December 2006
This meeting was held in room 145 of the Russ Engineering Center
at 7 pm Thursday December 21. For this month's meeting, Brian Engle
was scheduled to discuss QEMU,
including getting it set up, installing the guest OS, and using it once
it's installed. Since I was unable to attend this meeting, I have no
further details to report.
Santa (er, the good folks at Red Hat / Fedora) sent us a
bundle of goodies. Thanks to SIG member Todd Warner, a former
Red Hat employee of about six years, for arranging for the
donation. Todd is now a Lulu
employee, so he's still in the Red Hat family. See this Wikipedia article
for info about Lulu.
top last meeting next meeting
November 2006
This meeting was held in room 145 of the
Russ Engineering Center at 7 pm Thursday November 16.
The topic for this meeting was an overview of LTSP,
by Paul Visscher.
top last meeting next meeting
October 2006
This meeting was held in room 145 of the Russ Engineering
Center at 7 pm Thursday October 19. Paul Visscher discussed network QoS
(Quality of Service) and why you might be concerned about or need
it. Paul described his personal router / firewall configuration to
share some of his wireless bandwidth with neighbors while maintaining
sufficient bandwith for his own use. Slides of his presentation are here.
Hover your mouse in the lower right corner to display navigation
links.
top last meeting next meeting
September 2006
September 30, 2006 was the 4th year for Ohio LinuxFest and it just
keeps getting better. Three of us from Dayton attended the 1st one, then
nine the 2nd year, and fourteen last year. I know of at least sixteen of
our SIG members who attended this year, and there were probably more.
Jeff Waugh (GNOME & Ubuntu), Chris DiBona (Slashdot / Google),
Jorge Castro (Linux.Ars column), Michael Johnson (Red Hat Developer
& author), Jay Pipes (MySQL / Author), and Jon 'maddog' Hall
(Linux International) were just a few of the well-known speakers
present to talk about Linux and open source. The Columbus Zoo even
brought a couple penguins! This was the first year the event included
LPI tests, held
on Friday, which our own Don Corbet helped administer. I attended all
of some of the presentations and portions of a few others. The show
has been free each year, thanks to generous sponsors, but this time
they added an optional "all-conference pass" for $65 that
included a box lunch, a T-shirt, and a few other perks. I was pleased
to see several from our SIG participated in that. I'm looking forward
to trying some of the techniques I learned about the Apache web server,
and some of the latest distros I picked up.
top last meeting next meeting
CLUG, former home of Paul Visscher & Jason Cook, held a Linux Demo Fest as part of their
monthly meeting at the Pleasant Ridge branch of the Cincinnati Public
Library on Saturday, Sept. 23, 2006. The main topics of their meeting
were a talk by Celeste Gale on her Mars Society experience in 2005 working
in the Utah desert for two weeks in a space suit with an international
crew, followed by a description of the open source space simulation
program Celestia.
top last meeting next meeting
This meeting was held in room 145 of the Russ Engineering Center
Thursday September 21. For several months, we've been intending to
devote the first half of the meeting to some sort of instruction for
Linux newbies, but the best we've done so far is a Q & A session.
This month, Paul Visscher discussed and demonstrated some basic Linux
commands for the newbie portion of the meeting. He strongly recommended
that new users use the BASH
shell instead of any others such as Ksh, Tcsh, etc. Some of the
commands discussed were ls, cd, mount, uname, cat, man, apropos, less,
sudo, and others. He also demonstrated using the Tab key for command
line completion. Paul also gave some simple examples of using pipes (|,
which is above \ on most keyboards) to pass the output of one command into
another. While discussing those commands, we also touched on Linux kernel
version numbering, how to determine the version you're running on a Debian
system, partition types and naming conventions, and more. There was a
minor skirmish about vi
/ vim vs. Emacs (text
editors), although it was generally agreed that everyone should know
at least the basics of how to use vi, since it's virtually guaranteed
to be installed on all systems, whereas Emacs may not be available -
sort of like knowing edlin on DOS systems.
For the main presentation, Paul demonstrated OpenWrt, a replacement firmware
for wireless routers based on Linksys. In spite of some technical
difficulties, Paul successfully installed OpenWRT on a router provided
by Ken Phelps. We had one new person participate in the key signing
party this month. Welcome aboard, Brian Engle.
top last meeting next meeting
August 2006
The main topic for this meeting was implementing an
IPCop firewall in a medium-sized
corporate network by Grant Root. Grant also talked some about
OSCON2006,
which he attended last month.
More details will be posted soon.
Once again, we didn't have a key signing
party. It's been several months since the last one.
top last meeting next meeting
July 2006
This meeting was held in room 145 of the Russ
Engineering Center at 7 pm Thursday July 20. If you
have any suggestions for topics, please send them to the Linux-SIG-Planning
team. A summary will be posted soon, thanks to notes taken by Ms. Devlin.
top last meeting next meeting
June 2006
This meeting was held in room 145 of the Russ
Engineering Center at 7 pm Thursday June 15. If you
have any suggestions for topics, please send them to the Linux-SIG-Planning
team. A meeting summary will be posted soon.
top last meeting next meeting
Our first Installfest+ (formerly known as
Installfest) was held at Sinclair
Community College from 10 am–4 pm Saturday, June
3rd, 2006 in room 4242 of building 4.
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 tried to offer help in those areas.
As usual, there was no admission charge for this event.
We had copies of several of the more popular recent
distros available. Some of the distros available for $1 / CD or $3 / DVD were: Asterisk at
Home, Clark
Connect, Damn Small
Linux 2.4, Debian 3.1 R2
(sarge), Fedora Core 5,
Kanotix 2005-03,
KNOPPIX 4.0.1 DVD, KnoppMyth R5C7,
Mandriva
Linux Limited Edition 2005 (formerly Mandrake). MythDora 1.5 (MythTV 0.18.1 on Fedora
Core 3), SimplyMepis 6.0-beta4, SuSE
OSS 10.1, TheOpenCD v3.0,
SmoothWall Express 2.0, Ubuntu 6.06 "Dapper Drake" (CD or DVD),
Ultimate Boot CD 3.3,
a handy bootable CD full of diagnostics & utilities, VectorLinux 5.1, and Xandros
Desktop OS Version 3 Open Circulation Edition.
top last meeting next meeting
May 2006
This meeting was held in room 145 of the Russ
Engineering Center at 7 pm Thursday May 18. If you
have any suggestions for topics, please send them to the Linux-SIG-Planning
team. A meeting summary will be posted soon.
top last meeting next meeting
April 2006
This meeting was held in room 145 of the Russ
Engineering Center at 7 pm Thursday April 20. If you
have any suggestions for topics, please send them to the Linux-SIG-Planning
team. Dave Lundy (that's me) had forgotten that Paul Visscher had offered
to make a presentation on Linux Care and Feeding this month, and posted
that there was no scheduled topic. Apologies to Paul and to anyone who
didn't attend because they thought there was no reason to this month.
As usual, we started with a Q & A and announcements session. Maybe
someday we'll actually have a presentation for newbies.
Some of the items discussed were:
- There was a question about Totem in Ubuntu - couldn't play several different
file types. Someone suggested using xine
and MPlayer as
alternates. Possibly the real problem is that MP3 and various
other multimedia formats are not supported by Ubuntu (and many
other distros) "out of the box", but can be enabled.
EasyUbuntu has a script
to easily install MP3, DVD decryption, Flash, etc. to Ubuntu.
- Some suggestions for future meeting topics were User-mode Linux
and video editing using Kino.
Dave Lundy volunteered to do a Kino demo at some unspecified date.
- There was a call for volunteers to help set
up wireless network at Hara Arena for the upcoming Hamvention. See Glady if you
can help.
- Elliott asked for help with Kerberos with SuSE 9.1 Pro
and Windows (XP?).
- Someone using Mandriva
updated to KDE
3.5 and then GIMP wouldn't work.
Someone suggested checking KMenu. Perhaps the thread here may be useful.
- There was some question about fsck but I don't recall
exactly what it was or if there were any responses.
- GT reminded us of Installfest+, scheduled for June 3 at Sinclair Community College.
- Apparently there was a question about firewalls. Jason Cook recommended pfSense.
- Someone asked about not being able to unmount a USB device -
specifically a camera - in Mandriva 2006. Someone suggested using a
card reader instead of using the camera directly.
- There was a question about dual-boot. Jason said something that I
didn't comprehend about remapping a drive so Windows thinks it's on the
first drive. I asked him to write about it on the mailing list. Someone
else suggested reading one of the NT
Bootloader Linux How-To's. Someone else suggested a version of
Damn Small Linux that can
run in Windows,
thereby avoiding the need to configure a dual-boot system.
Linux Care & Feeding, by Paul Visscher
"As long as you don't mess with it, all is good." Well,
almost. It's possible to run out of disk space or inodes. Use df -h to
monitor space and df -i to monitor inodes. Clean the /tmp partition
regularly. Use a script run from cron to remove files older than x days.
Some KDE (and maybe GNOME) things use /tmp. Ignore them.
Don't put any important files in /tmp! Most distros clean out the
/tmp directory when booting.
Use applets to monitor CPU, RAM, swap, & network usage.
Use uptime to see how long the system has been up, the system load, etc.
Use free -m to check that swap isn't being used excessively.
Use the logrotate
utility to manage system log files, rotating, compressing,
deleting, and/or mailing them, as appropriate, usually run daily by cron -
see /etc/logrotate.conf & /etc/logrotate.d/
Software updates should be done regularly, but can
sometimes cause problems. Configuration files sometimes
change. Watch out! If you use a Debian-based distro, use apt-listchanges
to see what has changed in the new version
of the package before installing it. Also check apt-listbugs
before doing an upgrade.
There was some mention of using fsck
-y to repair a corrupted filesystem. tune2fs
can be used to fine tune a filesystem for your specific needs. If you
are using an older system with ext2, consider upgrading to ext3, but
it may be too CPU intensive. The question of how to defragment Linux
filesystems came up, but there was no definitive answer except that it's
generally not needed in Linux systems. Why?
Use smartmontools to monitor S.M.A.R.T. capable drives.
It's generally accepted that the swap partition should be about 1.5
to 2 times the amount of RAM in the system. However, some say that if
you have more than a Gig of RAM, that formula no longer applies.
Kill Firefox periodically.
Paul Ahlquist, Jr. also took notes and posted them here. Thanks,
Paul.
top last meeting next meeting
March 2006
This meeting was held in room 145 of the Russ Engineering Center
Thursday March 16. Thanks to Paul Visscher for taking notes - I was in
pretty bad shape that night.
- Someone (sorry, I'm really bad with names. We really should go around
the room introducing ourselves) was having problems with unmounting a USB
drive or digital camera. There was some discussion on the mailing list
about this a while back. The problem is that if some program (a shell,
OpenOffice, a Nautilus/Konqueror window, etc.) has a file or directory
open from the mounted drive, the drive can not be unmounted until the
offending program lets go of the file/directory it has open.
- So the logical next question is: how do you tell what program
has a file open from that device? There are a few ways to do it;
one is to look through windows you have open and see if one of
those does. Another way is to use the command line program 'lsof'. You'd
probably want to do something like 'lsof -n | grep "/mount/point"'. The
name of the program is listed on the very left of that output.
- Someone mentioned fuser
can be used to do the same thing.
- Someone else mentioned that if you open a terminal and type 'mount'
you can see all the mounted file systems.
- While writing up this meeting summary from Paul's notes
and looking for suitable links, I discovered this
article that describes a case where neither lsof now fuser was
able to determine what was holding the mount open.
- Someone asked about what hardware is supported by the OpenWRT firmware. This can
get particularly confusing; Linksys and others frequently
seem to change the hardware between revisions and it isn't
always easy to tell which revision of hardware you have
until it's too late. There is a reasonably complete list at wiki.openwrt.org/TableOfHardware
including hardware revision numbers.
- There was some (barely any at all) discussion about when the next
Installfest is going to happen. Nothing solid was decided, but there
seemed to be consensus that Linux is pretty easy to install these days,
so perhaps it would be more useful to have a "Install/Debug fest" where
people bring in that they are having problems with or want to know more
about. The removable USB device/unmount problems would be a good example
of this -- it's easier to understand what people mean when they say
"check lsof" if someone can show you the exact command to run and how
to interpret it.
- GEMAIR is migrating all of its bits to DONet in the next month or so.
Hi James! ;P
- Someone else was having performance issues with
GNOME
on a 500MHz K6 with 300-400meg of RAM. There was some discussion about
GNOME, Firefox, alternative window managers and Gentoo. I sort of forgot
to pay attention to this conversation. :(
- Jason Cook followed up by e-mail that GNOME has gotten quite
a bit better performance wise with 2.14 especially gnome terminal.
There are some additional enhancements to gnome-session that could go
in for 2.14.1 to improve startup time even more.
- For the main presentation, Andrew Lynch discussed MythTV in general, and his A.M.I.C.U.S. project
in particular. Dave Lundy had his MythTV system available
for a live demo. A.M.I.C.U.S. is a rather large bash
script to help make it easier for people to install MythTV on
their PC. There was some friendly bashing of bash, suggesting that Perl would be more suitable. Several in
attendance are also members of Dayton
Perl Mongers. Andrew also talked about his experience starting and
running a project on Sourceforge.
There was no key signing party, and we haven't had one in the last
few months.
top last meeting next meeting
February 2006
This meeting was held in room 145 of Russ Engineering
Center on Thursday February 16. Attendance was exceptionally
low. Perhaps because no topic was scheduled for tonight?
If you would like to make a presentation, or have any
suggestions for topics for future meetings, please send them to the Linux-SIG-Planning
team. Some of the many things discussed were:
- Someone asked when and where our next Installfest would be
held. It will probably be a combined Installfest / MythTV install / troubleshooting
session. GT will ask Art Ross at Sinclair
Community College about holding it March 18, 19, 25, or 26.
- GT mentioned that Bill Jacobs is recovering at Miami Valley Hospital.
Visitation hours are 8am - 8pm, but after 4pm is best.
- GT reminded us that TechFest is this
weekend at Sinclair Community College.
- Paul V asked about problems he has been having with software RAID.
Much troubleshooting discussion ensued.
- Paul V helped Chris Hall with Xen
troubleshooting.
- There was some discussion about moving our meetings to 119 Valley
St. or elsewhere, but no consensus was reached.
- Web hosting / e-mail suggestions
- Andrew Lynch, who started DAY-MUG, talked a bit about starting and managing an Open Source
project, in particular his A.M.I.C.U.S. project.
- Ken Phelps gave away an X Windows book and 2 Sparc computers.
- Nancy is looking for practical uses for some very old laptop computers
that have been donated to OTAP.
- Ken had some ORiNOCO Gold wireless cards that had been donated to OTAP
that needed to be tested.
- GT asked for an experienced eBay
seller to sell some esoteric items that OTAP occasionally receives.
- Dan Tasch asked how to do Debian security updates off-line
because it's painfully slow to use dial-up. Paul V suggested using apt-move.
- Jason Cook gave a brief demo of Compiz
running on top of XGL by Novell, which has weird effects
such as wobbly, cube, etc. Be sure to check out the video
there if you missed Jason's demo. He also demoed GStreamer 0.10.0. Both are
awesome!
We did not have a key signing
party, and haven't had one in the last few months.
The group adjourned to TGI Fridays.
top last meeting next meeting
January 2006
No topic was scheduled for this meeting, so it was a prolonged Q &
A session. I apologize for the somewhat brief summary this time. I was rather
distracted during the meeting futzing with my laptop. Some of the topics
discussed were:
- Parking at WSU has become somewhat more strictly enforced.
WSU has offered us special parking permits for $2, valid on Thursday
nights only. They were available for purchase at the meeting, and
will be available at future meetings. There was a lengthy discussion
about the parking situation, which included looking for other meeting
locations.
- Chester Howes had some questions about a modem.
- There was some discussion of text editors, including Kate,
which has syntax highlighting, and several other nice features useful
for editing shell scripts, etc.
- Several of us agreed that locate was
one of the most indispensable comands. If it's not present, it's one
of the first we install.
- Grant mentioned a new book from No
Starch Press by Martin F. Krafft titled The Debian
System.
- Someone had some questions about trouble he had installing Ubuntu. It was suggested to use
Ctrl-Alt-F3 and / or Ctrl-Alt-F4 (or Ctrl-F3 or Ctrl-F4) to view the
debugging details during installation and see where things stopped.
This applies to any Linux distro - not just Ubuntu.
- Another person asked about setting up NFS to share files with a Mac
running OS X 10.1.5. It was generally agreed that it's best to avoid
using NFS if at all possible. Use Samba instead.
- There was some discussion of what differences there are between
various Linux distros. The most significant differences are:
- How packages are managed (e.g. Red Hat and its offspring use RPM
Packages - .rpm vs. Debian and its derivatives use Debian Packages - .deb)
- Proprietary system management utilities such as linuxconf and the
control panel, etc. (Red Hat), RPMdrake, etc. (Mandriva), YAST,
etc. (SuSE), and so forth
- Assortment of programs included.
- Testing vs. stable vs. unstable (see this thread)
Most distros are pretty similar otherwise, and if you avoid using their
proprietary utilities, can be managed by editing a number of plain text
files that are common to most all distros.
- Paul Visscher offered to do presentations on
cfengine, licensing, and Emacs at some
unspecified time.
Once again, there was no key signing
party. We haven't had one the last few months.
top last meeting next meeting
December 2005
No topic was scheduled for our December meeting and I was unable
to attend. Paul Visscher provided the following meeting summary.
Thanks Paul!
- Rob Caldwell talked about drive geometry and something about
setting a c/h/s offset helping performance. I didn't really follow
what exactly he was talking about.
- GT talked about some old computer hardware (spurred by the CHS
discussion)
- We talked about a new version of SATA (I think?) and about
hot-swappable SATA enclosures and huge SATA arrays (multiple
terabytes)
- Someone asked about how to get CSS encoded DVDs working in Ubuntu. The
answer is: install libdvdread3 and then run the shell script in
/usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/examples/. That will install the magic
parts that let you decode CSS.
- There was some stuff I'm forgetting.
top last meeting next meeting
|
![[DLUG Logo]](images/dlug-top.jpg)
![[Powered by RedHat Linux]](images/powered_by_t.gif){kind=small}
