Here's my collection of Linux CD's/DVD's I've accumulated over the years. I've just typed the label descriptions I jotted down on them with marker at the time I created them. If you'd like a copy of one of these let me know prior to a lug meeting and I'll bring whichever ones are requested to be burned.

Mandrake
Linux Mandrake 7.0 (Air) - 1 CD
Linux Mandrake 7.1 (Hydrogen) - 2 CDs
Linux Mandrake 7.2 - 2 CDs
Linux Mandrake 8.2 - 3 CDs
Linux Mandrake 9.0 - 3 CDs
Virtual Linux (Mandrake 8.0 CD Boot) - 1 CD

Red Hat Linux
Red Hat Linux 6.1 - 1 CD

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.

Next meeting at the pre-meeting we'll be showing a 17 minute video about getting "Dad" to switch to Linux. Dad, of course could be anyone with an interest in computers. This should leave lots of time for new Linux user questions and casual conversation.

OpenStreetMap is a project aimed squarely at creating and providing free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them; the project was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive or unexpected ways."

An introduction to the Who, What, Where, Why of OSM will be followed by a demo of the steps in collecting, categorizing and contributing data to OSM.

There are already LUG in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Cambridge, England. Why not Cambridge, Ontario? Well, now there is a LUG in Cambridge, Ontario. Or there will be, shortly.

CambridgeLUG Will hold pre-meetings, in December 2006 and January 2007 before the official grand Opening in February 2007.

The December, Organizational Meeting invites the participation and input of those interested in helping to form and mold Cambridge LUG.

The January 2007 Founders Meeting will embrace and extend the work of the first meeting. We'll discuss upcoming meeting schedules, topics for presentations and other matters of the LUG. We'll have our first presentation too.

So I have this Norstar Startalk Mini that I have to get going, but we've lost all the Windows software (a real shame), and no one knows the administrator password. I connected the serial cable from the Startalk box to one of the Linux boxes under my desk, launched minicom on /dev/ttyS0 with 300 7N1 and voila: I got to see the box doing system startup tests.

At this point I tried sending some break signals, hoping to stop the box before it loaded the system software... but no luck.

I looked into minicom's internal scripting language, runscript. If you have minicom installed you should be able to just type man runscript to see the commands runscript will take.