[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting notes for Monday April 16th 2018

[Bobbie Sellers]

Hi LUGers,
     Well I got back online as you can see thanks to the loan of an 
ADSL2+ modem
by Aaron and the gift of another  Netgear router from John S.

     The meeting as I may have mentioned was small but very helpful for me.
I came in an hour earlier than usual so that I had some time to deal with
my e-mail which had stacked up with over 100 items waiting.  Still have
to act on those that are not on SF-LUG mailing list.  Have ordered a
another modem from Amazon and should have it installed by this time
next week.

     John S. showed up about 5:30 PM with a bag of routers and a full of
bon homie.  He left another Dell mini tower in his car.  But he brought
a laptop and so tried out several of the distributions, which I had brought
along.

     A few minutes later Aaron C. came in and had several items 
including a modem
Siemens SpeedStream 4100 ADSL+ which he has kindly loaned me.
     Later he bought the mini Dell tower from John S.

     Jim S. came in about 6:30 PM,  far earlier than we had hoped.

     A discussion ensued of which routers could use Open-Wrt or DD-Wrt
software or other efforts to replace the firmware of the routers with a
more secure version of Linux.    How such replacement could be
accomplished was a matter of some discussion as well.  These efforts
are based on Linksys WRT54G model router which used Open Source
software thus making it accessible to developers originally but they are
trying to get more routers supported.  The hardware requirement of
more than 32 megabytes of ram is eliminating a lot of older cheaper
devices. Read more about the effort at
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DD-WRT>.

     A little before 8 PM the meeting ended and transactions were concluded
and Jim kindly gave myself and Aaron rides myself to home and Aaron to
a transfer point.

     The next meeting will be on Sunday May 6th from 11 AM to 1 PM.

     I expect to have at least one major distribution release in hand but
you will hear from me about April 30 with the regular meeting
announcement.  Will also have Clonezilla in amd86, i686, and
i686-PAE.

     Anyone attending the meeting is free to correct my omissions or
incomprehension of the activities and asked to do so asap so that the
membership not in attendance will not be mis-informed any longer
than necessary.

     As always thanks for your attention.
     Don't let Earth Day on the 22nd of April slip by without attention!

     Bobbie Sellers