From: peter@va.pubnix.com (Peter H. Salus) Subject: Conference on Freely Redistributable Software [repost] Date: 2 Jan 1996 16:01:20 GMT Conference on Freely Redistributable Software Sponsored by the Free Software Foundation Over the past 15 years freely redistributable software with accessible code has become ubiquitous. GNU Emacs is the most popular Unix editor in the world; Linux may well be the most exciting Unix-compatible kernel; Perl has become indispensible to system administrators; Expect automates and controls interactive programs. Join us for a unique conference that will bring together implementors of different types of freely redistributable software as well as the publishers of the operating systems and the tools and applications. Systems and kernels involved will be the Gnu/Hurd, Linux, NetBSD, 386/BSD, and FreeBSD; tools and applications include Bison, Flex, Expect, Emacs, PERL, and GCC. This is the first conference dedicated to bringing together all those involved in freely redistributable software. Join us for this and much, much more! Cambridge Center Marriott Friday, February 2 through Monday, February 5, 1996 Full Conference Schedule Friday, February 2, 1996 Registration 6-10pm Reception 7-9pm Saturday, February 3, 1996 Registration 8am - 6pm Tutorials 9am - 5pm S1: Linux: An Open System for Everyone (am) - Phil Hughes S2: Installing and Running Linux (pm) Phil Hughes S3: Expect (full day) - Don Libes S4: C News (am) - Henry Spencer & Geoff Collyer S5: Advanced editing with Emacs (pm) Richard M. Stallman [box lunch is included with tutorial registration] BoFs 7pm - 10pm Sunday, February 4, 1996 Registration 8am - 6pm 9-10am: Keynote: Linus Torvalds, introduced by Phil Hughes 10:30am: Session I - Chris Demetriou, chair Automated Management of an Heterogeneous Distributed Production Environment - Ph. Defert et al., CERN Freely Redistributable Software across the Internet - Neil Smith, University of Kent Linux for Research and Teaching of Operating Systems - Victor Yodaiken, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology 1:30pm: Session II - Don Libes, Session Chair Freely Redistributable Instead of Commercial Software -- Yugoslav Experience - Radivoje Zonjic, University of Belgrade Linux on the OSF Mach3 micro-kernel - Francois Barbou des Places, OSF/Grenoble Internationalization in the GNU Project - Ulrich Drepper, University of Karlsruhe Free Software vs. the Medical Challenges of the 1990's - Greg Wettstein, Roger Maris Cancer Center 3:30pm: Session III The RPM Packaging System - Marc Ewing & Erik Troan, Red Hat Software Why Should the Value-Added Reseller care about Free Software? - Rick R. Castrapel & Frank E. Barone Coordinating Joint Cost/No-cost Rights for Software Developed with SBIR Funding - Philip A. Wilsey & Dale E. Martin, University of Cincinnati Licensing Alternatives for Freely Redistributable Software - L. Peter Deutsch, Aladdin Enterprises 5:15pm: Keynote: Richard M. Stallman, introduced by L. Peter Deutsch 8-9pm: Special Presentation on INN - Rich Salz, OSF 8-10pm: BoFs Monday, 5 February 1996 8-10am: Registration 9am - 5pm: Tutorials M1: Programming the GNU/Hurd (full day) - Michael I. Bushnell M2: BSD Internals (am) - Margo Seltzer & Aaron Brown M3: GCC (pm) - Richard M. Stallman M4: Perl (full day) - Tom Christiansen Conference Registration: $200 (Students see *) Tutorial fees: pre-reg on-site Half-day $175 $220 One day $295 $375 One-and-a-half $470 $570 Two days $540 $640 (Students see *) HOTEL INFORMATION The conference will be held at the Cambridge Center Marriott, just across the street from the MIT campus and at the Kendall/MIT station of the Red Line ``T'' \(em the Boston subway. To Make Your Hotel Reservation Special hotel rates have been arranged for attendees at the Conference on Freely Redistributable Software: US $95/night single or double. There are non-smoking rooms available. Call the Cambridge Center Marriott directly: +1 800 228-9290 in the US and Canada; +1 617 494-6600 from elsewhere. Fax: +1 617 494-0036. To ensure that you get the special hotel rate, tell ``reservations'' that you are an attendee at the Conference on Freely Redistributable Software. +1 800 228-9290 in the US and Canada; +1 617 494-6600 elsewhere Program committee Peter H. Salus, chair Robert J. Chassell Chris Demetriou John Gilmore Marshall Kirk McKusick Rich Morin Eric S. Raymond Vernor Vinge ---- TUTORIAL OFFERINGS Saturday, February 3 Course S1. Linux: An Open System For Everyone (half-day tutorial, am); Instructor: Phil Hughes Originally a PC-based product, Linux now runs on other hardware including the Alpha. Linux is making serious inroads into commercial areas and, in many cases, offers a viable Unix alternative at low cost. Topics covered include: What is Linux?; The Linux Copyright--GPL; Linux Design Philosophy; Linux Distributions; Is Linux Commer-cially Viable?; Using Linux; Future of Linux. Phil Hughes is the publisher of the \fILinux Journal\fP, the monthly magazine of the Linux community. Course S2. Installing and Running Linux (half-day, pm); Instructor: Phil Hughes This is a look ``under the hood.'' It will cover what makes up a Linux system, what you need, how to install it, and what to do when something goes wrong. Topics will include: Assessing Hardware Requirements; Comparison of Linux Distributions; Configuration Decisions; Installation; Systems Administration; Networking and Interoperability; What to do when something goes wrong. Course S3. Expect -- Automating Interactive Applications (full-day tutorial); Instructor: Don Libes This tutorial will teach students how to automate interactive programs such as telnet, ftp, passwd, and many other applications. It will also explain how to test interactive applications, how to connect such applications, how to reuse interactive programs in Web applications, and how to build X GUIs without rewriting existing code; all this with security and reliability. An hour will be devoted to Tcl/tk. Don Libes is the author of Exploring Expect and co-author of Life with Unix. In another life he works at NIST. Course S4. C News (half-day tutorial, am); Instructors: Geoff Collyer and Henry Spencer C News is one of the major reception/storage/expiry software packages; superseding B News completely, it is in widespread use. Topics will include: decisions that should be made before installation; what resources you need; news database organization; configuring C News; building, checking, and installing C News; setting up control files; testing, troubleshooting, and startup; maintenance and housekeeping. Geoff Collyer has been programming computers for almost a quarter-century, and using and administering Unix systems for almost 20 years. He is now a Member of Technical Staff in the Computing System Research Laboratory of AT&T Bell Laboratories. Henry Spencer is an independent consultant and author, long involved with Usenet and netnews. He and Geoff Collyer wrote C News, the first high-performance package for Usenet article transport and storage. Course S5. Advanced editing with Emacs (half-day tutorial, pm); Instructor: Richard M. Stallman Emacs is both an editor and a programming environment. In this tutorial, the creator of the most popular of all Unix editors will move beyond the everyday. This tutorial will explain advanced Emacs facilities for editing text and programs and manipulating files -- features including programming language major modes, tags tables, enriched mode, and shell buffers -- all without Emacs Lisp programming. Richard M. Stallman is the President of the Free Software Foundation and the creator of Emacs. He is also the principal author of Bison and GCC. Monday, February 5 Course M1. Programming the GNU/Hurd (full-day tutorial); Instructor: Michael I. Bushnell The GNU/Hurd is a multi-server operating system which runs on Mach 3.0. In Unix and most Mach-based systems, the majority of system facilities are concentrated in a single entity (called variously the `kernel' or the `single server'). The goal of this tutorial is to describe the architecture of the Hurd with special attention to its innovative aspects, as well as to provide guidance to programmers who wish to program or extend the Hurd. It will describe the existing Hurd servers and the library as well as cover subjects such as: The core interfaces of the GNU/Hurd for process management and I/O; The implementation of signals entirely in the library, and how correctness is achieved; How to use the additional libraries the Hurd provides to make writing servers easier; The implementation of fork and exec. Michael Bushnell is the principle architect and designer of the GNU/Hurd. He works for the FSF doing operating systems development. Course M2. BSD Internals (half-day tutorial, am); Instructors: Margo Seltzer and Aaron Brown This tutorial will present an overview of the kernel architecture of 4.4BSD. The presentation will emphasize porting to new architectures. Margo Seltzer received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, where she worked on file systems. She is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Harvard University; Aaron Brown is at Harvard University, where he has recently ported NetBSD to the SS 20. Course M3. Writing machine descriptions using GCC (half-day tutorial, pm); Instructor: Richard M. Stallman This tutorial will explain the overall organization of the GNU C compiler and the RTL data structure, and how to use it to write a new machine description. Students don't need to know anything about the GNU C internals, but should be prepared to learn fast. Richard M. Stallman is the principal author of GCC. Course M4. Perl Programming (full-day tutorial); Instructor: Tom Christiansen Perl is a publicly available and highly portable interpreted programming language occupying the large niche between shell and C programming. Perl's syntax and features resemble C, in combination with the best parts of sh, sed, awk, etc. Because Perl incorporates aspects of more than a dozen other Unix tools, experienced users will come up to speed on Perl rapidly. This course is suitable for individuals who have barely looked at Perl before. It is essential that students have a strong background in Unix shell programming, with a good working knowledge of regular expressions. Some background in sed, awk, and some C programming is useful but not essential. Topics of this tutorial include detailed descriptions and numerous examples of the syntax and semantics of the language, its data types, operators, control flow, regular expressions, and I/O facilities, and the Perl debugger. Tom Christiansen is a software consultant specializing in Perl applications, optimizations, and training. He serves on the Board of Directors of the USENIX Association, and is well-known for his courses in Perl programming. Tutorial fees: pre-reg on-site Half-day $175 $220 One day $295 $375 One-and-a-half $470 $570 Two days $540 $640 (Students see *) -------------------------------- Conference on Freely Redistributable Software REGISTRATION FORM Name: Company/Address: Phone: ___________________ Fax: __________________ email: ______________________________ Conference Registration Fee $200 (to 1/12/96); $250 (on site); Students (see *) $_____________ TUTORIALS I wish to register for: Saturday, 3 February S1. Linux OS (am) [ ] S2. Instal. Linux (pm) [ ] S3. Expect (full day) [ ] S4. C News (am) [ ] S5. Adv. Emacs (pm) [ ] Monday, 5 February M1. GNU/Hurd (full day) [ ] M2. BSD (am) [ ] M3. GCC (pm) [ ] M4. Perl (full day) [ ] TOTAL ______ A boxed lunch is included with Tutorial registration. Please indicate preference: Saturday Tutorials: [ ] Chicken [ ] Beef [ ] Vegetarian Tossed Salad Monday Tutorials: [ ] Turkey [ ] Ham+cheese [ ] Vegetarian pocket * Attention Students: Student fees: $50/conference; $75/tutorial; Preregistration only. There will be a limited number of scholarships available for students applying with a copy of current student identification. PAYMENT: Enclosed: [ ] Check [ ] Money order [ ] Traveler's Check Payments must be in US Dollars. Credit Card: [ ] MC [ ] Visa [ ] AmEx [ ] JCB [ ] Diner's Club [ ] Carte Blanche Credit Card Number: _______________________________________ Exp. Date: ______________ Signature: _______________________________________ The Conference on Freely Redistributable Software will be held February 2-5 1996 at the Cambridge Marriott Hotel, Kendall Square, Cambridge MA, USA. For more information contact: Free Software Foundation 59 Temple Place Suite 330 Boston MA 02111-1307 USA Phone: +1 617 542-5942 Fax: +1 617 542-2652 email: confinfo@gnu.ai.mit.edu -- ----------------------------------------------------------- Peter H. Salus #3303 4 Longfellow Place Boston, MA 02114 +1 617 723 3092 -----------------------------------------------------------