OSEL Blog

The May issue of Open Sources is now available.  This issue is almost exclusively about the OSWALD (Oregon State Wireless Active Learning Device).

On Monday (4/27) the LUG, CPATH, and EECS jointly celebrated the release of the OSWALD.  Not only did we get to see how many people can fit into the new LUG room, we also enjoyed an afternoon of cake, pizza, mingling, and hacking.

For those who haven’t been introduction to the OSWALD, it is a hand-held device originally designed by OSU student Kevin Kemper as his senior design project.  Now the OSWALD plays an active role in the undergraduate computer science program by demonstrating concepts in a hands-on setting.  Since it’s launch, first year students have written an MP3 player for the OSWALD in Java.  Read Open Sources for more.

The OSU Linux Users Group and Open Source Education Lab are hosting two Linux tutorials on Monday and Tuesday next week.

Tuesday’s tutorial will introduce Linux at OSU/Beginning BASH.  This tutorial will outline everything you need to know about our Linux engineering servers on campus (flip and flop) as well as introducing BASH.  No knowledge of Linux is required and the presentation will be aimed towards using Linux servers as a tool rather than a home computer.

In short:
What: BASH/Linux server help
Who: Anyone interested is invited
Where: KEC 1005
When: Tuesday 10/7

Topics covered:

• Command Line basics: man and –help, options/flags, parameters, how to change from the default shell to BASH
• Remote server basics:  ssh, scp
• Basic negotiating the file system: ls, cd, mv, mkdir, rm, find, grep, cp, intro to pipes
• Basic file editing/reading: less, vim, nano, emacs
• environment variables and aliases
• What shell and the engineering servers will and will not do either because of capacity, no root access, etc.

Monday’s tutorial will be aimed more towards running, installing, and working with Linux as a personal computer. Though the same content will be covered there will also be a mini install feast, more individual help, and more focus on package managers, Linux distributions, etc.  This meeting will also be in KEC 1005 at 6PM.

I hope to see some of you there! Feel free to contact me with questions or comments.
Sarah Cooley cooleys@onid.orst.edu

Michael Leibowitz, OpenOffice.org developer, gave an overview of the tools and processes used in developing OO.org. Particularly he concentrated on the steps a developer must take to get a patch into the project. A video of the presentation can be found on Google Video.

Eclipse Foundation members Bjorn Freeman-Benson and Ward Cunningham came to OSU to give a presentation in Professor Budd’s Open Source Development class. The title of the talk was “Software Creativity the Wiki Way.” Ward Cunningham is, of course, the inventor of the wiki-web concept, as well as being coinventor (with Kent Beck) of CRC cards, and part developer of the ideas of extreme programming. After the talk Bjorn blogged some nice comments on the experience, which you can read here .

Update: a video of the presentation can be found here.

Rene Reitsma, Oregon State Business Professor, presented the issues involved in creating an Open Source business and some of the strategies used by IBM, VA Linux and Red Hat. Attention was also given to the issue of total cost of ownership for companies using OSS to run their businesses. A recording of the presentation can be found on Google video and the slides can be found on the CS419 website.

Valerie Henson, Linux Kernel hacker working for Intel, came to Corvallis to talk with the CS 461 class about “how to write open source code and get paid for it, too.” As Val noted, in the dreary post-dot com crash era, the conventional wisdom is that there are more qualified computer professionals than job openings. In reality, the reverse is true in many areas of software development. Open source development is a fast-growing field; many Linux-related programming jobs go unfilled for 6 months or more for lack of qualified applicants.