I heard about these speakers in a promotion from Mandriva as I recall but the offer was only good in Europe. Mandriva was quite estatic about how good these speakers were and sounded and were Linux supported. While I am not curently running Mandriva anywhere, I did test them with both Fedora 12 and LinuxMint 8 (Ubuntu 9.10) and found that they are fully supported as an audio output USB device and sound great. The only issue I had was I couldn't quite get the volume up to Theater levels from DVD's but can't to that either with the internal speakers, always a little wimpy.

Drupal 6 appears to be well supported on Fedora 12. At the last meeting, I had mentioned the project articles in the March 2010 issue of LinuxFormat where installing Drupal 6 was featured as a "10 minute" project. Those instructions had worked well but could use some clarification which I have detailed below in a step-by-step of the process. When I installed Drupal 6 prior to the meeting, the current release was 6.15 but at the meeting 6.16 had been released so Drupal was issuing a security warning that a security update was needed.

Meeting turnout was great with about 4 "new" faces in the room and we did fill the room. Clint brought two machines for the demo this night and a router that created the "demonstration" environment for the evening. Clint had decided to demonstrate file and folder sharing using Samba which provides a Windows desktop compatible sharing protocol using SMB, which is also known as CIFS in much of the documentation.

We will be having our usual meeting this Thursday, March 4th, at 6:30 PM in the Computer Lab of the Boise Public Library, Capital Blvd, across from Julie Davis Park. While I don't have anything formally planned, I will have a couple of items to show briefly that maybe of interest on both Fedora 12 and Ubuntu (LinuxMint 8). We will take a little time to discuss the results of the survey I sent all. I do appreciate those who took time to respond along and were very supportive, all except one wanting to continue to receive the meeting notes and email notices.

Boise's 5th Annual BCC & Tech Fest will be held on the weekend of March 27 and 28th. This is a free event and offers many sessions covering a wide range of topics and it is not all programming or code. This is a signature event for Boise, held on the BSU Campus, and last year, drew over 600 registrants for attendance. This year we have expanded the time for each session to 75 minutes and provided more time to get from session to session; both of these changes should make for a more rewarding Code Camp & Tech Fest experience.

The good news is that the LinuxMint 8, Ubuntu, and Canonical partner repositories are now working! However, you will probably need to modify your sources list. Here is my working sources.list as tested today and I even got the update for Acrobat reader 9.3 from the Partner repository. sources.list contents: (I have also attached my sources.list file but you must be logged in to see it and be sure to do a mv on it to remove the _.txt extension.)

## -----------------------
## LINUX MINT REPOSITORIES
## -----------------------

## +++ Linux Mint 7 helena (stable) +++

At the close of the Boise Linux Group Meeting, one of the members asked for help on creating a LiveUSB bootable device using Ubuntu 9.10. We tried it on both the member's machine and my demo computer, where it would consistently fail and only one time (a glitch) did we get even the opportunity to try to create the LiveUSB drive. We concluded, erroneously, that it was the USB drive that was being used.

We had an attentive 9 members present for Clint's main presentation on Fedora 12 and in addition, Clint also showed a new distribution release called Artistx .08 Live DVD, which was released on February 2nd of this week and is based on Ubuntu 9.04. More on this towards the bottom of the meeting notes.

We had a special guest at our meeting last night in addition to the scheduled presenation on installing and configuring Linux. There were 10 in attendance. Our special guest was Scott Croft, Red Hat Professional Services, a Linux Consultant RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer). He spent about 30 minutes in updating us on the activities and programs at Red Hat as well as Fedora. Part of what was interesting is how fast they move the Fedora code in to thier Enterprise product as Red Hat releases both Fedora 13 and Enterprise 6 which may have some Fedora 13 code in it when released.

Our next meeting is this coming Thursday, January 7th, 6:30 PM, in the Computer Lab of the Boise Public Library, Capital Blvd, across from Julie Davis Park. We will have a presentation on Slackware 13.0 by member Jeremy Light who is a long time user of Slackware. Jeremy has been planning this presentation for several weeks now and should be very informative. Slackware was started in 1993 by Patrick Volkerding, one of the earliest distributions and the oldest currently being maintained. There are many distributions built on Slackware including Zenwalk, Slax, and Slampp.