Capital Area BSD Users Group

This month's meeting was once again at Raba in Columbia. We had nine attendees, but with two presenters, that's not all that great! In a BSD Users Group, it's the Users that make the group great! I hope we have more participation next month.

To start us off, Johan Huldtgren gave a short talk about FreeBSD's GEOM ([PDF Slides]). He discussed the basics behind the software RAID framework and explained how he uses it.

To close the meeting, Bret Lambert (tbert) gave a talk about contributing code to the OpenBSD project ([HTML Slides]). He talked about learning C, finding a place to start, kernel hacking and being patient waiting for interest in your diffs.

Audio versions of the meeting are also available as part of MetaBUG: OGG and MP3. (Thanks to Newt0n for hosting the files)

Many thanks to Johan and Bret for their great talks!

We adjourned the meeting across the street at the Green Turtle.

Filed under:   Meetings

As reported on The OpenBSD Journal, a Linux kernel developer removed the BSD License text from Reyk Floeter's Atheros wireless driver.

As Theo de Raadt wrote in a comment to The OpenBSD Journal article:

The other files in the driver, written by Reyk, are the replacement for the HAL. This basically is the hidden register access code which Sam (basically employeed by Atheros) refused to release. This code was placed by Reyk under an ISC license, something our project prefers to use since it is so simple that even a grade 5 student cannot misunderstand what it says. It translates to "You can do anything, but not delete the text".

Only Reyk could change that copyright notice, since he is the author.

At this time, Slashdot does not consider this news (even though a story has been submitted). This must be a too negative reflection of their beloved Linux.

Filed under:   News

This month, we'll meet at the Raba office in Columbia again at 6:30 PM ET. We are considering moving the meetings to PROTEUS in the future, but this month the meeting is at "the usual place".

Johan will give a short talk on FreeBSD's GEOM. Bret will stop being a straphanger and give a short talk about contributing code/diffs to OpenBSD. After the talks, if we have time and interest, I can possibly do a demo on starting a port.

After the talks, we'll then head over to Nottingham's or The Green Turtle for a couple beers.

Filed under:   Events   News

This month's meeting was once again at Raba in Columbia. We had ten attendees, so attendance was pretty good.

After a few technical hurdles (no DVI converter for Patrick's laptop and a seemingly broken VGA out on mine), the meeting got underway with Patrick Thomasson's presentation on OpenVPN (HTML or OpenVPN Presentation PDF). He gave an overview of how to setup OpenVPN and included several pitfalls one could face along with ways to avoid them.

After Patrick, I gave a short talk on Yaifo. Since most everyone was familiar with Yaifo, it was a very brief talk.

We closed the meeting next door at Nottingham's where the discussion never swayed from serious BSD-related issues. Or something.

Filed under:   Meetings