May 2009
Our May meeting featured a presentation by Paul Visscher about
Revision (or
Version) Control Systems, including why you should use them if you
do any programming or modify system configuration files.
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April 2009
April 2009 meeting at W.S.U. Brandeberry Conference Room (292 Joshi)
This month we met in a new location - the Krishan
& Vicky Joshi Research Center. It's between
the Student Union and Russ Engineering. We met in the Brandeberry
Conference Room (292 Joshi).
No topic had been confirmed for this meeting, but we discussed many issues, including:
- DMA's 33⅓ picnic, to be held Sat., Sept. 12 at Thomas A
Cloud Park. Tickets will be $2 in advance or $5 at the event.
- GT is searching for Open Source software suitable
for generating tickets for the picnic. Although Scribus is a highly regarded desktop
publishing program, it didn't work well for that task. Someone suggested
gLabels.
- Penguicon in Michigan May 1-3.
GT, Grant will be attending, and Catherine Devlin will be one of the
featured speakers.
- Don Corbet donated a couple books and talked briefly about Ohio LinuxFest, which will be
held in Columbus Convention Center 25-26, 2009. He also mentioned
Florida Linux Show
and that Red Hat will be pushing
virtualization hard in their soon-to-be-released Red Hat 6 and Fedora 11.
- There will be a Jaunty
Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04) release party May 9 at the Easton Town Center
(Columbus) Panera Bread location Saturday, May 9, where CDs will be
available.
- There was an extensive discussion of the new ext4 filesystem and
why you might want to switch to it (it's faster, handles huge
files, is better at avoiding fragmentation, fsck is faster, and it has
nanosecond timestamps), and a lot of reasons why you shouldn't switch
unless you really need the new features. You could lose data
with ext4 due to delayed allocation. Paul V strongly recommended LWN.net as a good
source of info if you want to keep current on ext4's progress.
- Don mentioned that this year marks both the 40th anniversary for Unix and 18th for Linux.
- Ken Phelps mentioned the transition of DMA's e-mail to
Gmail. If you have an @dma.org address, you need to visit the
"Gmail for Organizations" link at the bottom of the Gmail login page to continue using
your address.
- Steve Hayden has found some on-line tools to convert to/from degrees,
minnutes, seconds to fractional degrees, but is seeking an off-line
solution.
A few days before the meeting, Paul Visscher had offered to
discuss FUSE but only Grant had expressed an interest in the topic.
I assumed that Paul wouldn't do the presentation due to lack of interest.
Thanks for proving me wrong, Paul! As usual, Paul gave an excellent
presentation. Paul said he would put a copy of his presentation notes on
his website. Next month,
Paul will discuss Version Control Systems.
After the meeting, we adjourned to TGI Friday's.
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March 2009
No topic was scheduled for this meeting. A variety of subjects
were discussed, including:
We adjourned to One Eyed Jacks
on Col. Glenn, where Cold Beer and Cheeseburgers used to be.
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February 2009
Jason Cook discussed LAMP
and maintaining a LAMP system. Welcome back, Jason!
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February 2009
A few of our members manned a booth at this year's
TechFest and
distributed Edubuntu 8.10 DVDs and
Ubuntu 8.10 CDs to students &
their parents. If you received one of them, you can find more info here.
Grant Root reported "Day 1 of TechFest was extremely successful at
the Linux SIG booth. We had huge numbers of kids and their parents
stop to try out the Linux laptops, listen to us talk about Linux, and
take an Edubuntu DVD."
"We had so many takers that we ran completely out of Edubuntu
DVDs!"
"The killer app on the Edubuntu laptop turned out to be Potato Guy.
Eric started that up, and every young kid who walked up stayed to play
with it. That gave us a chance to explain Linux and Edubuntu, and the
parents were thrilled that they could take home the same stuff their kid
was having fun with. Kstars
[sic] was also popular."
"The young kids also gravitated to the OLPC, which is little
and cute. They jumped right in and ran all sorts of applications on it.
The adults were interested too, especially when they found out what it
was — many of them had heard of it."
"Got lots of parents — and quite a few kids — who were
already using Linux or had at least heard of it. Very cool!"
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February 2009
InstallFest+ at Sinclair Community College
Our next InstallFest+ (formerly known as
Installfest) will be held at Sinclair
Community College from 10 am–4 pm Saturday, February
7th, 2009 in room 4242 of building 4.
Once again, Art Ross and Sinclair Community College will be our hosts.
Why Installfest+ instead of Installfest? Since Linux
has become much easier to install over the past few years, we've decided
to shift the emphasis away from just installing Linux. Sure, we'll help
you do that if that's what you want. But most people can get it installed
OK on their own these days, but sometimes find that they need help doing
certain things (printing, scanning, connecting with other networked
computers at home, playing music, etc., etc.) once it's installed.
So we're going to try to offer help in those areas. If you have a problem
you want help with, bring your machine in and we'll help as best we can.
Please let us know in advance what problems you need help with so we
can attempt to be better prepared. There is no admission charge for
this event, although parking in the above ground garage is $2.
We had copies of several of the more popular recent distros, including:
ClarkConnect CE 4.3,
Damn Small Linux 4.4.10,
Debian 4.0 ("etch"),
Fedora 10,
KnoppMyth 5.5,
Mandriva Linux One 2009 (possibly both KDE 4 & Gnome versions) (formerly Mandrake),
MythDora 10.21 (MythTV 0.21 on Fedora 10),
SimplyMepis 7.0,
openSUSE 11.1,
OpenDisc 08.10,
SmoothWall Express 3.0 SP1,
Trixbox CE 2.6.2.1 (formerly Asterisk@Home),
Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex" CD,
Ultimate Boot CD 4.1.1, a handy bootable CD full of diagnostics & utilities,
and VectorLinux 5.9.
If you have unusual hardware (very new or very old PC, or
system with something other than an Intel Pentium or AMD Athlon
CPU such as Alpha, PowerPC (e.g. Mac), Sparc, new Inel-based
Mac, etc. or need specific help, please let us know in advance
so we can try to be prepared to help you. Contact info is here. We will also have help available for
anyone wanting to setup MythTV.
KnoppMyth is
probably the easiest way to do it, but there are several other ways,
including A.M.I.C.U.S.,
developed by our own Andrew Lynch.
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January 2009
InstallFest+ at Sinclair Community College
Due to circumstances beyond our control, the Linux
InstallFest+ which was originally scheduled for Jan. 24, is now
rescheduled for Feb. 7
January 2009
We don't yet have any particular topic
scheduled for this month, although I expect TechFest 2009 will
be discussed.
If you have any suggestions for topics, please send them to the Linux-SIG-Planning
team.
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December 2008
This month Paul Visscher will discuss ssh tunnels.
Presumably, Michael Gilbert will continue his monthly
"in-security" series.
If you have any suggestions for topics, please send them to the Linux-SIG-Planning
team.
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November 2008
No specific topic was scheduled for this month, so we had an extended
Q & A session that covered many topics.
If you have any suggestions for topics, please send them to the Linux-SIG-Planning
team.
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October 2008
Nancy mentioned that she saw a white Jetta with the license "My
Linux", but apparently it's not ownwd by one of our members. Gary
briefly discussed the recent Ohio LinuxFest. About half of tonight's
19 attendees went. Gary also mentioned that our next Installfest /
Configfest will be held at Sinclair Community College on Saturday,
January 24. Watch for more details soon. Somone asked how many had
installed Ubuntu 8.10. A few have so far. Someone else asked what
printers are supported by Linux. It was recommended to check the OpenPrinting database of supported
printers. There was some discussion about Ubuntu parking the disk head
too often. Apparently that's been fixed. There was also discussion
about random failures with solid state disks related to repeatedly
writing to the same area. Paul V. recommended that folks check out Linux Weekly News.
For the main presentation, Paul Visscher discussed his work installing
and configuring Linux in Centerville Schools. They currently have
700-800 client machines running Linux as well as using LTSP with about
300 Asus EeePCs. They use Puppet and Clonezilla to maintain the same
configuration across multiple computers.
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October 2008
October 11, 2008 was the 6th annual Ohio LinuxFest and it
just keeps getting better each year. This year once again had
an optional day of training on Friday, Oct. 10 for $350 and LPI
testing on Sunday. See the full weekend schedule here.
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September 2008
Tonight we'll discuss Ohio
LinuxFest and our next InstallFest / ConfigFest. Michael
Gilbert will continue his monthly "in-security" talk.
If you have any suggestions for topics, please send them to the Linux-SIG-Planning
team.
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August 2008
If you have any suggestions for topics, please send them to the Linux-SIG-Planning
team.
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July 2008
As best I know, Elliott will continue leading the panel discussion
of "How to Introduce and Encourage Linux Use to Resistant
Organizations" this month and Michael Gilbert will continue his
monthly "in-security" series. I haven't heard of any other topics for
this month so far.
If you have any suggestions for topics, please send them to the Linux-SIG-Planning
team.
Please bring printouts of your public key
and government issued photo ID to participate in the key
signing party. It's been far too long since we've had one.
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June 2008
We returned to Wright State University for our June 19 meeting.
This month was the start of a series of panel discussions headed up
by Elliott Lake about "How to Introduce and Encourage Linux Use
to Resistant Organizations". They discussed experiences they
have encountered when trying to start implementation of Linux projects
and suggest ways to improve them. Also, Michael Gilbert continued
his monthly "in-security" series - security issues that have
popped up within the past month.
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May 2008
We met at New
Horizons® Computer Learning
Centers, 1890 Commerce Center Blvd., Fairborn, OH for the Thursday
May 15 meeting.
This month Michael Gilbert demonstrated
Eee PC and discussed
installing a Debian based distro on one. He also discussed "in-security" -
security issues that have popped up within the past month, and is looking
forward to making it a monthly discussion. Also, Eric Baenen gave
a quick overview of the Linux for South West Ohio Libraries project that
was recently started.
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April 2008
We met at New
Horizons® Computer Learning
Centers, 1890 Commerce Center Blvd., Fairborn, OH for the Thursday April
17 meeting. New Horizons is near the large Kroger store on the north
side of Dayton-Yellow Springs Rd.
This month we didn't have a topic, so we had an extended Q&A session.
If you have any suggestions for topics, please send them to the Linux-SIG-Planning
team.
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March 2008
We met in Student Union, room 157, Wright State University
for the Thursday March 20 meeting. This month, we had a
demo by Eric Baenen of cloning and restoring systems with Clonezilla Live. Also,
Jason Cook talked about Wikia and
some of the things he is doing there.
We had some Fedora 8
x86 Live CDs to give out at tonight's meeting, as well as a Fedora
T-Shirt.
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February 2008
We met in Rike Hall, room 016, Wright State University
for the Thursday February 21 meeting, which was very nice. The desks
are wired with power and ethernet, but without a Wright State account,
you can't get online. This month Don Corbet discussed and demonstrated
installing "Out-of-the-box XEN" para- and full virtulization
and the difference under different CPU's running SLES-10 or Fedora.
We gave out some Fedora 8
x86 Live CDs at tonight's meeting, courtesy of Red Hat Fedora.
The new Milano's at the
corner of North Fairfield and Kemp - a little over a mile south of
TGI Friday's - has been suggested for the after-the-meeting meeting.
They have free Wi-Fi.
Please bring printouts of your public key
and government issued photo ID to participate in the key
signing party. It's been far too long since we've had one.
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January 2008
We met in Student Union 156C at 7 pm Thursday January 17.
This month we had a presentation by Michael Gilbert that he called
"Running a secure system by knowing your vulnerabilities",
which included discussion of WebKit
and KDE4. We expected to also have
a fair amount of discussion of Eric Baenen's proposal to "do more
to help more people convert from proprietary software to Open Source
Software and Linux.", but I didn't hear any. But since I wasn't
feeling too good that night, I may have missed it.
Please bring printouts of your public key
and government issued photo ID to participate in the key
signing party. It's been far too long since we've had one.
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December 2007
We met in the RC146, at 7 pm Thursday December 20.
This month we had two main topics. Elliott Lake
discussed FreeNAS and
Eric Baenen discussed VMware and other virtualization software.
Some items mentioned include:
- building virtual machines, recommendations
- virtualization to support migration to Linux
- virtual machines for legacy OS's/apps
- server virtualization
- Xen vs Virtual Iron vs VMware vs VirtualBox vs Parallels
- VMware server vs VMware Player
- VMware vs Virtuozzo
Eric's "practical virtualization" slides are available in swf,
odp,
and pdf
file formats. Elliott's .ppt slides are here.
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November 2007
We met in RC146, at 7 pm Thursday November 15. Our evening started
with the usual Q & A session. Some of the topics discussed were:
- We used a Clearwire modem
and account that was donated to DMA®
by member Jeremiah Ilges of The Ohio
Technology Group in Springfield. Thank you Jeremiah and Ohio
Technology group!
- The Ohio Technology Group is donating $50 to DMA for each new Clearwire account if you mention DMA when you buy the account through OTG.
- Someone asked for video player suggestions. Both VLC and MPlayer were recommended.
- There was a question about synching with a Palm OS PDA.
J-Pilot was suggested, but some
people said they had problems with it and it was noted that there
hasn't been any development of it in over a year. See the Linux.com Synchronizing your Palm PDA
with Linux article for other options.
- Someone asked how to partition a drive. Use GParted,
which is used by most distros to partition a drive
during installation. Check out the GParted-LiveCD.
- Someone asked how to change the run level of
Ubuntu during bootup. Boot in single user mode. See Grub
Boot into single user mode for details and Debian
and Ubuntu Linux Run Levels for more info.
- GT & Paul V briefly talked about the newly
formed Dynamic Languages
SIG. You may subscribe to the mailing list here.
- GT announced that the DMA Holiday Dinner
is Wednesday, December 5.
This month's main topic was
microformats, excellenty
presented by Catherine Devlin. She explained that microformats are
small extensions to HTML that make it easier for machines to collect
and aggregate data about events, etc. from web pages. Catherine showed
event calendars from a few web sites, including our own, to show the wide
diversity in how event data is displayed on web pages. By using the hCalendar microformat,
it's relatively simple to keep the same appearance on a web page,
yet allow aggregators to easily extract the event data in a consistent
manor regardless of how it's displayed. There are also microformats for
address info (hCard),
licensing info,
such as for photos, and other situations. Catherine also demonstrated the
Operator add-on for
the Firefox web browser. In closing, she suggested checking out a couple
conferences. First is CodeMash
in Sandusky January 9-11, 2008. She also recommended PyCon 2008 in Chicago March 14-16,
2008.
After the meeting, several of us adjourned to the nearby TGI Friday's.
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October 2007
We met in the Student Union, room E163B, at 7 pm Thursday October 18.
There was no topic scheduled for this month's meeting, so we had an extended Q & A session.
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October 2007
Our latest ConfigFest (or InstallFest+) was held at Sinclair Community College from 10
am–4 pm Saturday, October 6th, 2007 in
room 4242 of building 4. Once again, Art Ross and Sinclair Community
College were great hosts. Turnout was a bit lighter than at some of our
previous fests, but we were busy most of the day. It would have been
good to have had more of our more experienced members present to help.
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September 2007
September 29, 2007 was the 5th annual Ohio LinuxFest and it
just keeps getting better each year. This year they added
an optional day of training on Friday, Sept. 28 for $300 and LPI
testing on Sunday. See the full weekend schedule here.
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September 2007
We met in RC145 at 7 pm Thursday September 20. This month
Barry Hassler gave an excellent demonstration of configuring Asterisk, a very versatile PBX
system implemented in Open Source software.
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August 2007
No topic for this month's meeting had been set before the meeting.
After a brief Q & A session, Paul Visscher volunteered to give a brief
version of a couple previous presentations he had done previously - OpenWrt and "How Email Really
Works". Thanks, Paul!
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July 2007
We'll meet in room 150 of
Russ Engineering at 7 pm Thursday July 19.
For this month's meeting, Mike Gilbert demonstrated how to submit
bug reports.
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June 2007
We met in E163B (Discovery B) of the Student
Union at 7 pm Thursday June 21. The regular DMA monthly meeting
was rescheduled to the same night as this SIG this month to accomodate
"Dave Whittle's Picks for the Digital
Home" presentation, so GT did not attend the Linux SIG tonight.
Dave Lundy was occupied elsewhere, so Grant Root took notes in his
absence. Thanks, Grant!
- We discussed Ohio LinuxFest
and collected the money Nancy needed for our non-profit sponsorship.
- We had a programmer there whose Linux experience was pretty
limited, and in response to his questions we talked about
recommended distributions, demonstrated package management in
Kubuntu, and covered compilers, editors, ssh, version control, etc.
- Jason talked a bit about a newish project management suite called
redMine (http://www.redmine.org) which is written in Ruby-on-Rails.
We pulled up the web site and went through the demo.
- Paul Visscher demonstrated the use of swaks, which stands
for "Swiss Army Knife SMTP". It's a commandline tool for testing mail
servers.
- Paul Ahlquist talked about fanout and fanterm www.stearns.org/fanout, which
allow you to run commands on multiple machines.
- Paul Visscher talked about a number of useful networking
commands.
- Jason talked about the null
utility, which is "a combination of /dev/null, tee, md5sum,
with the addition of some other features".
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May 2007
We met in E163B (Discovery B) of the
Student Union at 7 pm Thursday May 17. For this
month's meeting, Ken Phelps gave a presentation on the DNS: how it works, and some
things you need to know about it. Also, Mike Gilbert was supposed to
discuss how to submit bug reports but we ran out of time.
Once again we didn't have a key signing
party. It's been far too long since we've had one.
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April 2007
This month Mike Gilbert discussed the "State of
Gaming on Linux" and demonstrated a wide variety
of games. Michael's presentation files are available
in PDF and TEX format. In addition, Jason
Cook briefly discussed LAN Parties.
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March 2007
We've moved! This meeting was held in room E163B (Discovery
B) of the Student Union at 7 pm Thursday March 15.
For this month's meeting, Brian Engle gave a presentation on the OpenBSD project, describing how the
system works, and some of the differences (philosophical and otherwise)
between OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Linux. More details to follow...
Yet again, we did not have a key signing
party. It's been eons since we've had one.
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February 2007
This meeting was held in room 145 of the Russ Engineering
Center at 7 pm Thursday February 15. This month Paul Visscher and Paul Ahlquist teamed up to discuss
SMTP, and why it's
"worse than you can possibly imagine". See slides here. Also, Mike Gilbert
talked a bit about "The Debian Distribution". His presentation
PDF is here & source
file is here. More details
to follow in a few days.
Once again, there was no key signing
party. It's been several months since we've had one.
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January 2007
This meeting was held in room 145 of the Russ
Engineering Center at 7 pm Thursday January 18.
The topic for this month's meeting was a presentation
by Jason Cook about modifications to an Xbox game console to use it as
a MythTV front-end. Details to follow.
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