December 2004
We had a presentation of the Asterisk open source
PBX / VoIP project
by Greg Boehnlein. Mr. Boehnlein was one of the many featured speakers
at the 2nd annual Ohio LinuxFest. Greg's slides are available here.
We got started fairly promptly and listened intently as Greg explained
the rather considerable capabilities of Asterisk and what is needed to
set it up and use it. There appeared to be quite a bit of interest
from several attendees, based on the Q & A during and after the
presentation.
Mr. Boehnlein reminded us that Patrick Volkerding
(Slackware Linux guru) is still seriously ill, as reported on Slashdot, suggested the possibility
of a regional Installfest, and asked anyone who could to help with next
year's Ohio Linuxfest.
In spite of the close proximity to Christmas, and the rather unpleasant
cold windy weather, we had about 30 people show up for tonight's meeting.
After the meeting, several of us went to TGI Friday's.
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November 2004
We briefly thought we would have a presentation of GnuCash by Andy Grimm. Unfortunately,
Andy was not able to attend tonight's meeting. So we improvised and
briefly discussed a number of topics. It turned out to be quite an
interesting and lively meeting. The subjects included:
- Gary Turner reminded us that the DMA® Holiday Dinner will be Monday, Dec. 13 and
tickets are still available for $21 each, and that DMA® is selling
Entertainment Books
for $25 to help raise money for our organization.
- Jason Cook talked a bit about some network ideas that are being
considered for our next Dayton
LANfest. Anyone interested in working on that project should
contact Jason.
- Dave Lundy mentioned that he had been exploring Ubuntu, a relatively new Linux distro
based on Debian. A couple people
bought copies of the Ubuntu CD.
- Ken Phelps mentioned that new releases of both FreeBSD (5.3) and OpenBSD (3.6) are available.
There was some discussion of the differences between the two.
GT summarised it by saying OpenBSD is closed - as in secure.
Virtually no Internet applicationw will work out of the box until
you specifically enable them.. This led to some discussion of iptables by Jason and others.
- Ken Phelps suggested discussing one or two
commands each month. Someone else suggested setting up a wiki of the monthly
commands. Ken gave an impromptu discussion and example of using xargs
to process a long list of arguments. Then Jason
discussed wiki in some detail and mentioned the amazing Wikipedia.
- Ken and others also talked a bit about podcasting,
which he'd heard about on a recent IT Conversations program.
Of course this led to some discussion of
- RSS
by Jason
- Russell Yeley suggested a project to build
MythTV systems
and several people expressed interest in participating.
He also tried to stir up interest in a group buy of the HD-3000 HDTV tuner card
developed exclusively for Linux. There was considerable discussion
(mostly by Jason) of MythTV, hardware requirements, etc.
Jason suggested using an nVIDIA GeForce FX5200 or better video card for
a MythTV client. We'll probably start assembling some systems early
next year.
- That led to a fair amount of discussion of BitTorrent - what it is and isn't,
by Jason. The discussion of both MythTV and BitTorrent led to
mentioning TvTorrents.
- Nancy Christolear mentioned a 3 credit hours "Fundamentals
of Linux" class, PHY297-50, that will be taught by Art Ross at Sinclair
Community College 5:10 - 6:50 pm Monday and Wednesday evenings this
Winter term. Contact Art at (937) 512-2236 for more info. A few of our
members have taken that class in the past and said it's a good value.
- Ryan Riddell, a University of Dayton student, asked if there
would be any interest in holding an Installfest at UD sometime soon.
Yes!
Several people continued the meeting at the El Rancho Grande Mexican
Restaurant & Cantina. I imagine Jason lubricated his throat well -
he was getting quite hoarse by the end of the meeting.
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October 2004
Our last Installfest was held
Saturday, October 23 in the Russ Engineering Center at Wright State
University. Attendance was a bit less than expected, but we had a
good turnout and kept busy all day.
We had several copies of the more popular recent releases, such as
Fedora Core 2, Mandrake 10 Official, SuSE 9.1 Personal, Xandros Desktop OS
Open Circulation Edition, etc., as well as "live CDs" such as Knoppix and
Kanotix. A "live CD" allows you to try Linux without actually installing
anything to your hard disk. They are also very useful for testing for
hardware compatibility - great if you're considering installing Linux
on a laptop, which are often more difficult than on desktop PCs.
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October 2004
Jason Cook has been playing around with the new release of the
X.org X server and some of the
experimental featues. This month, Jason talked about the current
status and where things are heading in the world of X, as well of some
of the history and why things are changing. He also showed us some
of the new features. It looks great! He also talked some about freedesktop.org. Currently Gentoo Linux has the best support and Fedora
has limited support for X.org. Wide support of X.org should be available
in about a year.
Other things mentioned were:
- Paul Ahlquist announced that we are selling the Entertainment
Book this year for $25 to help raise money for DMA®.
He sold one and we'll also have them available at Saturday's
Installfest, and at the GEMAIR office.
- Jason highly praised a new Debian based distribution, Ubuntu Linux. We'll have several
copies available at this weekend's Installfest.
- Grant Root suggested starting a group project, such as building MythTV systems. Jason has offered
to help spearhead that project, and several people expressed interest.
Grant got the idea of a group project from a SIGs BOF at last month's
Ohio LinuxFest.
- Ken Phelps mentioned INSERT
(Inside Security Rescue Toolkit), which is based on KNOPPIX and fits
on a credit card size CD. It contains several tools, including Clam Antivirus and the ability to read
& write NTFS file systems, and much more. Jason gave a short demo
of it.
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Three of us tested the waters last year at the first ever Ohio LinuxFest and liked what we saw
and heard. This year, a few more of us made the short trip to Columbus
for this year's event Saturday, October 2nd. It was originally scheduled
to be held on the Ohio State University campus, but due to increased
interest, was held in the Hyatt Regency Columbus in downtown Columbus.
I am very glad I made the trip again this year. There were nine from
our SIG that attended that I'm aware of. For the most part, I thought
they did a really great job of organizing the event. About the only
complaints I had were that it would have been nice to know the speaker
schedule in advance, and the Birds of a Feather (BOFs) were too close to
each other, making it difficult to hear. And the key signing party wasn't
very well organized, but since I didn't have a key to sign... well, that's
another story. 
There were a couple times when I wished I had a clone because I wanted
to attend two different talks that were occurring at the same time.
Last year's attendance was about 100 and they had about six presentations.
This year the attendance was over three hundred - maybe close to four
hundred - and they had a keynote speaker (OK, but not great) and 10
presentations, plus half a dozen BOFs. Obviously there's no way for one
person to take it all in, unless the event is expanded to two days and
each topic is presented twice. They wrapped up the show with a few words
from Jon "Mad Dog" Hall and held a raffle of about 40 assorted books,
T-shirts, software, etc. and a CD clock autographed by Linus Torvalds.
Two of our SIG members won raffle items.
I attended both of Rich Bowen's Apache talks and learned quite a bit.
I'm certainly not an Apache guru, but I know quite a bit more about Apache
than I did this time yesterday. I heard the last couple minutes of
"Theory and Practice: SELinux on Fedora", presented by Red Hat's Colin
Walters, and was intrigued by what I heard. Dan Rusek, from Novell,
talked about "The Future of the Linux Desktop". That presentation wasn't
as technical as most of the others I attended, but was interesting.
I sat in on the first few minutes of "Asterisk and Linux: VoIP for the
Masses". It wasn't something I was particularly interested in, but I
had no interest at all in "Benchmarking and Tuning the GROMACs Molecular
Dynamics Package on Beowulf Clusters" in the other room at that time.
What I heard about Asterisk was quite a bit more interesting than I
had expected, but eventually I decided to take a break and chatted with
some other people until the next presentation. I'm certainly no expert
on mail systems, but since Paul Ahlquist and Dave Nevel have been fine
tuning GEMAIR's mail system recently to reduce spam and virii, I decided
to listen to Bill Moran, from Potential Technologies, talk about "Using
Open Source Tools to Solve Big Problems: Email". I recognized quite
a bit of what he talked about from some of Paul's recent messages,
but he also mentioned some techniques I'm not aware of. If you have
anything at all to do with administering a mail system, I urge you
to read his presentation, which he said will soon be available at www.potentialtech.com/wmoran.
I may eventually post some pictures I took.
On the way back home, GT was mulling over the possibility of organizing
a similar show. How about it? Are there enough people interested and
willing to help to attempt such an event?
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September 2004
Before the main presentation got
underway, there was some discussion of the new PCI
Express, and its availablity. There are a few PCI Express
(PCIe or PCI-E for short) motherboards for Pentium CPUs currently
available, and PCIe motherboards for Athlons should start appearing
within a few months. This week's PC Club promo features a GeForce
PCX5750 PCIe video card for $136 which got a very good review at Overclocker Cafe.
Dale Williams discussed an embedded Linux project and demonstrated
the prototype he's been working on. It's a Turn Coordinator Replacement
system for aircraft that he helped design using Real Time Linux based
on Red Hat 7.3, C++, PEG
(Portable Embeded GUI) for the graphics system, built on a single board
"Viper" computer from Arcom. It was
quite an interesting meeting, which prompted considerable Q & A!
Grant Root showed the very nice lookng 2x6' vinyl banner he had made
at his expense, and gave a brief summary of the Linux SIG booth at the
recent Computerfest. The group agreed to reimburse Grant for the banner
and other supplies he bought for the show from the CD and DVD sales
proceeds, leaving a grand total of $2 seed money for future projects.
The Oct. 2 Ohio LinuxFest
was mentioned. About half a dozen people indicated they planned
to attend. They were reminded that registration is requested, even
though there is no charge. Also, just after our October meeting will be
our next Installfest. Another plea for
volunteers and presentations was made. Ken Phelps briefly mentioned
a presentation on Honeypots he attended earlier this week at the
Dayton InfraGard.
After the meeting, several of the group moved the conversation to the
nearby El Rancho Grande Mexican Restaurant & Cantina on Colonel
Glenn Highway.
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August 2004
 Congratulations to Grant
Root for the great job he did in organizing the booth for this
year's show and in procuring a nice banner for our group. We had lots
of people stop in to learn more about Linux. Many of them purchased a
Kanotix CD (a standard
"live" CD), or Freeduc CD
(a showcase for Free educational software), for $1.00 each (some bought
both), or Fedora Core 2 DVD for
$3.00. Nancy Christolear also provided a few copies of a compilation
of open source software for Windows which she discussed at her seminar.
They were quite popular at $1.00 each. We sold all of the Fedora DVDs
on Saturday, and the CDs were all sold before the show ended.
We had a small "playground" consisting of four computers. Each one
was running a different distribution - Kanotix, Freeduc, Slackware and
Xandros. The computers were provided by Chris Haaker, Nancy Christolear
and the Dayton-Phoenix Group, Inc. (Grant's company). Each was clearly
labeled as to what was being demonstrated.
Thanks to Red Hat and Don Corbet for the Fedora DVDs, Bill Jacobs,
 Chris
Haaker, Dave Lundy, Frank Wylie, Gary Turner, Ken Phelps, and Russell
Yeley for their time working the booth, and to Nancy Christolear, Grant,
and Dave and for duplicating a couple hundred or so CDs. Booth volunteers
were identified by a nifty penguin button that Grant designed.
We distributed about three fourths of the 200 copies each of
a FAQ-style intro to Linux with a list of online resources, an
introduction to our SIG with meeting info, and a flyer for the upcoming
fall Installfest.
Grant has several pictures of the event on his photo
gallery.
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While Andy was getting ready to do his presentation, Grant Root
discussed plans for the SIG booth at Computerfest®, and recruited
some volunteers, but more are still needed. He also announced that he
has ordered a 2x6 foot vinyl banner for the SIG, which he paid for himself.
Dave Lundy showed a roughly half scale sample of what it will look like.
Grant accepted donations to help offset his expense.
The main topic this month was an overview of PAM (Pluggable
Authentication Modules), presented by Andy Grimm. Andy briefly described
what PAM can do and gave some hints at how some of the modules can be
used to solve certain problems. He said he will make his presentation
available on-line.
After Andy's talk, there was considerable discussion of
a wide variety of topics. There was some discussion of the
recent Linux Expo
that both Don Corbet and Andy Grimm attended earlier this month.
Don passed out several goodies from the show, and gave a stack of Fedora
Core 2 DVDs and other items to Grant to
distribute at Computerfest® - er I should say Mid-America Consumer Electronics
Show August 28—29. Paul Visscher talked about serious flaws
recently found in MD5, SHA-0, and SHA-1 that were announced in a Report
dated August 18 from Crypto
2004 at Freedom
to Tinker. There was also some discussion of Xfree86
vs. X.Org, benchmarking SMP systems, and several other topics -
too many for me to take adequate notes. It was a lively meeting!
Most of us continued discussing numerous topics - some even pertaining
to Linux - at TGI Friday's.
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July 2004
I was unable to attend this month's meeting. I've gathered from
various sources that there was some general discussion, Q & A, etc.
In addition, Grant Root gave a first report from the new Planning
Committee, mentioning why it was formed (covered in a recent post)
and what they talked about at their first meeting:
- Developing faculty contacts at the local colleges
- Recruitment of new members
- Improving the state of meeting presentations
- Some alternative programs for meetings (besides presentations)
- The focus of the group (Linux vs. Open Source in general, etc.)
At the meeting, Grant passed around sign-up sheets for presentations
people could give and those that they wanted to see given. He'll post
those lists shortly.
We also had a discussion of the Linux SIG booth at Computerfest, in
which we decided on several things that we'd like to see there:
- A nice SIG banner. (Jason will send me a graphic file, and I will look
into printing options)
- A flier for the SIG. (Nancy sent me some materials she had, and I'll
work up a draft.)
- A fleer for the next installfest, if we can schedule it in time.
- A demo PC running something cool under Linux. (Suggestions?)
- Copies of a distro (probably a live CD like Knoppix) to sell for cost.
(Nancy volunteered to work on this.)
- It was suggested that we set up a sign-up schedule for volunteers to
man the booth.
Finally, Paul Visscher gave an impromptu
presentation on how networking in Linux works - ifconfig,
route,
ifup, ifdown, iwconfig,
netstat,
config file locations in Red Hat and Debian based
distributions, etc. Also, Michael Manry (aka LinuxSneaker)
mentioned Linux Weekly News' article about wireless code
in the Kernel. He said the kernel development section of their weekly
publication is always a good read.
Then James left and the exotic dancers showed up. 
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June 2004
We held our most recent Installfest held at
Sinclair Community College from 10
am - 4 pm Saturday, June 26th, 2004.
There was no admission charge for this event.
We had copies of Fedora
Core 2 (not recommended for Linux newbies
nor for dual boot installation with Windows - see why),
Mandrake
10 Official, SuSE
9.1 personal, Xandros
Desktop OS Open Circulation Edition, SmoothWall Express 2.0, and Ultimate Boot CD 2.31, a handy bootable
CD full of diagnostics & utilities, for a small charge.
Turnout was good in spite of the excellent summer weather. Although
there were only 19 names on the sign-in sheet, I know there were more
people present than that. Sinclair Community College and Art Ross
were great hosts for our event. Plenty of snacks and beverages were
available throughout the day, and both wired and wireless Internet
access were provided. The only minor inconvenience was trying to get
an elevator with the 8000 or so Irish dancers also at Sinclair for their
dance competition, the Dayton FEIS.
We hope to have additional details and pictures, courtesy of Don Corbet,
posted here soon.
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Don Corbet discussed and briefly demonstrated the "Penguin
Sleuth Kit" KNOPPIX-based
CD (a diagnostic & cyber forensic tool) and gave out a few copies.
Grant Root reported on the Fall Computerfest and what's happening
regarding the Linux Playground, based on what he learned at last
Saturday's Computerfest planning meeting. Miscellaneous other topics
mentioned included, in no particular order: - Grant Root
mentioned a "Linux System Administration" course he took at New
Horizons
- Ken Phelps mentioned the Spinning
Cube of Potential Doom, a visual representation of malicious network
activity displayed by the Bro
Intrusion Detection Monitor. Jason played the video.
- Ken also mentioned INSERT, another
KNOPPIX based diagnostic, but small enough to fit on a credit card
size CD
- Someone (sorry - I don't remember who) mentioned Grokdoc, a wiki
to help new Linux users get up to speed.
- Jason showed some very strange video from thebroken.org
After the meeting, several people continued discussions at TGI
Friday's®.
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May 2004
Our topic this month was a discussion by Jason Cook of BitTorrent,
a method for high speed file downloads. The presentation
was delayed somewhat because of a room scheduling error and
network problems. Once those issues were overcome, Jason
demonstrated the Azureus
client for BitTorrent. He also talked a bit about MusicBrainz,
a community music metadatabase, and JuK, a part of
the KDE 3.2 kdemultimedia package.
After Jason finished his presentation, Don
Corbet talked briefly about getting an official SIG banner, and possible
funding options for our SIG, to enable us to better participate in the
global Linux community. He mentioned his experience
at last weekend's Hamvention
where he and some other of our SIG members helped man a booth (see photos by
Grant Root) for Linux and Open Source
technologies enthusiast and author, Bruce
Perens.
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April 2004
Attendance this month was only 16, probably due to the combination
of very nice weather and not having a topic scheduled. We used the
time for general Q & A and short discussion of various topics.
A few items discussed were:
- Scheduling next Installfest - probably early July at Sinclair
Community College. GT will contact Art Ross to set a date. The next
one after that will probably be in early to mid September at Wright State.
- Using digital cameras & USB flash memory devices with Linux
- The new nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra
- Ethernet via Linksys USB Network Adapter
- Firestarter configuration
- Proposed topic for future meetings: network startup sequence details
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Our second Installfest in 2004
was held Sunday April 4, in room 331 of Kennedy Union (#19 on the UD
campus map) at University of
Dayton, Dayton, OH. Here are maps
& driving directions for this event at UD. Thanks to Robert Ball for making
the arrangements.
 I took this one picture
at the Installfest. If there are any others, please send me a copy.
Only about 15 people signed in, but I'm sure there were more attendees
than that over the course of the day. Attendance was lower than usual,
most likely due to the unusually short notice for this event. Still,
some installations were done and problems solved, but some issues remain
unresolved. In particular, David Carrier's X configuration problem
with his laptop. We copied the XF86Config and XF86Config-4 files from
his KNOPPIX boot, which worked flawlessly, to /etc/X11 in his Mandrake
file system, but X still failed to start in Mandrake.
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March 2004
We were back in our usual location, Russ Engineering Center,
this month. Grant Root discussed his experience with installing Xandros
Desktop OS version 2 on his wife's laptop, and compared it very
favorably with Mandrake Linux
version 9.?. In almost every respect, Grant rated both installing and
using Xandros better than Mandrake, although there were still a few
areas that could be improved. He also demonstrated both the very easy
installation process and using Xandros. Grant also talked a bit about
his recent experience with Geek
Cruises. He spent a good part of a week learning PHP aboard the Sovereign of
the Seas while cruising to The Bahamas a couple weeks ago. I'll bet
he wished he was still there when he saw this morning's snow!
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February 2004
There was some general confusion about where tonight's meeting
actually was. Eventually 20+ of us found it. Some had forgotten the
meeting was moved, and others including myself, had erroneously thought
the meeting was in the Fred White Health Center. Don Corbet briefly
discussed a few books that he likes, including "Moving to Linux:
Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye!", and "Linux System
Administration: A User's Guide". Both were written by Marcel
Gagné, who writes the "Cooking with Linux" column for Linux Journal, among
other things. Then he got the author on the phone for about 45 minutes
talking about many topics including the interesting story of how he
came to write the "Cooking with Linux" column, followed by a
short Q & A session. After the phone interview, some other books
and a few other topics were briefly discussed. Then Don gave away one
copy each of "Linux Web Server CD Bookshelf" & "Linux
Core Kernel".
Don has proposed setting up a group buy of "Moving
to Linux: Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye!",
hopefully at a significantly discounted price. If you're
interested, please contact Don.
Speaking of switching from Windows to Linux, a relatively new Linux
distribution seems to be the current champ in that regard. Check out
Xandros Desktop OS Version 2.
The reviews I've read so far look very good. I'll report more after
I've tried it myself. Discuss it.
Curiously only six of us ended up at Hops after the meeting. The good
news was that we could all hear each other, for a change. We discovered
later that several others had gone to TGI Friday's.
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January 2004
Shortly before this past Saturday's Installfest, there was some
interest expressed in using TV tuner cards with Linux, using xawtv, etc. Jason strongly
recommends tvtime over xawtv, primarily because of tvtime's deinterlacing.
Jason had indicated the possibility of making a presentation
if he had time to prepare one, but didn't do one Saturday.
But he did a great demonstration at this meeting of MythTV, a popular PVR (Personal Video
Recorder) type Linux application. MythTV is much more than just a
PVR application, as I had thought before seeing this demo, and has an
intuitive non-techie user interface, making it easy for the rest of the
family to use. Unfortunately, Jason wasn't able to show us any live TV
due to some problem with his tuner card that apparently occurred during
transport to the meeting. But he had several programs previously recorded
to hard disk and showed us some samples, as well as a sample from DVD.
The DVD picture was excellent, and the TV pictures were very good.
To take full advantage of MythTV, you will need an Internet connection
so that you can automatically download TV schedule information. Jason
indicated he was using zap2it.com, but other schedule listing sites
such as TitanTV.com, tvguide.com, etc. may be also work - I don't know.
Many inexpensive TV tuner cards will work, but particularly recommended
are Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250
and WinTV-PVR-350, or the $200 HD-2000
High Definition TV Card, especially if you have a slower PC because
these cards have built-in hardware MPEG encoders, which reduces the
CPU load.
Frank Wylie was not be able to attend this meeting to do an apt-get demo, but will at the next
Certification
SIG meeting, Wednesday, January 28, at 119 Valley St.
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We had a very good turnout for this event, even though it got
underway somewhat after the scheduled starting time. Only 19 people
filled in the sign-in sheet, but I'm sure the total attendance was well
over double that; possibly even triple.
A few days earlier, someone had asked on our mailing list about getting
a Hauppauge WinTV PCI tuner card to work with Linux, and it was suggested
that he bring it to the Installfest for help. Assuming cable TV would
not be available in the classroom (Todd was unaware of it), Dave Lundy
rigged up a UHF antenna so it could be easily transported and setup
in the room. It worked sufficiently well to test TV cards, but it was
eventually discovered that there was a live cable TV
outlet in the room, somewhat obscured behind some equipment. At least
three people brought PCs with TV tuner cards installed. Jason had
offered to do a presentation on TV with Linux if he had time to prepare
one, but there was no presentation this time. I believe the person who
initiated the discussion left with most of his TV problems solved.
Apparently at least one person installed Fedora Core 1 and at least one
other installed a beta version of Mandrake 9.2. Several sets of Red
Hat 9.0 and Mandrake 9.1 were copied and installed, and possibly a few
other distributions were installed.
At about 2 PM, some of the best pizza I've ever had arrived from Giovanni's.
Gary Turner (better known as GT to most of us) had taken up a collection
and Nancy Christolear made the trip to pick it up because Giovanni's has
no delivery service. Unfortunately, collection < cost of
pizza, so GT was left holding the bag for the difference.
Please be a little more generous in your contribution for food in the
future.
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