Wednesday, December 18, 2019

BLU meeting live stream is active

The live stream of tonight's BLU meeting is live now. Jeff Schiller will be
demoing MIT's App Inventor software.

https://www.youtube.com/user/bostonlinuxandunix/live


--
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
Email: abreauj@gmail.com / WWW http://www.abreau.net / PGP-Key-ID 0x920063C6
PGP-Key-Fingerprint A5AD 6BE1 FEFE 8E4F 5C23 C2D0 E885 E17C 9200 63C6
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Tuesday, December 17, 2019

Boston Linux Meeting reminder tomorrow, Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - MIT App Inventor

When: December 18, 2019 7:00PM (6:30PM for Q&A)
Topic:  MIT App Inventor
Moderator:  Jeff Schiller
Location: MIT Building E-51, Room 315

Note: Parking at E-51 is now free. See note below

Please note that Wadsworth St is open from Memorial Drive to Amherst St,
but is closed between Amherst St to Main St. See the ling below for
additional details.
https://courbanize.com/projects/mit-kendall-square/updates

Summary:

An intuitive, visual programming environment for building smartphone and
tablet apps

Abstract:

Those new to MIT App Inventor can have a simple first app up and running
in less than 30 minutes. The MIT App Inventor project seeks to
democratize software development by empowering all people, especially
young people, to move from technology consumption to technology creation.

Jeffrey discusses the back end of MIT App Inventor, including how he
migrated an instance with 200,000 users and 100 GB of storage from one
cloud provider to another with only a few minutes of downtime.

Bio

Jeff works at MIT in the Information Services and Technology Department
(IS&T). For more then 20 years he's managed MIT's Internet presence. He
also built a significant portion of MIT's Security Infrastructure
including its X.509 certificate deployment. MIT is probably has one of
the largest deployments (and certainly the oldest, dating back to 1996)
of X.509 client Certificates.

Attachments:

https://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/about-us.html
https://jis.qyv.name/
https://www.csail.mit.edu/person/jeffrey-schiller
<https://www.csail.mit.edu/person/jeffrey-schiller>


For further information and directions please consult the BLU Web site
http://www.blu.org

Parking:
On-Campus Free Parking (These parking lots are free after 5pm)

The Amherst Street/E51 parking lot is the best parking option. It
probably will have plenty of spaces. During the school year the lot
tends to be full, but tends to clear out after 6:30 or 7PM.


Due to the never-ending construction, Sloan's Hermann Garage is only
accessible via Main Street. It is a small garage without a gate, and
directly under the Sloan library.

All other MIT lots require permits after hours.

The closest public parking
is Kendall Center Green Garage, next to the Marriott Hotel. The entrance is
90 Broadway Street. For other parking options, see
http://web.mit.edu/facilities/transportation/parking/visitors/public_parking.html


All Cambridge parking meters use Passport by Phone:
https://www.cambridgema.gov/traffic/Parking/paybyphone
This is active on all Cambridge metered parking spaces. Meters are free
after 8PM

For further information and directions please consult the BLU Web site
http://www.blu.org

--
Jerry Feldman <gaf.linux@gmail.com>
Boston Linux and Unix http://www.blu.org
PGP key id: 6F6BB6E7
PGP Key fingerprint: 0EDC 2FF5 53A6 8EED 84D1 3050 5715 B88D 6F6B B6E7


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Friday, December 6, 2019

Boston Linux and Unix InstallFest LXXI reminder, tomorrow, Saturday December 7, 2019

Boston Linux and Unix  Installfest LXXI
When: Saturday December 7, 2019, from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm
Where: MIT Building E-51, Room 061
2 Amherst St, Cambridge
http://mitiq.mit.edu/mitiq/directions_%20parkinge51.htm
Parking is free at the E-51 lot in front of the building.

Lunch is generously sponsored by Ron Thibeau owner of Bluefin Technical
Services

What you need to bring: Your computer, monitor, power strips and your
Linux distributions. We do have copies of some distributions.
In general we have expertise with most distros, but if you need special
expertise, please email the BLU discussion list in advance. Today, most
distros are using Live images that you can try out and then install.
This can be copied to DVDs or USB sticks.There are a number of USB
creators, such as UNetbootin (https://unetbootin.github.io/). Both
Fedora and Ubuntu have a USB creator built in.

COST: It's free! However, we DO have expenses, and contributions are
welcome. Please consider contributing $25 per machine.

Our volunteers will help you to install Linux on your own system. While
Linux runs on most systems, some systems do have configurations and
hardware that may not be supported. Please consult the following web
pages for hardware compatibility. While we prefer you to bring your own
distros, our volunteers will normally have

        Linux Howto Pages: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX/howtos.html
        Linux Frequently Asked Questions: http://tldp.org/docs.html#faq
         Additionally, there are forums and listservs for most distros.

Generally our volunteers have sets of the latest Fedora, SuSE and Ubuntu
distributions:
        * Fedora - https://getfedora.org/ (Fedora 31 Live DVD/USB)
        * Ubuntu - http://www.ubuntu.com ( 18.04.1 LTS DVD/USB or 19.10)
        * other distros can easily be downloaded at the Installfest

We generally have them on local drives and can burn CDs/DVDs and
USBs.Since there are many variants of these distros, we advise you to
bring an empty USB stick with sufficient memory to hold one of the
distros. Live images require about 1.5GB. I usually have some USBs
prepared or can easily burn a USB.

We usually have both a Wired and Wireless network available.
The preferred wireless SSID at MIT is "MIT". In addition John does set
up a local wifi.


Additionally, you can run Linux on your Windows PC through a virtual
machine manager, such as Virtualbox. You can install this in your
Windows machine and run Linux as a guest OS, or install it in your Linux
machine and run Windows as a guest. Linux has a built-in virtual memory
system, but you can also download and install VirtualBox 6.0
(http://www.virtualbox.org) which is free and is available for Linux,
Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows XP and Windows Vista.
Additionally, there are also some VMWare clients that are also free for
Windows.

Please refer to the BLU website (http://www.blu.org) for further
information and directions. There is a parking lot in front of the
building on Amherst St. Enter the building, and take the elevator your
left down to the basement. Room 016 is directly across from the elevator.

--
Jerry Feldman <gaf.linux@gmail.com>
Boston Linux and Unix http://www.blu.org
PGP key id: 6F6BB6E7
PGP Key fingerprint: 0EDC 2FF5 53A6 8EED 84D1 3050 5715 B88D 6F6B B6E7

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