The Distribution Library & Burning CDs & DVDs at Meetings

With more new members showing up to meetings it seems prudent to provide some sort of CD/DVD Linux-distribution burning facility. It would be nice to provide something like the Freedom Toaster http://www.freedomtoaster.org/, and in fact I've been working on putting together a low-end (Pentium III 1GHz) version of the Toaster for The Working Centre's Computer Recycling Project, which is now in the basement of 66 Queen Street (door on Charles Street - hey, I'm Charles on Charles now). But in the meeting space we have to have something mobile. I propose to bring my notebook which has a DVD/CD Burner. If other members are also willing to burn CDs and DVDs at meetings please feel free to offer to do so at meetings.

New release of LinuxBIOS 2-2536.

The LinuxBIOS team has released a new version of LinuxBIOS 2-2536. The team has listed a number of compelling reasons to use the BIOS:

• 100% Free Software BIOS (GPL)
• No royalties or license fees!
• Fast boot times (3 seconds from power-on to Linux console)
• Avoids the need for a slow, buggy, proprietary BIOS
• Runs in 32-Bit protected mode almost from the start
• Written in C, contains virtually no assembly code
• Supports a wide variety of hardware and payloads
• Further features: netboot, serial console, remote flashing

Raul S. mention at the last meeting that he has a friend who was sending computers to El Salvador. Coincidentally, The Working Centre is currently working on sending 15 computers to Meanguera del Golfo in El Salvador. I have 15 Pentium III's, but I'm short on hard drives above 6GB.

At first I thought I might install the K12 Linux Terminal Server Project and make the boxes diskless. But I think I'll just make 1 Samba file server and put 3-4GB hard drives in the rest with The Working Centre Linux Project on the client computers.

I already have a Pentium III 800MHz with 512MB RAM (which I'm upgrading to 1GB) ready to act as the Samba server.

As many of you know our LUG library has grown pretty large. At one point I was carting down 8 boxes of books, plus the projector, DVD, and speakers (often with the help of LUG members - thank you all). I've managed to reduce what I cart down to 4 boxes because I have quite a few on shelves around Computer Recycling -- but this limits what people see at each meeting. I'd like to make everything available to everyone, but it's a lot of work carting everything up and down, and I like to get out in time to join everyone for the after meeting meeting at Zekes.

I think what I'm going to do is bring down a couple of boxes with a good selection of titles. The library is on the web site. If people email me a couple of days ahead of each meeting I can confirm or deny whether a book is in or out. I think I'll work on managing and updating the library if no one minds.