[KLUG Members] Donating time to the open source community.

[Bruce Smith]

As most of you already know, much of the work for open source is done by
people who donate their time.  Since there are so many people involved,
this is what makes open source great.

There are many ways to donate your time.  The most obvious is donating
time writing code on some software project.  Other ways include writing
documentation, web sites, advocacy, helping your local LUG....

Up to now, almost all of my donated time has gone to helping KLUG.
And don't worry, I'm not going to stop that.  But I've always had the
urge to help out developing an open source software project by writing
code.  I've been very selective, and I've never been able to find a
project that I felt was perfect for me - until recently.

Over the last few weeks I've been helping out with a project that I use,
and believe is an excellent piece of software, but it still has a lot of
areas where it can be improved.  They must have liked my work because a
couple days ago, I was promoted to a "core developer" of Devil Linux. 
The official announcement on their mailing lists is here:

  http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=5001603

Devil Linux is a distribution used mainly as a firewall/router, which
runs completely off CD with configuration changes saved to floppy.  
More info is on the web site:   http://www.devil-linux.org/

The work I did previously was to add the CIPE firewall package to the
Devil Linux base distribution.  It's working now in CVS and beta
releases, and I'm currently running it on my home firewall.

My next effort will be to make Devil Linux more "new-user friendly".
Currently it doesn't have any GUI configuration tools (ala IPCOP), so
everything must be configured from the command line.  I hope to help out
in that area, and I'll announce any big improvements here.

I would someday like to see Devil Linux as easy to configure as IPCOP,
but without the hard drive requirement (which is a big energy waster,
heat generator, noise maker, and potential point of failure, and should
not be required for a firewall or router - IMO).

As I said before, I'm still going to be doing all the things I currently
do for KLUG.  A few months ago, I wrote a very large script that almost
completely automates the downloads, update, and creation of BSware
weekly, so I'll be donating my time saved to Devil Linux.  

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Bruce Smith                bruce@armintl.com
System Administrator / Network Administrator
Armstrong International, Inc.
Three Rivers, Michigan  49093  USA
http://www.armstrong-intl.com/
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