Boise Linux User Group

Our next meeting is Thursday, July 2nd, 6:30 PM, in the Computer Lab of the Boise Public Library, Capital Blvd, across from Julie Davis Park. On the Agenda, Martin Torres will be presenting his experiences with using Bacula, an community driven cross platform backup solution. http://www.bacula.org/en/ Don't let the "network" based word scare you away from learning about this backup solution.

We showed Mint 7 at our last LUG meeing (June 4th) and others are reporting back enthusiastically how great it works for them and how fast it is. Linux Mint is now the 3rd most popular download according to Distrowatch and more on this can be found at http://www.tech-no-media.com/2009/06/interview-with-clem-from-linux-mint... I took my laptop with me to the June IPCUG meeting (06/11), held at the library in Meridian. It was awesome as I slid in my wireless card in my older laptop and connected immediately to the wireless network there.

I am using Ubutu 9.04 for a production application where it needs to run the latest subversion client, run a bunch of scripts to develop reports based on subversion respositories, and uses crontab to report results of the nightly jobs. First time I used this, I got a report from crontab that I wan not expecting (and it new how to send to me using sendmail via my alias to my real email address). Sendmail setup was straight forward and just works.

Fedora 11, at this point in time and in my opinion, sucks. Updates are problematic, the mirrors don't have the complete basic install packages, even OpenOffice, I had to go to the cd's to complete that Install. I have wasted so much time, the costs of trying to install Fedora 11 would be in the hundreds of dollars if tallied in billable hours. It is almost impossible to install any applications from either the base or mirror package repositories. I can not remember when installing a Linux OS was so frustrating as Fedora 11 has been.

Fedora 11 was officially released on the mirrors, June 9th. Couple of notes of interest. The files are dated a week ago, June 2nd, the date it was supposed to be released last Tuesday. DVD's are in short supply on the mirrors and the full CD set is 6 cds now. My first pass at Fedora 11 has not been favorable. Off the Fedora 11 LiveCD (Gnome) Install, seems like a lot was broken. Updates didn't work until I went in and edited both the fedora and fedora-updates repo source files. Read More...

We had a great meeting with about 10 in attendance inclunding 2 new attendees. Not bad for windy night in Boise. On the agenda, the many uses of the System RescueCD 1.20 and Mint 7 "Gloria" which is based on Ubuntu 9.04. These notes are quite long so be sure to click on read more!

We had a good meeting with about 10 in attendance, some good discussion as Clint presented both Xubuntu and Ubuntu running on laptops where he demonstrated seveal ease of use features and programs. We did continue the discussion started this last Saturday at the Ubuntu 9.04 meeting with a review of some of the tips presented as well as more in depth on configuring and using the Ubuntu Desktop system. Several CD's were handed out at the end of the meeting.

Ubuntu 9.04 Final was released on April 23rd! The IdahoUbuntu group will be holding a meeting on May 2nd at the University of Phoenix in Meridian from 9am to noon. The University of Phoenix is located just off (west of) Eagle Road at 3080 E Gentry Way. You can go http://maps.google.com and enter University of Phoenix Meridian Idaho in the search box which will bring up the map taking you there. Incidently, the map is showing that Gentry way is blocked off at Eagle Road now so be sure to make the turn on E Magic View Dr. and go around the block to the University of Phoenix.

We had a good turnout and a great meeting Thursday night where we spent a good two hours with author and member Ken McConnell in not only discussing his book, Null_Pointer, but also many aspects of writing and getting published. Ken sent along the following links from the evening:

His web presence.
ken.mcconnell@gmail.com I'm on GTalk.
@kenmcconnell on Twitter
@kenmcconnell on identi.ca Open Source Twitter-like protocol
Ken McConnell on Facebook I don't hang out there much, but I friend just about anyone.
http://myview.w0pht.org My blog.