On Sunday October 14, 2007 between 11AM and 7PM, PLUG members will assemble at 445 Elgin to fix up old computers that were donated to the user group.

PLUG is on summer haitus. Please join us again on Thursday, September 20th at 7:30 PM. Have a great summer everyone!

Manitoba’s non-profit and voluntary sector organizations are utterly modern in their composition and function, -- based on strong social and community networks, and yet they are struggling. Why? Of the 8,000 or so that exist in the province, nearly a third are facing collapse. For many Voluntary sector and non-profit organizations, the difference between failing and flourishing can be measured in the smallest of margins. The smallest savings in dollars, a boost in efficiency of any fraction of what the private sector has enjoyed over the last several decades, could mean the difference between living and dying. Our organization, the Prairie Linux User Group, is no different. Whether the difficulty is posed by lack of funds, lack of expertise, or lack of committed individuals, the result is the same – when one of these vital organizations closes its doors, some important and badly needed social good gets left undone.

This sector of society – civil society – neither state nor market nor family, has by acclamation assumed the mantle of defender of the Public Good. Public good depends above all else upon strong social networks, which in turn require citizens and institutions who see cooperation as a virtue. The State cannot build using co-operation, its tools are more coercive than cooperative, while large-scale business is competitive rather than cooperative. So the future of social cohesiveness and defending the Common Good rests with civil society. Since voluntary and non-profit organizations play such a crucial role in maintaining the health of our society, we can't afford to let them fall apart.

But what can be done?

The PLUG website runs on Geeklog, which is a php-based weblog with a plugin framework and numerous plugins. A vulnerability was discovered recently which would allow an attacker to use SQL injection to determine the MD5 hash of any user's password, which could then be used offline to find the real password. The vulnerability was discovered by Stefan Esser at the Hardened PHP Project. You can read the full Geeklog announcement also. All of the site customizations were preserved in the upgrade.

PLUG is considering switching to a new day for the monthly meetings, starting in September. Currently it is 3rd Thursday of the month. Discusion is taking place on the Sparkplug mailing list. Two issues are under discusion. How do we pick a day? What day do we pick?

I have been scheduled as the speaker at the May PLUG meeting.

details:
UserLinux
www.userlinux.com
This is a project that Bruce Perens has been working on recently. UserLinux is a subset of Debian GNU/Linux (Sarge), tailored for business environments. The UserLinux approach to building a distribution and the
concept of a custom Debian distribution will be examined, including their support model. Presentation will include demonstrating a live running system, and the default software installed.

Mall of Freedom
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~umjenki5/mallOfFreedom/
One of Mark's summer projects. Mall of Freedom is a web based package management front end (installation, removal). The goal is to provide an extremely simple web based tool for end users to browse and install
applications provided by their distribution.

Swag included.
UserLinux installation CDs and live CDs
Debian GNU/Linux (Sarge) installation CDs.
Richard Stallman audio CDs

Felix Jodoin, a 13 year-old programmer and member of PLUG, has won a gold medal at the Winnipeg School Division Science Fair for his project, which involved creating his own custom distribution of GNU/Linux. Congratulations, Felix!

A source close to the NDP (and a long time member of PLUG) reports that as of this past weekend, Manitoba's New Democratic Party became the first major political party in North America to officially support Free and Open Source Software.

PLUG has been invited by ArtSonic to host a booth at the ArtSonic Art-Music Expo on October 1st to promote Free/Open Source Software in the arts community and to spread the good word about the launch of the Creative Commons Canada site on September 30th. The event should be a wild ride -- they have revived the Garrick Theatre (331 Garry Street) for what is described as "a Synchronous Evening of Vision, Music, Words, and Dance". The show starts at 8 PM and tickets are $10 at Music Trader, Into The Music, Answers (U of M) and Urban Bakery.