Welcome TechFest attendees! Here's more info on Linux!

Meeting at RC154, W.S.U., Thur., June 18
Linux apps on USB flash drive

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DLUG Events

Beginning Thursday, May 21, 2009, all events listed on this page are held in Russ Engineering, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, unless stated otherwise. Our usual meeting time is 7 - 9 p.m. the third Thursday each month. All meetings are free and open to the public unless stated otherwise. Please check for the exact location each month. See maps and cue sheets for directions to Wright State. Be aware that parking is limited and parking regulations are enforced. There is free parking in Visitor Lot #2 near the Student Union. Carpool with a buddy if possible. Usually several of us adjourn to a local eatery to continue our discussions even more informally. The meeting room is subject to to change each school term, and the eatery is selected at each meeting.

Coming Events

Past Events

Coming Events

June 2009

June 18 2009 meeting at RC154, W.S.U.

Elliott Lake will discuss how to get reliable installations of Linux onto a USB jump drive and have the installation act like a hard drive. He's working with a different approach than what he has been using previously to see if he can increase the number of Linux distributions he can install on jump drives.

If you have any suggestions for topics, please send them to the Linux-SIG-Planning team.

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July 2009

July 16 2009 meeting at RC154, W.S.U.

No topic has been scheduled yet for this meeting.

If you have any suggestions for topics, please send them to the Linux-SIG-Planning team.

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August 2009

August 20 2009 meeting at RC154, W.S.U.

No topic has been scheduled yet for this meeting.

If you have any suggestions for topics, please send them to the Linux-SIG-Planning team.

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Past Events

May 2009

May 21 2009 meeting at RC145, W.S.U.

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

March 2009 meeting at W.S.U.

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

February 2009 meeting at W.S.U.

Jason Cook discussed LAMP and maintaining a LAMP system. Welcome back, Jason!

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February 2009

TechFest Logo

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

January 2009 meeting at W.S.U.

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

December 2008 meeting at W.S.U.

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

November 20, 2008 meeting at W.S.U.

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

October 16, 2008 meeting at W.S.U.

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

Ohio LinuxFest 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

September 2008 meeting in W.S.U. RC145

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

August 2008 meeting in W.S.U. RC145

If you have any suggestions for topics, please send them to the Linux-SIG-Planning team.

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July 2008

July 2008 meeting in W.S.U. RC145

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

June 2008 meeting in W.S.U. RC145

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

May 2008 meeting in New Horizons

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

April 2008 meeting in New Horizons

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

March 2008 meeting in 157 Student Union, W.S.U.

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

February 2008 meeting in 016 Rike Hall, W.S.U.

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

January 2008 meeting in W.S.U. Student Union 156C

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

December 2007 meeting in Russ Engineering, Rm. 146

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

November 2007 meeting in Russ Engineering, Rm. 146

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

October 2007 meeting in Student Union, E163B (Discovery B)

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

ConfigFest 2007 at Sinclair Community College

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

Ohio LinuxFest 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

September 2007 meeting in Russ Engineering 145

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

August 2007 meeting in Russ Engineering, 145

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

July 2007 meeting in Russ Engineering, 150

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

June 2007 meeting in Student Union, E163B

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

May 2007 meeting

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

April 2007 meeting

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

March 2007 meeting

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

February 2007 meeting

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

January 2007 meeting

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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