The Open Pitt What's cooking in Linux and Open Source in Western Pennsylvania Issue 26 July 2006 www.wplug.org Notes from YAPC::NA 2006 by Scott M. Kriebel The Yet Another Perl Conference— AJAX was a popular topic this year, with client hooks for multiple lan- North America (YAPC::NA) was held obviously getting Perl hackers ready guages including, of course, Perl. The on June 26-28, 2006 on the campus of for the Web 2.0 world. Perl 6 updates Java server launches a browser and the Illinois Institute of Technology in were given by Damian Conway and runs your test on the actual browser. Chicago. Scott provided this report Larry Wall. Unfortunately, the re- Perl modules for testing are available. from the event. You can find its web lease date is still “around Christmas” During the lightning talks, Casey site at <http://yapcchicago.org/>. with no specification of the year. West announced the Pittsburgh Perl Here are my notes about some of Workshop to the audience. Jeff Bis- YAPC has its roots right here in Pitts- the talks. bee gave a quick overview of his burgh. Started as a low-cost Perl con- Larry Wall's keynote was a person- JavaScript::XRay module that looked ference, it was first held on June 24- al glimpse of his life. He showed pic- interesting. Unfortunately, I don't do 25, 1999 at Carnegie Mellon Uni- tures of his family, vacation, church much Javascript right now. There was versity. According to Wikipedia, the and a hack-a-thon. He also spoke also an obviously unrehearsed skit to first YAPC had 31 speakers on vari- about being legally blind for a number raise money for the Perl Foundation. ous Perl topics. The following year, of years. Finally, Larry made the With over 60 talks, these notes just YAPC 19100 (so named for the Y2K point of how the Perl community can don't do justice to the event. I'm also bug) was also held at CMU. be “blind” about things. Well, at least skipping the jail cell-like dorm rooms, Though I've worked in this field for that's what I picked up. freezing air conditioning, problematic several years, this was the first confer- Jose Castro (cog) did an interesting wireless, terrible airport delays, and ence I've ever attended. YAPC::NA talk titled “Perl White Magic: Special observing an arrest for public urina- brings the big names in Perl together. Variables and Command Line tion. But with all that said, I had a Larry Wall, Damian Conway, Mark Switches.” He showed ways to re- good time and I suggest putting Jason Dominus (MJD), brian d foy, duce syntax to make effective Perl YAPC on your conference TODO list Audrey Tang, Ingy dot net, and chro- one-liners with switches and special if you do any Perl hacking. matic to just name a few. I must ad- variables. However, the presentation mit it was neat having a beer at the bar seemed rushed and was done nearly and striking up a conversation with a half an hour before his time was up. fellow that turned out to be Randal L. A fellow by the name of Luke Coming Events Schwartz, co-author of some of the Cross did a presentation on “Auto- Aug. 5: General User Meeting. books that I cut my teeth with when I mated Web Testing with Selenium.” 10AM to 2PM, 3002 Newell- first started learning Perl. Selenium is a cross-browser web ap- Simon Hall, CMU A complete list of the talks can be plication testing framework. Basic- Aug. 12: 5th Annual WPLUG found at the web site listed above. ally, it's a (well-written) Java server Open Source Picnic. 1PM to 6PM, Snyder Park, Whitehall June Roundup Sep. 16: General User Meeting/ Jun. 10 General User Meeting: In- Beth Lynn Eicher tackled a question Nomination Meeting. 12:30PM stead of focusing on a single topic, a on building graphical interfaces. She to 4:30PM, Carnegie Library of “Just Ask WPLUG” session was held showed a partially-functional program Pittsburgh—Squirrel Hill where questions gathered from mail- for building shell scripts which was Sep. 23: Pittsburgh Perl Workshop ing list participants were answered. the project of a former Pitt student. hosted by the Pittsburgh Perl Bill Moran kicked off on the subject As a more useful tool, she demon- Mongers. University Center, of using Ubuntu as a LAMP server. strated Qt Designer which builds nice CMU (pre-registration req'd at The question specifically asked how interfaces for C++ code. Last up was <http://pghpw.org/>) to place files on a machine so the Linux on the XBox. David Ostroske Sep. 30: Ohio LinuxFest. Greater Apache web server would find them. presented a response written by Columbus Convention Center Bill described several ways of desig- Duncan Hutty which described the (pre-registration required at nating directories for web content and software and hardware challenges of <http://www.ohiolinux.org/>) how to set the proper permissions. running Linux on this platform. The public is welcome at all events Page 2 The Open Pitt July 2006 Hot Off the Grill... The Open Pitt is published by Here's a rundown of some recent soft- on July 9. While there are a few new the Western Pennsylvania Linux ware releases of interest: features, the main change was in mov- Users Group Turbolinux FUJI Version 11, the ing to the latest GNOME graphical in- <http://www.wplug.org/top/> newest product from the long-time terface. www.gnucash.org Asian Linux distributor, was an- Showing no fear of version number Editors: Elwin Green nounced on May 30. Also available inflation, BLAG Linux and GNU Vance Kochenderfer are tools to ease migrating from Win- 50000 was released on July 10. This What is Linux? dows systems and DVD playing soft- desktop distribution containing 100% Linux is a kernel, the core of a computer oper- ware. www.turbolinux.com ating system, created by Linus Torvalds. It is Free Software is based on Fedora typically packaged as a distribution, which in- The highly-anticipated release of Core 5 and fits on a single CD. cludes the extra programs necessary to make a Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, code named Dap- www.blagblagblag.org computer functional and useful. Since 1991, it per Drake, occurred on June 1. Separ- Also coming out on July 10 was a has grown from a one-man project which ran ate CD images are available for on one computer to one with thousands of con- live CD based on OpenSolaris, Bel- tributors running on everything from personal desktop and server use. Enhance- eniX 0.4.4. Along with general fixes, organizers to million-dollar supercomputers. ments include a new graphical in- the major improvement is faster CD staller, power and networking man- access. www.genunix.org/ What are Open Source and Free Software? agement, and easy installation for a distributions/belenix_site/ Open Source and Free Software provide you, the user, with the opportunity to see the source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Years of waiting for IBM to pro- code of the programs you use. You are free to PHP) server. www.ubuntu.com duce a Linux version of its groupware use it, share it with others, and even make On June 2, KNOPPIX 5.0.1 was product paid off on July 10 with the changes to it if you wish. While the Free Soft- made available to the public. This release of Lotus Notes 7.0.1. ware and Open Source communities differ in www.ibm.com/software/lotus their philosophical approach, in practical terms granddaddy of the live CDs/DVDs in- they share nearly identical goals. Learn more cludes up-to-date versions of the ker- A major player in the virtualization at <http://www.opensource.org/> nel and applications as well as an im- arena, VMware Server was made and <http://www.gnu.org/>. proved installer. www.knoppix.com available for free download on July This newsletter was produced using Open After months of hearing calls for a 12. It creates virtual servers, giving Source and Free Software. native Linux version, a beta edition of the ability to run multiple guest oper- Google Earth 4 was released on June ating systems. www.vmware.com Copyright 2006 Western Pennsylvania Linux 12. Warning: viewing satellite im- Aiming squarely at the business Users Group. Any article in this newsletter may be reprinted elsewhere in any medium, agery of large portions of the planet market, SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 provided it is not changed and attribution is can be a highly addictive time-waster. was released by Novell on July 17. given to the author and WPLUG. earth.google.com/earth4.html www.novell.com/linux/ On June 19, the minimalist Damn On the server side of the web, the SimplyMEPIS 6.0, the first version Small Linux 3.0 distribution came Plone 2.5 content management system of this friendly Linux desktop to use out. This live CD squeezes a graphic- was announced on July 19. Many Ubuntu rather than Debian as a base, al desktop and applications into less speed improvements have been made came out on July 21. It is equally us- than 50 megabytes. Improvements in- and it now incorporates the latest able as both a live CD and a hard- clude ACPI power management and a Zope application server. plone.org drive installation. www.mepis.org new “penguin with a hat” theme. www.damnsmalllinux.org If other web browsers don't satisfy Location, Location, Location you, give Opera 9 a try.