The Silicon Valley Linux User Group (SVLUG) is the oldest and one of the largest Linux user groups in the world. It's a group of Linux hobbyists, professionals, and enthusiasts in the vicinity of San Jose, California, which is also internationally known as Silicon Valley.The members share interests in Linux and free or low-cost implementations of Unix, as well as other open source software. The group was originally formed in 1988, as the PC-Unix Special Interest Group of the Silicon Valley Computer Society. SVLUG celebrated its 10th anniversary at the March 4, 1998 meeting, where Linus Torvalds addressed an audience of 500 people.

SVLUG general meetings are held the first Wednesday of the month, installfests / workshops the 3rd Saturday of the month, and Hacking Society dinners/meetings the 3rd Tuesday of the month. General meetings are either technical presentations, product demonstrations, or general question and answer meetings. The Saturday installfests / workshops are your chance to bring in your computer and install the basic system, or work on more advanced features. The Tuesday evening Hacking Society meetings are "an experiment in collective open source hacking". All meetings are free and open to the public. Sign up for one of our mailing lists, to learn about local events and discuss Linux with local enthusiasts, or join ongoing real-time discussion on the irc.freenode.net "#svlug" IRC channel.

Members of the SVLUG will demonstrate free and open source solutions to needs experienced by nearly all households and businesses-storage and routing/firewalling. Furthermore, they will demonstrate how extremely low power devices such as a Soekris computer and older generic PCs can be the platform for these solutions. The solutions use a GUI for ease of use and adoption. A typical network & computer architecture found in a home or small business will be the basis for these demonstrations. The "front door" will be a 4801 Soekris computer running m0n0wall (router/firewall). It will be connected to a generic switch to which will be connected a FreeNAS network attached storage device allowing storage of data from Linux, BSD, Macintosh and Windows computers.

Various free & open source backup solutions will also be demonstrated such as Backupninja, a simple front end to rsync, rdiff-backup, ssh, and cron.

Please visit the Silicon Valley LUG at booth 27.