LuftHans Free Software in 3-D

The Fall semester starts next week for the community colleges. Lots of Free Software classes being offered.

Here are the results for a search for Linux that nets 42 classes and 17 different courses.

Some PLUG and LOPSA-US-AZ members will be meeting to play paintball at noon on June 14th. The event is open to anyone who wants to join us. We can get up to 30 people on the group reservation, but the facility can accomodate more.

See the Xtreme Pursuit group rate page to see what you get for $25. We'll certainly be needing to buy more ammo as well.

We've got lot's of activities coming up.

GNU/Linux security class starting the first week of June.

The Ubuntu desktop class continues on Wednesday at the west side meeting.

Geek paintball at xtreme-pursuit at noon on June 14th. We're working on a group rate, so contact me if you'd like to participate.

The Arizona LoCo is hosting InstallFests on Saturday, May 17th.

See the flyer for more info.

Both InstallFests are from 13:00 to 16:00.

The Phoenix InstallFest is at the First Baptist Church of Peoria in the basketball gym. 8133 W. Cactus Road, Peoria, AZ 85318

The Tucson location is still TBD.

A big round of thanks to Dennis for organizing the Phoenix event for Software Freedom Day 07. Thanks also to the volunteers who helped him organize and run the event and those who did recon on possible event locations.

Dennis has posted a short wrapup with pictures.

Hopefully PLUG will follow Software Freedom Day up with a picnic in October.

Last week's interesting presentation on screen brought in several new people. We also had several new people show up at last month's west side meeting.

It's up to us to make PLUG interesting enough for them to come back.

Thanks to Colin for his presentation. Thanks also to Dierk and Joe for their impromptu mini-presentations.

We also had people show up to advertise jobs they have open. Please post GNU/Linux and Free Software related jobs to the PLUG-discuss mailing list.

James over at Rhino Equipment mentioned that he was planning on starting a local Asterisk user group. He's setup a web site saying that it'll kick off in September.

September is also the Phoenix AstriCon.

Amanda from Rhino Equipment has been out to help at the InstallFest.

PLUG recently moved its web site to new hardware. With the change we also moved to Drupal from Joomla!.

With the change we've been getting more participation in maintaining the web site, which it great. Some of that is due to us doing a better job of getting people access to make updates. Some is we seem to have more people familiar with Drupal.

Once again Kevin is updating the user map to work with the new environment. As usual, he's also adding features.

Noel Gorelick of the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University will be discussing ASU's participation in the robotic exploration of the planet Mars, and how linux plays a part in that work.

Noel did a great job with his last presentation for PLUG. Lots of really cool pictures of Mars and stories behind what was going on. He was also a great presenter as well as having really, really cool materials. This might be the last chance to catch the talk as Noel is leaving the Mars Space Flight Facility at ASU to work for Google.

Wednesday, 2007May23, starting at 19:00.

Arizona Conservatory for Arts and Academics

Recently attendance to PLUG meetings has been growing. We're back up to 30 to 40 people at the east side meeting. Having a lot of good presentations has helped there. Not only have we been getting good Free Software presentations ( including JJ's great, spontaneous presentation about his homemade wireless router ), but we've been getting some excellent presentations that aren't directly about Free Software.

We had two presentations on NASA projects ( thanks Noel and Mike! ), plus an excellent presentation on resume writing ( thanks Don! ). Mike even talked with us afterwards about his experiences on the MythBusters.