Our next meeting is this Thursday, April 3rd, 6:30 PM, in the Computer Lab of the Boise Public Library, Capital Blvd, across from Julie Davis Park. We will be discussing installing Linux to USB drives, specifically the Ubuntu 7.10 LiveCD and SuSE 10.3. Pretty cool to be able to run and install Linux to and from a USB drive. There will be the usual time for discussion of other topics of interest and planning for our May meeting. Here are some links that we will be referencing in the discussions at tonights meeting: This is an article I recently wrote on USB drive usage: http://www.boiselug.org/Linux/USBHeavn.pdf Test your system for usb boot compatibility: http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2007/09/17/testing-your-system-for-usb-boot... Ubuntu USB install directions: http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2007/09/28/usb-ubuntu-710-gutsy-gibbon-inst... SuSE USB install instructions: http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2008/03/28/usb-suse-flash-drive-install/ http://en.opensuse.org/Portable_SUSE Booting Linux using USB-ZIP on older systems http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2007/02/20/booting-linux-from-usb-zip-on-ol... Creating and booting off a usb-zip formatted drive http://wonkabar.org/archives/358 Brian Aldridge showed off Pendrive's new release of PendriveLinux that you can install from Windows, no burning an iso, very easy install. So quick and easy, that one of the members downloaded it on his laptop during the meeting and intalled it to a USB drive. Based on Mandrake (Mandriva) and the Toronto McNLiveCD, it is very cool. http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2008/02/13/pendrivelinux-2008-install-from-... Footnote to USB Bootable Linux. I have personally built both Ubuntu and PendriveLinux drives discussed here. They have not been stable enough for anykind of consistent or reliable use. Another member has experienced overheating with PendriveLinux, which I also experienced. I have SuSE 10.3 on a USB and so far it has been reliable but I have not worked with it enough to really be confident in its long term use. Booting USB drives on desktops is a crapshoot even on Desktops over 2 years old. It appears the the most reliable means of booting a LiveCD is via a CD and then saving the settings (persistence) on a USB drive, all of this being well supported. March Meeting Report: Brian Aldridge demonstrated and discussed Amazon's Web Services which are available at http://aws.amazon.com. We looked at their Elastic Compute Cloud, Simple Storage Service, Mechanical Turk, and their Flexible Payment Service. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides re sizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) is a PayPal alternative that allows the movement of money between any two entities, humans or computers. Amazon Mechanical Turk (Amazon Mturk) is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. While computing technology continues to improve, there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as identifying objects in a photo or video, performing data de-duplication, transcribing audio recordings or researching data details. A person would be able to do such tasks for a pre-agreed payment amount.