcoming General Meeting Topics:
- October: Tom Haddon of Canonical will talk about Ubuntu.
- November: Our own Bob Blick will give a talk: 'Storage, Sharing and Backup: Samba, Rsync, and the MyBook World NAS'
- December: This one is still undecided, but could be a new Knoppix talk by Kyle, Paul might give a talk about linux servers, or perhaps a lively panel discussion.

We selected a date for the next Installfest - Sat. October 20th. I am awaiting confirmation from O'Reilly that the conference room is available before I announce the 'fest officially.

We also reaffirmed that we want to make this an Installfest-Plus. This just means opening up the event to help with configuring hardware or applications in addtion to the traditional OS installs.