The Open Pitt What's cooking in Linux and Open Source in Western Pennsylvania Issue 25 June 2006 www.wplug.org From the Editors: The Long Haul As The Open Pitt begins its third year Today, estimates of market share for Call for Speakers: of publication, it seems appropriate to Mozilla and Firefox combined range Ohio LinuxFest be a bit retrospective. You may have from 9% to 12%, depending on which heard the proverb: all it takes are source you consult. The fourth annual Ohio LinuxFest years and years of hard work to be- Are you seeing a pattern here? will again be held in Columbus, Ohio, and presenters are needed come an overnight success. It's pretty Those endeavors which achieve great well-suited to Open Source and Free to deliver talks about Free and success do so largely through the Open Source Software topics. Software as sayings go. years, if not decades, of effort put for- The event will take place on After all, the “upstart” Linux kernel ward by the people involved. As any September 30, 2006, and propos- has been in public development for 15 parent knows, the work doesn't end at als should be submitted by July 10 years. And the GNU project, whose childbirth—that's just the beginning of using the on-line form available tools are included in each distribution a twenty-year project. from <http://www.ohiolinux.org/ of Linux, was formed 24 years ago. So let's take a look at some re- speak.html>. The original release of BSD, the fore- cently-born projects. A year ago, Sun Once again, the LinuxFest will be runner of today's FreeBSD, NetBSD, Microsystems released OpenSolaris, held at the Greater Columbus Con- and OpenBSD projects, took place an Open-Source version of its popular vention Center. Over 700 people fully 28 years ago. UNIX system. So far, three derivative attended last year, and a larger Maybe system software isn't what distributions (BeleniX, SchilliX, and turnout is anticipated for 2006. Sponsorship opportunities are excites you. One year ago, PC World Nexenta OS) have been based on it. named the Firefox web browser its also available for companies and Although the project has enticed a projects interested in having a “Product of the Year” for 2005. Two number of developers to sign on, to years ago, as the first issue of The booth on the exhibit floor. date we haven't seen announcements Registration for attendees begins Open Pitt was published, Firefox of significant OpenSolaris deploy- stood at version 0.9. This may seem on July 1, and, as always, will be ments. free. A conference pass may be like an extremely short timeframe, but purchased which will get you a t- the true genesis of Firefox was Nets- See LONG HAUL, p. 2 shirt, lunch, and other goodies. cape's code release in 1998, which For further details and updates, gave rise to the Mozilla project. refer to the LinuxFest web site at <http://www.ohiolinux.org/>. May Roundup May 17 General User Meeting: each, he showed that an interesting Coming Events Patrick Wagstrom reviewed the feature of public-key encryption is complex yet increasingly relevant that it allows you to securely commu- Jul. 8: Installfest. 10AM to 5PM, subject of encryption. Starting from nicate with people you've never met. Newell-Simon Hall 3rd floor the definition of cryptography as writ- But this introduces a new wrinkle: atrium (Perlis Atrium), CMU ing a message so that it is difficult— how do you know that a key really be- Jul. 15: Special Event: Site Visit or impossible—for outsiders to under- longs to the person whose name is on at Sungard's Data Center. stand its meaning, he described the it? One answer is the web of trust, 2202 Liberty Ave., Strip two major forms of encryption. These where individuals vouch for the iden- District (RSVP required) are symmetric encryption, where the tity of one another, and by so doing Aug. 5: General User Meeting. sender and recipient share the key to they build a chain between sender and 10AM to 2PM, 3002 Newell- the message, and public-key encryp- recipient. After his presentation, Simon Hall, CMU tion, where the sender uses one key to Patrick put this concept into action by Aug. 12: 5th Annual WPLUG scramble the message and the recipi- signing keys for those who brought Open Source Picnic. 1PM to ent uses another to unscramble it. them to the meeting along with appro- 6PM, Snyder Park, Whitehall After reviewing the basic concepts of priate forms of identification. The public is welcome at all events Page 2 The Open Pitt June 2006 Links of the Month by Michael P. O'Connor The Open Pitt is published by After taking an issue off, this month shows off some of the hand-held the Western Pennsylvania Linux we'll be looking at Linux and Person- devices that are designed to run Users Group al Digital Assistants (PDAs). Linux on them. <http://www.wplug.org/top/> For those of you that just want to For those of you that are brave and sync your PalmOS-based PDA to want to put Linux on a non-Linux Editors: Elwin Green your Linux system, you can use J-Pi- PDA (such as the Palm), check out Vance Kochenderfer lot <http://jpilot.org/>. I know <http://palm-linux.sourceforge.net> What is Linux? that the mail client Evolution does for how to install Linux. It will have Linux is a kernel, the core of a computer oper- have Palm syncing features also, but you download a copy of Linux ating system, created by Linus Torvalds. It is I think that J-Pilot is a bit more stable. <http://uclinux.org/> and give typically packaged as a distribution, which in- Evolution can be found at you instructions on how to get it go- cludes the extra programs necessary to make a <http://www.gnome.org/projects/ computer functional and useful. Since 1991, it ing on your Palm. The stuff on this has grown from a one-man project which ran evolution/> , and there's a good page is a bit dated, but it should be a on one computer to one with thousands of con- chance it's already included with your good place to start. tributors running on everything from personal Linux distribution. As always, if you have any links to organizers to million-dollar supercomputers. For an article on Linux on PDAs suggest, send them in to me at check out the LinuxDevices article on What are Open Source and Free Software? <[email protected]>. Open Source and Free Software provide you, it at <http://www.linuxdevices.com/ Till next month, enjoy these links! the user, with the opportunity to see the source articles/AT8728350077.html>. This code of the programs you use. You are free to use it, share it with others, and even make LONG HAUL, from p. 1 between applications. Just recently, changes to it if you wish. While the Free Soft- ware and Open Source communities differ in One highly-hyped area in recent the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) ratified it as an their philosophical approach, in practical terms times has been virtualization, which they share nearly identical goals. Learn more ISO standard, giving it great credibil- allows running multiple independent at <http://www.opensource.org/> ity and status across the globe. So far, and <http://www.gnu.org/>. environments on a single physical ma- government bodies in Massachusetts chine. A hot player in this arena is This newsletter was produced using Open and Belgium are looking to it as a Source and Free Software. Xen, which a year ago was included standard format for storing data. Al- with the Fedora Core and SUSE though several applications which Copyright 2006 Western Pennsylvania Linux Linux distributions. On the surface, read and write it exist, whether Open- Users Group. Any article in this newsletter the situation today is not much differ- Document succeeds in gaining wide- may be reprinted elsewhere in any medium, ent, as none of the other major distri- provided it is not changed and attribution is spread use may ultimately depend on given to the author and WPLUG. butions have decided to ship it. But it the ability of its proponents to con- small, unglamorous tasks that trans- stands to reason that the Fedora exper- vince users of the need for an open late an idea into reality. ience will eventually result in Xen's format. The availability of a plugin Any project, whether it's a piece of inclusion in Red Hat's enterprise soft- for Microsoft Word wouldn't hurt, software or an organization like ware, and significant work is being either, and reportedly there are pro- WPLUG, needs people like you to done to have Xen included in the main grammers in the Open Source com- take on these tasks. We'll continue to munity working on exactly that. Linux kernel tree. It would not be hammer away here at The Open Pitt, If you take some time to reflect on surprising if a year from now this has and you're encouraged to contribute to these examples, you should see that already taken place. that as well. If you have an article to In the arena of office software, one the greatest indicator of success is the submit, a comment, or even just a year ago the Organization for the Ad- determination and persistence of the question, you can contact us at vancement of Structured Information people and organizations involved.