I went to the Portland Linux Group meeting last night. There were around
50 or 60 people there (sorry I didn't actually count).
Tim Witham who is "Intel MSL - Linux Program Manager" (what ever that
means) talked for about an half hour on the Open Source Development Lab
that is coming to Portland this year. It will be operational by December
31, 2000. Tim is the new Lab Director.
The lab's purpose is to give developers a place to validate their stuff for
Enterprise Level Systems, i.e., big networks, processors (IBM 390s?), etc.
Think of it as the box in the middle:
[developers] -> [Open Source Development Lab] -> [Distributors]
The lab is intended to be a "Lights out data center]. I think that means
no one is actually there. Stuff is run remotely.
Projects will be determined by the lab director following a Board of
Director's guidelines. The Board will be made up of people from the
sponsors and the Linux community. The Linux community will have 1 more
person on the Board than the sponsors.
If you want to know more, check out their web site at www.osdlab.org.
Keith Packard spoke for about an hour on XFree86. He has been on the
XFree86 core team for over 14 years. This was a very interesting talk.
With release 4.0, X is now modular. The 4.02 release will support
transparency and a better way to render fonts. These changes should make
for a much better graphics programming environment. Okay, I don't know if
I got this all right. I am new to Linux and so I am just sucking it all in
- understanding will/is coming later... Anyway this revision seemed like a
bid deal to me and I am looking forward to working on it. If your
interested this stuff is available for you on the X web site. I don't know
what it is but I am sure someone on this list does.
The last thing I want to mention is that the Portland Linux Group is
starting an "Advanced Topics" meeting to be held the 3rd Wednesday of each
month. This is going to cover advanced topics where the audience is
expected to already know a lot about the subject. The meetings are
sponsored by Mandrake (they pay for the meeting room). Food and drinks are
also available for you to purchase if you wish. The person making the
announcement said that "You win if you are able to stump the speaker!" The
first meeting will be on October 18th (you will need to find out from PLUG
where and the time). The subject will be something like "Building a Tar
System Backup that actually is usable." I think the problem is "How do you
backup a system that is being used such that when you restore it all the
pieces will still work together?" So if you go you should already have an
idea why this is a problem and some of the things that one could try won't
work. Sorry if I am stating the obvious - again I am still new to Linux...
I didn't go out for beer with them afterwards so I don't know what happened
there.
Oh, one final thing, Intel was looking for a "Sr. Software Engineer" and a
"Performance Software Engineer". I'll bring the two sheets they handed out
to next Thursday's Clinic. The Intel contact is Tuan Phamdo
(503/696-6251). He was NOT the person that made the announcement. If you
need more information on this subject, you can call me (I'll read the spec
sheets to you) or Mr. Phamdo.
Kent
