MEETING MINUTES: - 
Nov 9th 2002

Members attending the meeting included:  Richard Foerster,  Jim Lucha,  Isaac Saldana, Martin Fleming, Gary Frye, Gregg Rawson,  Tom Nielsen, Dick Mathews, Jeff Lasman, and Ken Howells.  Attending the meeting for the first time was, Jim Gray.  Donna Schrokosch arrived late, but was able to provide a brief update about her efforts at the Hawthorne Center.

Members not in attendance at this meeting included:  Alan Shoemaker, Don Evinger,  Mac Shaver, Klaus Herzog,  Ossil Macavinta, Michael Karshner, Dana Rodin, Todd Lyons, Dave Reisz, Gary Taylor,  Hung Nguyen, Kandy Phan, Tad Peters,  Forrest Sherman,  Craig Carignan, and  Jim Vassilako.    New members, Iffiok Nsek , Mark DiNicolai,  Karl Pomroy, Joe Bruner, Eric Holland, and Eric Schwartz were unable to make this meeting.   

Greg Rawson shared a bit of computer history with us at the start of the meeting.  Despite a youthful appearance, Greg has had many years of experience in the computer field.    He shared  an old issue of “S-80 Computing”  a newspaper for people involved with the TRS-80 computers in which he was involved building, testing, and writing about hardware.  In this issue there was an article he had written about a switching device that allowed file transfer between student systems and a classroom instructor. 

Martin Flemming, hasn’t been able to attend for the past three months due to travel.  He mentioned that while in London on a recent trip he visited a  museum housed in a historic building in Bletchley Park which was the center of a massive code-breaking effort during WWII.  A number of interesting machines including Enigma, were on display.

Martin also told us about a device called an Audio Tron –100 which  he recently added to his home stereo system.   AudioTron, has a built in Ethernet port and uses your home network to play Internet radio from a networked Internet connection and digital music files from a PC’s hard drive, so you don’t have to be in front of your PC to enjoy the benefits of digital music.   It runs Win-CE and uses a program called “Java Tron” to provide a user interface.  Martin got his unit at Fry’s

http://www.audiotron.net/audiotron/producthome.asp  AudioTron-100 (Ethernet Only) Price: $299.95

  Jim Lucha provided a brief update on his JAMD project.  He says he is now working on the next release, which will be based on Red Hat – 8.   Version 8 has the new gcc and a number of refinements that make it easier.   Since the last meeting Jim was involved in a project to do the ISO’s for “Pink Tie” distribution that is available at Cheepbytes.   In a publicized dispute with Cheapbytes.com, Red Hat apparently demanded that Cheapbytes not to sell the ISO images of Red Hat Linux as "Red Hat Linux." As a result, you can now buy "Pink Tie Linux" from Cheapbytes, which consists of the Red Hat ISO images from Red Hat's Web site.

http://newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/12/10/2014239&mode=thread

3 CD-ROM Pink Tie 8.0 Install Set Shipping $6.99
5 CD-ROM Pink Tie 8.0 Install & Source Set Shipping $10.99

Ken Howells shared his recent experiences installing Mandrake 9  on his system.  He had Mandrake 7.2 on one partition and wanted to install 9 on an unused partition.  Unfortunately the upgrade clobbered the mbr, and he was unable to run xFree4 with his video card.  He was able to get xFree-3 working with it, however.

  Jeff Lasman mentioned he is looking for volunteers to work on a project he is working on to develop proprietary server configuration and security enhancements that would work with PLESK server administration.   Jim Lucha suggested two existing projects to look into:  “NSA SE Linux”  and LIDS, which stands for Linux Intrusion Detection/Defense System.   LIDS is essentially a kernel patch and admin tool to enhance the linux kernel security.  It includes an implementation of a reference monitor and Mandatory Access Control in the kernel

It was an interesting meeting and we are looking forward to our next meeting which will be Dec 14th, 2002.