Spring 2010

On Saturday, May 22 in the Ohio Union, the Ohio State Open Source Club will be hosting a LAN Party from 10 AM Saturday morning until 3 AM Sunday morning. Per our Free and open source philosophy, we will be promoting games that either run natively in Linux or run well in WINE and, while some of the games themselves might not be free or open source in nature, we would like to show how gaming in Linux is not a lost cause.

We will be providing a venue for people to come out and play the following computer games:

This Thursday, May 20th at 7PM in Dreese Labs 305, we will be discussing open source gaming, gaming on Linux, gaming with WINE, and just general options for gaming once you switch to an open source operating system. One complaint that seems common in the open source OS world is that gaming is pretty much thrown out the window once you have made the switch. We would like to spend the meeting debunking this myth and showing all of the options that one has in the open source gaming arena.

This Thursday, May 6th at 7PM in *Caldwell 133* (note the change), Alex Lingo will be presenting an old club favorite known as "This Week in Slashdot". Slashdot (commonly abbreviated as /.) is a website located at http://slashdot.org that deals in news for the nerdy. Readers submit articles which are then accepted or rejected by editors and then published on the site. From there, the readers have huge discussions about every aspect of the article which can be very funny/interesting/insightful/etc and oft prove to be a very good read.

This Thursday, April 29th at 7PM in Dreese Labs 317, we will be spending the meeting time attempting to install Linux on anything. We have members with PS3's, iPods, XBOX's, Wii's, phones and whatever else you can think of and we are going to attempt to install an operating system of our choice on them. These members are volunteering their hardware for the meeting and recognize that performing these actions may violate warranties and are not responsible for attempts made meeting goers' own electronics.

This Thursday, June 3rd at 7PM in Dreese Labs 305, Robert Joseph will be presenting on the scripting language Perl. This timing fits nicely because the Open Source Club is hosting Yet Another Perl Conference::North America 2010 later this month and we felt it was appropriate that we should prepare ourselves. More info will be posted soon.

This Thursday, May 27th at 7:30PM in Dreese Labs 305, Jon Tubb will be talking about ShellCoding and other subversion methods. Delve into the magical world of assembly as we explore the inner workings of your favorite software and then make it do your bidding. Botnets, wireless hacking, and everything else you need to get started will be presented.

This Thursday, May 13th at 7PM in Dreese Labs 305, Daniel Thau will be presenting on Linux Mandatory Access Control (MAC). MAC is a different approach to computer security from the Discretionary Access Control (DAC) that is the default for Windows, Macs, most Linux distros, and most other Unixy operating systems. The basic concepts behind MAC will be explained, contrasted against DAC, and various options for MAC on Linux will be covered (with specific focus given to SELinux and TOMOYO Linux).

This Thursday, April 22nd at 7PM in Dreese Labs 305, Jesse Amundsen, a student in the Physics and Geology department at Northern Kentucky University, will discuss the current state of open source geographic information systems (GIS). This will include a brief introduction to the components, functions, and uses of a GIS followed by an exploration of current open source offerings and how they compare to the current proprietary powerhouse that is ESRI's ArcGIS.

This Thursday, April 15th at 7PM in Dreese Labs 305, we will be hosting a discussion session revolving around tips, tricks, and time savers that people have discovered. Do you think you have an awesome .bashrc, .vimrc, key binding, or a little known useful program and want to show it off? This would be the perfect opportunity to share with the rest of the club. There are lots of nifty things that are not widely known and we think this would be a good opportunity to share your knowledge of time savers with others!

This Thursday, April 8th at 7PM in Dreese Labs 305, we will be holding a lightning talk session focusing on programming languages. It came to our attention that knowledge of different languages was fragmented amongst meeting goers so we decided that we should each take turns introducing each other to languages that we have learned and think others would appreciate or find useful. The lightning talk format consists of short talks that each focus on a single topic and are typically given by multiple presenters in succession.

Notice: Due to inexcusably poor service from classroom services, the meeting was moved to Dreese Lab 305 for the current meeting. We apologize for the short notice, and plan on inquiring into why our room was overbooked without our knowledge.

Thursday, April 1^st, at 7PM in Dreese Labs 266, Brian Swaney demonstrated how to effectively utilize the open source photo editing suite GIMP.