Boise Linux User Group

Background

The Boise Linux User Group was founded by the Idaho PC User Group as a special interest group (SIG) and conducted its first meeting in April of 2003. It is Boise, Idaho's oldest Linux User group meeting continuously, twice a month, for over 3 years. Now taking the name of  Boise Linux User Group and with a membership list of around 30 members, meeting attendance is generally around 10 or more depending on the topic and amount of interest providing for varied discussions, not necessarily on-topic, and for networking with other Linux users. Featured on this page are the meeting reports of every meeting since April, 2003. You are invited to search this page for your topic of interest as these notes are also accompanied by links to very howto and additional presentation notes from the meetings. The Linux User group meets on the 1st & 3rd Thursdays. For more information, to make suggestions for the meetings or even volunteer to present, and to be placed on our email distribution list, you can email c_tinsley@msn.com

Next Meeting

Our next meeting will be on Thursday, December 6th, 6:30 PM, in the Gates Lab of the Boise Public Library, 715 S Capitol Blvd. On the agenda will be further discussion of our new website project based on the Drupal content management system. If you have something you would like to have on the agenda or present, please email at the mailing list address below. There will be time for discussion of other topics of interest and deciding on the December meeting topic and presentation.

The Boise Linux User Group maintains a secure mailing list which we use for notifying members of upcoming events and breaking Linux mail. If you would like to be on that email list, please email c_tinsley@msn.com and we will add you to the list.

Distro Watch

Fedora 8 ISO Download links
Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Downloads
Edubuntu 7.10 Download
K12 Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) Fedora Core 6 Release Announcement with Download Links.
OpenSuSE Downloads - Check Release Notes!
Puppy Linux Home Page
Puppy Download Page. Current version is 2.17.1
Puppy 2.03CE (180MB OpenOffice 2.0.3

Previous Meetings

The October 4th and November 1st were general discussion meetings concerning the direction of the group and building our own website. At the October meeting, Clint gave us a look at several Content Management Systems that we could use. The November meeting saw a presentation on Drupal by member Brad Benner who is willing to head up the project. The decision was made by the group to use Drupal and volunteers were requested to help in builing the site and migrating the old site content to Drupal. This is currently a work in process.

September 6th Meeting Notes - We had a great turnout, a packed house, for the MythTV presentation which was very well received by those present, awesome presentation by Shawn and a round of thanks to him as he really put aon a show, as promised. His setup included a backend server and two laptops as frontends which access the backend server and provides all the user functions , all running on Ubuntu Linux He also demonstrated his remote control functionality. He also had a cable box connected to the server and was able control that for channel selection and recording/viewing. His newest build was on Mythbuntu and you can find out more about that at Mythbuntu website.

For those who might not be familar with MythTV, here is one users comments:"MythTV is Tivo and Windows Media Center on steroids. The most notable features include:

• a TV recorder
• an optional web based recording manager (that is awesome)
• automatic commercial skipping for recorded TV
• no playback restrictions (WinMCE disables playback for what content creators deem is "premium" content after 3 days)
• no monthly fees (no longer the case, scheduling service is now $60/yr)
• allows easy expansion (just add network storage or another internal hard drive)
• a music manager
• a DVD player
• a video file player (that plays every non-DRM'd codec you've ever seen)

I love MythTV. Once you have a DVR, regular television is unwatchable. Annoying commercials (that raise the volume 30-50%) are no longer an issue. Rewinding, pausing, and fast forwarding regular TV is spectacular."

Additional Links on Ubuntu MythTV:

http://parker1.co.uk/mythtv_ubuntu.php
http://parker1.co.uk/mythtv_0.20.php
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Ubuntu_Dapper_Installation
http://www.djlosch.com/article_How-to:_Ubuntu_Edgy_and_MythTV_and_Hauppauge_PVR-150

Here are some more links for information on MythTV:

http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/ - Link to How, Tips, Documents, Hardware, etc.
http://mythtv.org/modules.php?name=MythInstall - Installing & Using MythTV
http://mythtv.org/modules.php?name=MythFeatures - Features & Screen Shots
http://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/Supported_hardware - Supported Hardware
http://g-ding.tv/?q=MythDora - MythDora 4.0
http://mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html - KnoppMyth 5 F1 PDF & Links
http://knoppmyth.globaltap.com/ Another take on the Pamphlet - Overview

Other presentations and information. (Requires Acrobat Reader):
The Pamphlet of KnoppMyth - R5 Edition
Practical MythTV - Michael Still
Building a Linux-based - PVR

We have merged with the Boise LinuxMeetup group and will continue to meet on the 1st Thursday as the Linux User Group here in Boise. We also discussed putting up our own website and will be moving forward with that project shortly. The website would provide the ability for members to post content and questions, provide an RSS facility, as well as provide meeting notes and news. Finally, we ajourned without setting a topic for the next meeting but we hope to get an agenda in place for our next meeting on October 4th.

August 2nd Meeting Notes - Clint had setup a number of resources at home which he was able to Remote desktop into from the library for showing secure access, Joomla CMS, and a Windows File Sharing server, all running on Ubuntu Dapper server. Clint touched on a number of points of general interest. Approximeately 30 minutes was spent on the Ubuntu Live event held in Portland recently. Several presentations available are available for the downloading from the conference at Oreillynet.  The main Ubuntu Live site is at http://www.ubuntulive.com/.

June 7th Meeting Notes - We had a really good turnout this evening as the presentation on the new Fedora 7 release by Jim Millard. Noteworthy is that Fedora is just Fedora with the dropping of the "Core" from the name. Fedora 7 is very polished desktop and upgrading from the previous version is very seemless according to Jim. Fedora 7 is a good example of the State of the Linux Desktop today as the focus becomes more on ease of installation, ease of use, ease of software selection and installation, stability, and an eye pleasing if not eye catching desktop.

May 3rd Meeting Notes - It was unfortunate that we did not have more in attendance this night as it turned out to be a very informative meeting. Martin Torres led off the evening with a presentation on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.0.4 running on his laptop. Feisty is the latest release from Ubuntu. He gave us quite a tour which included exploring how he could open and save a file on his Windows XP NTFS file system as it turned out that there is a configuration tool available that enabled exactly that as he succesfully saved his edited file back on the Windows partition. For laptops, Feisty is very impressive as it supports CPU throttling where the Feisty automatically adjust CPU speed depending on demand and even Clint was impressed as he showed how he could easily and cleanly run a DVD on his laptop with only 128 MB of Ram. You can take the full tour of Feisty at http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/704tour and be sure to check out the Windows migration tools along with all the other new features in Feisty. The other part of Martin's Ubuntu demo was on Automatix2, which has been described as "cruise control" for Ubuntu in making it easy to configure the perfect desktop in Ubuntu. Automatix2 is an program or package installer that uses scripts to make the installation experience completely painless as it downloads programs and resolves dependencies on the fly. There are a couple of tripping points with Automatix2 as it may not install automatically as Clint reported that he had to do the manual 6 step installation and you have to make sure nothing else is using the apt package manager such as Synaptic or updater as it will cause Automatix to fail an install and require that you repeat the install. Automatix2 is available at getautomatix.

Our presentation for the second part of the meeting was un-announced as Jeff R. had brought and demonstrated DD-WRT, an open source Linux OS for routers which greatly extends the capabilities of the Linksys WRT54G Wireless G series routers as well as some others. You must be careful in your selection of router to use with DD-WRT as even the newer WRT54G, version 7 and later, are not compatible. The currently supported routers can be found on the DD-WRT wiki installation page. The router Jeff was showing was the Buffalo WHR-G54S which he had obtained on sale from the Circuit City website for $25. The DD-WRT software is quite impressive in the capabilities it adds which includes security settings, creating your own wireless hotspot for guests to use the Internet without being able to access your private network, DMZ, Radius support, and the list just goes on. DD-WRT brings functionality to the $50 consumer router, features only found in routers normally costing several hundred dollars. More information can be found on wikipedia and at the DD-WRT website.

April 5th Meeting Notes - We picked up two new members this night plus 5 regulars for a total of 7 in attendance. Clint led off the meeting with a presentation on the Levanta Intrepid M Linux Management Appliance running as a VM with two managed servers. The VM can manage and control up to three servers running Linux at any time. It is available as a free download from this Levanta website. Using the Intrepid, Clint demonstrated how to configure the VM on VMware Server, bring up two servers and add configure them so that they could be provisioned and managed under Intrepid. We also viewed a short video on how you could make some pretty distructive changes to a managed server and the Intrepid would restore the server to its last "checkpont." In discussing the possible uses of the Intrepid M, it was thought that this could also be used to "provision," manage, and maintain Linux desktops as well. Documentation and videos can be found at in the Levanta forums.

Clint then turned to discussing a new release of GParted LiveCD that includes Clonezilla with GParted as a multi-boot CD. As a liveCD (or bootable USB flash/pen drive), Clonezilla can clone single machine as well as specific partitions without being installed but it does require some place for you to store the drive or partition image of the machine being cloned such as a second hard drive or samba share point on a network. I can clone all the standard Linux and Windows partition types and what it doesn't recognize, it will clone at the sector level. It does not do direct disk to disk clones from what we could tell but there are other programs available that can easily do this, even bundled with some hard drives. If you want to take Clonezilla to the next level, you can build a Clonezilla server which can clone over 40 computers simultaneously. Information and instructions on using Clonezilla Live as well as building the Clonezilla DBRL server can be found on the Clonezilla website.  Two additional features that can be supported by Clonezilla server is PXE boot so that you don't even have to touch the machines being cloned other than to boot them and using "DBRL-winroll," you can Change MS Windows hostname, "workgroup" name, automatically and assign a random SID for Windows. Information on this feature is available on the DBRL-winroll website.

March 1st Meeting Notes – With 6 members in attendance, it was decided that we would only meet once a month, on the first Thursday of the month. Clint demonstrated a couple of recently released distributions. The first was the latest version of Vector Linux 5.8 SOHO Beta 1, based on Slackware. This version features the lastest KDE (3.5.6) and OpenOffice 2.1. It is a very robust distro, and with its Slackware base, it runs great on older hardware. The 2nd Distro was SimplyMEPIS 6.5, Beta 7 which is now based on Debian/Ubuntuled and very impressive including support for Beryl 3D manager. A very strong showing from the folks at SimplyMEPIS. Martin Torres loaded it on his laptop after the meeting and says its a keeper.

January 18th Meeting Notes – We had 9 members in attendance. Clint led of with a presentation on SabayonLinux x86 3.26, a GentooLinux based distribution, which is unique for 3 reasons: 1) It is distributed as an installable liveCD which includes not only all the support needed for playing commercial DVDs. 2) It includes the proprietory Nvidia drivers for Xgl and includes Beryl 1.4 for great desktop effects including the cube. 3) It features the new KDE menu structure which Clint had first seen in Novell’s SuSE 10. Software packages include the latest KDE 3.5.5, OpenOffice 2.0.4, and the awesome Google Earth which Clint used to take everyone on a tour of the cycling trail in the Boise Foot Hills in 3D, very awesom. http://www.sabayonlinux.org. After demonstrating playing a commercial DVD video, a few more discussion points, and booting the LiveCD version which performed impressively considering it was running from CD, Clint then did a short presentation on the new Fedora Core 6 from the Linux Terminal Server Project. FC 6 doesn’t seem as “polished” as FC 5 when it was released but still very good and includes the latest software including OO 2.0.4. The meeting ended with a discussion of the LiveCD Freebie 2.0, a FreeBSD release for desktop use. FreeBSD is very well behaved but attempting to run it on a system with a fairly new Nvidia Graphic’s card was not successful for demonstration. http://www.freesbie.org/ The Knoppix 5.1.1 LiveCD also failed to run for the same reason. Clint remarked that the new Knoppix 5.1.1 seems to be much improved over 5.0 which was released over 6 months ago and runs great on older hardware. After the meeting, he was able to get it to boot and display using the cheat codes for the video display. Knoppix 5.1.1 also includes Beryl XGL support.

For those who might be interested in learning more about Linux, we also showed elpicx 0.3, a KNOPPIX-based live CD with a collection of documentation, exercises, example solutions and simulators to help you prepare for the exams of the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) and includes exam simulators for LPI exams 101, 102, 201 and 202, where you can test your knowledge. Based on Knoppix 5.0.1, it also includes extensive documentation on using Knoppix. More information and download links are available on the web site at elearnit.de.

In concluding the meeting, it was decided that for our next meeting, we would be viewing the DVD Movie “RevolutionOS’ on the beginning of Linux with Linus Torvalds.

December 7th Meeting Notes. Clint started off with a demonstration in the first hour on using rsync to create folder hbackups. For the demo, he had a VMware server running the Ubuntu Personal Backup Appliance (PBA 1.0.2) which was running the rsynce daemon, a copy of openSuSE 10.2 and WindowsXP where he demonstrated the windows components for using rsync. (Presentation Link - PDF) Then we turned to a discussion on Fedora Core 6. Two of your members expressed their dissatisfaction with it with one member abandoning it for now due to problems with repositories, connectivity, and performance. Clint has also taken a look at FC 6 to find that is it a bit poor on the performance side but seems the repositories are working well now and it does have the latest stable versions OpenOffice 2.0.4, Scribus, the Gimp and Eclipse. On installing on 12/09, the initial yum update went flawlessly with over 500 MB of updates including a kernel update. Clint also showed openSuSE 10.2 which had just been released the day of the meeting. Very impressive, looks nice. Novell has ported quite a few features from its commercial SuSE Enterprise Desktop product. Installer has been improved and even includes the option of disabling IPV6 during the install, which many Internet providers do not support at this time. SuSE 10.2 continues to get good reviews. Distrowatch led off their Weekly Watch with a segment on SuSE 10.2 which includes the following links: openSUSE 10.2 Documentation provides quick links to the available user guides for the project's latest release; especially the 230-page openSUSE 10.2 Start-Up and the 700-page openSUSE 10.2 Reference guides look like excellent free learning resources. Software management in openSuse 10.2: YaST, rug, zypper and yum teaches your all there is about managing software in openSUSE while List of Recommended Repositories for YaST tells you ho to extend your openSUSE installation with extra software. Hacking openSUSE 10.2 provides instructions for solving the "CD not found" error reported on systems with certain motherboards and explains the procedure for adding support for MP3 and DVD playback and for installing some useful proprietary software and kernel modules on openSUSE 10.2 How To Forge Perfect Setup for openSuSE 10.2

The K12LTSP project has quietly released it 6.0 version of Fedora Core (See link above in Distro Watch for release notes which includes links to the various downloads)

For those comtemplating server setups, a few links of interest:
Installing a LAMP system with Fedora Core 6.
Building a Ubuntu 6.10 Firewall/Gateway Server and more.
Ubuntu 6.10 Server Perfect Setup.

Meeting Notes – November 2, 2006 – Tonight’s focus was on the latest releases of Fedora Core 6 and Unbuntu Edgy Eft. Clint brought two machines for the presentation, on of them being for making CD’s for those wanting them and his VMWare server where could show different virtual machines including FC6 and three flavors of Ubuntu, 6.06, 6.06 upgraded to 6.10 and a 6.10 clean install. Clint noted that the installs and upgrades went smoothly with one notable exception on doing a distribution upgrade from Ubuntu 6.06 LTS to 6.10 Edgy. In the release notes for Edgy Eft, two methods for upgrading are given. Clint tried what he thought would be the easiest as he is basically a command line person and used the command “apt-get dist-upgrade” twice and they both ran too quickly such that the upgrade didn’t take place. He then tried the command as root ‘gksu “update-manager –c”’ as shown there in the Release Notes only to realize that root doesn’t cannot run X in the terminal so exiting to normal user, the correct command is ‘sudo gksu “update-manager –c”’ Both FC 6 and Ubuntu feature the “latest and greatest” stable updates to OpenOffice 2.0.4 among other packages. The updates and what’s new are are detailed at the Edgy Eft Release Notes and the FC Release Summary. FC6 also gives you a tour. And get all the latest news on FC6 including reviews and repository announcements here and here. Clint also mentioned a new Xubuntu release Xfld 0.3 with minimal hardware requirements and very fast graphic interface based on the Xfce desktop and environment and uses Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy as its distribution base. It is distributed as a live and installation CD. More information can be found here. A couple of those present took copies of Xfld 0.3.

The meeting was closed with a request to those present for meeting presentations or topics for our next meeting and that request is still open.

October 5th Meeting - Our first presenter was not able to attend so the presentation on gPg has been deferred indefinitely. We had 10 in attendance and spent the evening being enlightened on the ins and outs of Puppy Linux. Gregg Bruch and Clint Tinsley have wrote an 8 page Howto (available here) on Using Puppy Linux 2.x which includes notes on configuring and installing it. Gregg started off the presentation by demonstrating and configuring Puppy Office 203 running on a K6-550 with a 128 MB of RAM. Gregg's presentation including running Open Office 2.0.3 and saving his configuration along with his home directory to the hard drive on shutting down so that he would not have reconfigure Puppy on the next boot and he would have all his files available. Then Clint took over, still on Gregg's computer, and demonstrated using LinNeighborhood to access shares on Clint VMware server and also demonstrated setting up printing from Puppy to a shared printer, also located on the VMware server using the lpd printing protocol. Then Clint moved over to the VMserver where he showed how to configure lpd printer sharing on WindowsXP on a virtual machine and then also demonstrated a dualboot configuration where Puppy Linux was sharing a hard drive with Windows98SE, also in a virtual machine. Clint had some other virtuals set up on the server, so he powered them up and showed the Puppy being able to access all the shared resources on the "network" including the local shares on the Host WindowsXP computer that was actually running the virtual server. One thing that impresses Clint about PuppyLinux is its ability to run almost anywhere, including on systems he could not even boot other versions Linux, and runs on almost any storage medium, very portable. The meeting concluded with a discussion of the next meeting and it was decided to have a VMware fest at Boise Computer Service which is owned and operated by member Brian. That will be on October 19th.

Sept. 21st Meeting - DM-Crypt is a Linux technology now built into most kernels that allow you to have an encrypted partition where you can securely store your important information as well as transport it without fear of loss as the information stored in the encrypted form is not accessible. Robert Storey gave us a great presentation on how to do this. His 7 page handout is recommended reading for anyone interested in using DM-Crypt or crytosetup on Linux. Robert also provided a script archive of his scripts which he demonstrated along with a tar containing some great drive wiping tools. Right click on the links to download. DM-Crypt is very secure requiring the user to know both the partition name and passphrase to use it. DM-Crypt is becoming the default encryption technology in that it has been endorsed by Red Hat/Fedora as the encryption technology of choice and it is well supported on Debian as well. Robert did his presentation using Ubuntu. DM-Crypt might be a good reason for our Government to use Linux in securing sensitive data against loss in light of current events. After the meeting, Clint went home and applied what was learned in using DM-Crypt on Fedora Core 5 to create a large encrypted partition which he then burned to CD and restored. "Putting it all togethter on Fedora Core 5" provides the details and a step-by-step on doing this. DM-Crypt is not very friendly, presently, in that it requires all the configuration to be done as the "root" user and at the command line. It is very usable and look for GUI's to become available in the near future in making DM-Crypt more friendly; both Fedora and Ubuntu know to prompt for the root user password when the application requires them and most GUI's are front ends for the command line packages. A couple of cautions: 1) The encrypted partition is very easily corrupted as I read all it takes is one bit messed up to complete render the encrypted partition useless and the data lost so backups are required, not an option and 2) DM-Crypt is only available on Linux and hence, is not cross-platform.

Sept. 7th Meeting - VMware Server. We had a lot of interest in VMware as we "packed" the Gates Lab, with over 12 members present. Martin Torres lead off the presentation by demonstrating the installation of VMware Server to a prebuilt Fedora Core 5 installation and he handed out a short procedure on installing VMware on FC 5 which also included links as to where to download files and some locations where prebuilt Virtual Machines (VM's) could be found. Martin brought some VM's he had downloaded on a external USB hard drive which he demonstrated. Clint also had a number of VM's stored on a hard drive partition. Demonstrations included showing VM's running ReactOS, Puppy 2.0.2, Puppy 1.0.7, a Personal Backup Appliance (Ubuntu 5.10), a VM that allows you to run LiveCD without burning them to CD first, and a VM running Windows XP that Clint had built from scratch, all this on VMware Server which is free for the downloading. During the last half hour, Clint demonstrated VMware Server running on WindowsXP using some of the same VM's we had seen earlier running on Linux VMware Server. Clint had done quite a bit of work with VM Server and offered these notes on installing to VM Server to FC5:

(Taken from Mark's (we)Blog of August 19th, 2006 - http://www.markwilson.co.uk/blog/2006/08/installing-vmware-server-on-fedora.htm)

1) First off, you can use an existing install of FC5 which should be current on the updates but make sure you have the following components installed using the pirut Package Manager, yum or an equivalent method:
o gcc (v4.1.1-1.fc5.i386)
o gcc-c++ (v4.1.1-1.fc5.i386)
o kernel-devel (v2.6.17-1.2174_FC5.i686)
o xinetd (v2:2.3.13-6.2.1.i386)
Clint noted that you must have the kernel-devel or similar header files on both FC5 and the VM's that you create in order to install the VM tools on the VM.

2) Next, visit www.vmware.com/download/server where you can get your free serial numbers and download VMware Server. You will have to have serial numbers so be sure to take a few minutes to register so that you can get them. Also, if you want to use both the Windows and Linux VM Server, you will need to get unique serial numbers for each OS (the serial numbers are unique to the OS and cannot be used interchangeably between Linux and Windows.) Then Download VM Server for Linux (or Windows) along with the support components which you will need:
For Linux, the downloads are:
VMware-server-1.0.1-29996.i386.rpm
VMware-server-win32-client-1.0.1-29996.zip
Unzip the client installer (VMware-server-linux-client-1.0.1-29996.zip) into a folder.
Download the VMware any-any update vmware-any-any-update104.tar.gz from http://mirror.vmmatrix.net/vmware-any-any-update/
Extract vmware-any-any-update104.tar.gz in to a folder where you can find it during the install.

3) Switch to root user (su -). Change to the directory where you have downloaded the above files.

Run the VMware Server installer (rpm -Uvh VMware-server-1.0.1-29996.i386.rpm).

cd into the directory where you extracted vmware-any-any-update amd execute ./runme.pl (this will call vmware-config.pl, allowing for the acceptance of the VMware end user license agreement, configuration of networking, specification of the server console port, definition of the location of virtual machine files and entry of the VMware serial number).

If the patch is working correctly then all the prompts should work at their defaults; however it may be necessary to answer the question "What is the location of the directory of C header files that match your running kernel? [/usr/src/linux/include]" with /usr/src/kernels/2.6.17- 1.2174_FC5-i686/include (or another version of the kernel-devel tools). This may or may not be necessary, if it is correct, the script will continue to run, if it is not, it will ask you for the correct location. On our FC5, it worked in just hitting return to accept the default.

Building the vmmon module will fail if gcc and gcc-c++ are not present and the configuration script will have to be re-run if it finds that inetd or xinetd are not installed.

Install the VMware Server Console (rpm -Uvh VMware-server-console-1.0.1-29996.i386.rpm).

Run vmware-config-server-console.pl from the terminal prompt. You'll have to agree to licensing again but no serial number will be required.

Exit the root account.

You should now be able to run vmware from a terminal session on the desktop or you can make an application launcher icon on the desktop with the command "vmware" Important file locations:
/var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines is the default location for your VM's although you can run them from just about anywhere.
/usr/lib/vmware/isoimages contains the VM tools iso's a number of different OS's including Windows, Linux, freeBSD, Solaris, and Novell.

Virtual Machine Downloads:
http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/ - lots of VM's for any purpose and distribution. Many of these link to other sites where the download can be found. Beware that most of these use BitTorrent and expect to spend some time downloading.
http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/vmware/
http://developer.kde.org/~binner/vmware/ - openSuSE 10.1 KDE 3.5.4
http://www.reactos.org/en/download.html - ReactOS, a Windows clone

Other VM tools and resources:
http://www.vmwarez.com/2006/05/virtualization-tool-kit.html
P2V Source Article - http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?page_id=174
blog - http://swik.net/vmware
http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/server_pubs.html - VM Server Documentation
Installing Fedora Core 5 / How to install linux on VMWare Server - http://www.techenclave.com/forums/guides-and-tutorials/77593-installing-fedora-core-5-install-linux-print.html
How To Install VMware Server On Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) - http://www.howtoforge.com/ubuntu_vmware_server
VMware® Utilities - http://petruska.stardock.net/Software/VMware.html
Ubuntu LAMP Server step by step instruction on how to do this in VMWare on Windows XP - http://www.howtoforge.com/ubuntu_lamp_torrentflux_vmware

August 17th Meeting. We demonstrated Puppy 2.0.2 Seamonkey Linux running on an old (read incredibly slow) HP Pavilion Pentium 266 which is has befriended the Puppy and living well together. Apparently, the Puppy is not afraid of the DMCA pit bull because it comes multimedia enable including the ability to play commercial DVD's as well as mpeg. Puppy has a very small foot print coming out of the kennel, only 71 MB including Seamonkey (Mozilla, derived from Netscape) browser and you can run it from just about any current bootable media such as flash drives. It is installed to the hard drive of the Pavillion and boots natively where a few extra packages have been added including OpenOffice 2.0.3, Java 1.50_6, Scribus, QT libraries which all works very nicely. It uses a light weight windows manager which makes it ideal for old hardware plus it provides xvesa and the xorg x server for displaying xwindows. Puppy Linux version 2.02 was just recently released and now has full NTFS write support, using the ntfs-3g driver, providing Full read and write support for NTFS partitions. This includes saving of the Puppy session to hard drive. Clint also demonstrated the Gparted Live-CD 2.2.5 Gnome Partition Manager, which is great for managing your hard drive partions and resizing, just be sure to back up anything you care about.

August 3rd Meeting - Clint spent approximately 90 minutes providing an extended presentation on how to install Xen 3.0.2 on Ubuntu 6.0.6 Dapper including showing how to create the Xen configuration files necessary for DHCP NAT, booting the guest sessions, configuring the guest sessions, and managing the guest sessions with xm (xenman). The demonstration including running three guest operating system on Xen which were a Dapper based "webserver" along with a Fedora and OpenSuSE images downloaded from Jailtime.org where you can download a number of pre-built os images for use on Xen. He concluded the presentation with a demo of the Live CD 1.5 from XenSource. He an 8 page handout detailing the installation. An updated 15 page version with the configuration files is provided here for downloading. The last 30 minutes of the meeting were spent in general discussion and a short showing of email filtering services that Brian Aldridge is providing his hosting customers.

July 20th Meeting. In that our normal meeting location was not available on Camas, we met across the street in Cassia Park, in the park shelter. Despite the 100 degree temperatures, it was quite comfortable. It was announced that our future meetings will be held in the Gate's Lab of the Boise Public Library. Clint spent about an hour on his experiences with the Smart package manager on SuSE 10.1 and Fedora Core 5. Smart is a new package manager showing significant promise in that has been fully implemented SuSE 10 and there are rumors that Ubuntu may adopt it as it package manager in its next release and it also available for Fedora Core 5. Smart's major benefit is that is able to determine the best updates based on dependencies and packages installed; it does this by analyzing all the package updates available from the various repositories and then installing those that meet the dependencies tests. Clint compared Smart to Yum on Steroids on SuSE as a command line utility. At the conclusion of his presentation, Clint emphasized that the various package managers are not consistent in their use and results. He found differences in what would be updated by Smart, SuSE’s YAST, and YUM. One example he documented was on SuSE 10.1, YAST provide a set of updates that were different than those offered by Smart (YAST was complete with 5 updates) where Smart only provided 3 of the 5 but then, a day later YAST had “lost” 3 of the updates to Samba but they were still shown as Smart Updates. Clint suggested that what ever you use, you should check the results found by one tool with those of the alternatives such as Smart. Clint is using both Smart and SuSE’s YAST to maintain his system. Finally, Clint told the group that in using Smart, it requires two commands to work correctly in that you must do a smart update before smart upgrade in order to refresh the package cache, where YUM does both in one command. Two members of the group brought a couple of Ubuntu loaded laptops which they wanted to setup wireless on. Martin worked his magic and had one up and connected as it seems there was an open unsecured access point nearby which they were able to connect to the Internet. When most of those left at about 8:20, they were working on getting the two laptops connected so that they could download the necessary drivers on the second machine to bring up the wireless adapter.

Smart Links
Smart Package Manager - Labix  Home webite
Guru's SuSE 10.1 blog on installing and using Smart
Adding Installation Sources to SuSE 10.1
Fedora Core Smart Config RPM Find
Smart on Ubuntu Discussion

Meeting Notes - July 6th. Martin started off the evening with a presentation on Opera's v9 browser which has a number of new features, functionalities, and very fast. He also demonstrated Google's Earth for Linux which is pretty impressive. About mid-meeting while discussing AVG AntiVirus, we digressed in the land of Helix, a forensic and security toolset LiveCD that includes the ability to find root kits that may have compromised a system. Wrapping up the evening, Jim shared his new employment experiences as a Linux System Admin where Gentoo has been the distribution of choice for both servers and desktop. Gentoo is pretty good for servers it is difficult to support on the desktop and he would like to try to move the organization to Fedora Core 5. The meeting concluded with a discussion about LiBc, another Boise Linux Group, which has been dormant for a couple of years and now is restarting up, with their first meeting the following Wednesday, July 12th; a show of hands was taken to see who might of attend.

June 15th meeting notes – A real round of thanks goes to Brian Pete for his presentation on installing Fedora Core 5 on an iMAC. Great job! If you didn't catch his presentation, you can download it here.

I demonstrated both Puppy 2.0 and dyna:bolic (multimedia linux distribution) in a "dual" boot configuration where I had both installed on a laptop's hard drive. I am impressed by Puppy fast desktop and overall support for the system but it did not support the usb mouse on the laptop and this is a major issue for me. As an update to that, Puppy 1.0.4 did support the USB mouse but I had other challenges in installing that to the laptop. dyna:bolic as a full suite of multimedia tools and is getting some very good media attention: Multimedia For Linux. dyan:bolic can run in several different configurations, natively as a live CD, "nested (changes are saved to a hard drive or USB device" or installed to your hard drive. I showed it as installed to the hard drive; the main concern I have with the hard drive install is that it does seem to save changes and I don't know what is involved in adding additional packages but it does come with a lot of stuff as shown in the review article.

June 1st meeting notes – We had 8 in attendance before the night was over. Clint started off the evening's presentations by showing the just released Puppy Linux 2.00 running on a older old laptop with 128 mb of RAM from the Live CD. Speed was extremely robust and network configuration with Puppy's new network configuration tool was a point and click operation, very easy. He the rebooted to another Puppy Linux Live CD, Grafpup 1.40, which is full blown graphics version of Puppy with the Gimp photo editor and other graphics packages. Grafpup, too, was very fast. Then, moving over to a desktop computer, Clint demonstrated some of the features of SuSE 10.1. Clint has moved to SuSE 10.1 from FC5; when asked why, he cited the enhanced graphics support for 3D and Xgl along the stable repositories for SuSE 10.1, and the games available including a 3D game called Neverball. As part of the presentation, Clint also showed how he had installed Mozilla 1.7.13 so he could use Mozilla Mail with his MSN account instead of Thunderbird (which doesn't work with MSN) and how he moved his .mozzilla folder from the FC 5 computer to the new SuSE 10.1 system. He concluded the SuSE 10.1 presentation with a showing of Google's Picaso Photo Manager/Editor (Windows version, not the Linux one) running using CodeWeavers CrossOver Office Pro 5.0.1. There was a discussion on what you could do and not do in running Windows applications on CrossOver Office Pro. Support seems very good for Adobe products and Clint has ran PageMaker 6.5 on CrossOver, even though it is not on the “gold” list of supported products. We downloaded Google Earth, hoping it would work, but found it would not install due to psapi.dll issue even though psapi.dll.so was present in the CrossOver Office libraries. Clint concluded the evening's presentation's with PAIPIX 5.0 installed; PAIPIX 5.0 is huge LiveDVD which you can install to a hard drive, “pure debian” with Knoppix and Kannotix bundled in which contains just about every software package you could could want to play with. (We did look for the “kitchen sink” thinking that since everything else was there.. but, alas, no kitchen sink.) The meeting concluded with a discussion on future meetings with the decision made to keep the twice monthly meeting schedule with our next meeting on June 15 with Brian Pete presenting. We hope to have presentation on Ruby on Rails at our July 6th meeting.

SuSE 10.1 web links:
First look at SUSE 10.1
The Jem Report – Hacking SUSE 10.1. This was Clint's reference document in setting up SuSE 10.1 for the open source repositories and multimedia support along with Xgl.
Novell Cool Solutions: Xgl on SuSE 10.1 for Gnome and KDE with Nvidia cards.
HOWTO for SUSE LINUX users. Includes instructions on supporting older “legacy” Nvidia cards and several versions of SuSE LINUX.

Puppy Linux Page. Details and download links.

PAIPIX Home Page (English) PAIPIX DVD Download

Other notes:

The Ubuntu Dapper 6.0.6 LTS (Long Term Service) was released on June 1. Based on the furry of activity on the Ubuntu list, Ubuntu may have been a little too anxious to get this one out the door and maybe should have waited to make it 6.0.7 LTS with another “beta” or two. 6.0.6 is available for downloading now at www.ubuntu.com. Update: Distrowatch Weekly (06/05/2006) review states this about Ubuntu 6.0.6 "that Dapper shipped too early. There are several serious bugs which will likely leave many newbies and hardcore veterans alike banging their collective heads against the wall." Upside, the bugs are primarily hardware related and you may do just fine. Here are additional ubuntu links which may be of interest to general users as well:
How-To: Dual-Boot Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper) Linux Desktop Along Side Windows XP This article shows how you can setup two hard drives in a dual boot configuration, WindowsXP on one and Ubuntu on the other.
Ubuntu Home Server Setup Word .doc download, opens fine in OpenOffice.
Linux-Watch Article: Ubuntu's Dapper Drake is one impressive Linux distro.
EasyUbuntu - EasyUbuntu is an easy to use script that gives the Ubuntu user the most commonly requested apps, codecs, and tweaks that are not found in the base distribution - all with a few clicks of your mouse. EasyUbuntu is so easy to use in fact, that even your grandma could be playing encrypted dvds, streaming Windows Media, and sporting the latest Nvidia or Ati drivers in minutes! And yes, EasyUbuntu is GPL. EasyUbuntu works on (X/K)ubuntu and on all the three architectures (x86, AMD64 and PPC). - EasyUbuntu Home page. EasyUbuntu Setup Python Scrip.

How to install ANYTHING in Ubuntu!

Clint's Ubuntu Dapper 6.0.6 Experience: I already had WindowsXP installed on the "play" computer so I moved that drive to the slave position as recommended in the Dual Boot How-To posted on our website. I am happy to report that the installation of Ubuntu to the primary hard drive with being able to dual boot WindowsXP on the slave went very well. I need to dig into this a bit deeper because normally the bootcfg on WindowsXP would be an issue in moving the drive to the "D" position but Ubuntu handled this and WindowsXP still thinks it is on C and this inspite of an "active" partition being seen on the primary partition; very interesting.

Now on to Dapper 6.0.6. The base install went without a hitch, no issues so far and the installer is very friendly; Dapper 6.0.6 now uses a LiveCD for the installer so you get the graphical interface to work in and it extremely clean and easy, plus there are some installation docs on the LiveCD to help you along. After the base install, I used the easyubuntu python script to add the multimedia support and that seems to work okay although it did terminate without returning to the root prompt. I did have install kaffine separately for full multimedia support and I installed k3b for burning CD's. I still have not been able to get the mozilla suite to install which I need for my MSN account; the installer is not able to connect to the display, a gtk error. I was hoping that installing k3b (gtk support) might provide the support for that but didn't help. Nor did installing the programming support or gcc. I have installed the mozilla suite on both FC5 and SuSE 10.1 without any issues, using the mozilla-installer which fails on Dapper 6.0.6.

Knoppix 5.0.1 was released on June 2nd and is available on a Live DVD of over 4 GB. Details and download at www.knoppix.com. Knoppix is, in a way, the ultimate Windows recovery/migration CD and now has transparent read/write access to NTFS partitions. Knoppix 5.0.1 now has installers for both installing to hardrives and upgrading existing installations of older versions of Knoppix.

Our May meetings of the 4th and 18th focused on using Fedora Core 5 accompanied by the usual side discussions of topics of interest. The May 18th meeting was to feature a presentation on VNC and Vino but we arrived at our usual meeting place to find it locked. Apparently due to email problems with our host, the meeting had not made it on his calendar. Clint had brought in two machines, one loaded with FC 5 running VNC and Vino and a SuSE 10.1 system to use as the client from which was planned to show how remote desktop access worked. As we met in the parking lot, Clint handed out his presentation and went through it without the visual aides he had planned. You can view Clint's update Vino notes and VNC setup HOWTO here. Both Clint and Martin have taken a look at Novell's latest SuSE 10.1 distribution and have found it wanting. It seems to be very sluggish in running, problems with the update process and repos not working, X server seems to have some issues, and some packages are conspicuous by their absence, such as Scribus. Gnome looks more like Windows than Gnome or KDE and KDE was frozen at 3.5.1 with this release. Clint also mentions that upgrading or moving SuSE 10.1 to other systems or hardware seems to only work if you Nuke N Pave where you have to do a fresh install. Martin has removed SuSE 10.1 in favor of FC5 (comments follow here) and Clint will not be upgrading his SuSE 10.0 system. Martin's experience with SUSE 10.1 (community edition) was 50/50 liking/disliking it. Note - these comments were using a package of RC-1 and RC-3, but that was enough to take it off my laptop instead of using the final release version. The install went correctly, the second time (the first install recognized by laptop LCD as something very strange - on it side and overlapping graphics) and the graphic install process works as designed. Disappointments included Firefox, which, after updating to 1.5.0.3, takes forever to load to the first screen - not related to the IPv6 issue with DSL but once up, behaves as it should. NTFS suppor built in to the kernel so you do not have to mount your other OS partitions. Why can't all distros do this by default, or at least perform it as part of the graphic install/setup? The biggest problem is with the update sites. Working one time, not the next. There does not appear to be a reliable, single location or set of mirrors that are current for updating or adding to the community packages. And, the final issue - SUSE is slow to boot up. This on an Athlon 64 laptop with 1 gig of memory. I Loaded FC-5 on my laptop and it appears to be a keeper. Wireless issues with NDISWRAPPER still exist - have to log in as ROOT and IWCONFIG.... the setup then logout and back in as user and everything works fine. A setting or start file somewhere needs a string added. Inconvenient but not enought to drop the distro. Some issues with the update sites for YUM (and YUMEX) also - but this was taken care by going to the LIVNA.ORG site and using their install rather than the recommendations on he Fedora Forum site. LIVNA recommends rpm -ivh..., while the entries I found on the FAQ to add LIVNA used rpm -Uvh..., which would not produce a usable repo entry. Additionally, FC-5 appears to come up and be working faster than SUSE 10.1

The April 20th meeting was well and focused on extending Fedora Core 5 using Yum and Yumex. Clint led the meeting demonstrated several sites of interest as well as demonstration of using Yumex to add packages and update FC5. Two sites of use in installating and extending FC 5 include The Personal Fedora Core 5 Installation Guide and Fedore Core 5 Tips & Tricks. The YUM Extender is a desktop GUI front end for the console based YUM which has pretty much replaced the up2date utility and is used to update, install, and remove packages, all while resolving dependencies. Resources shown here include the YumX home page, FC 5 .99 User Guide (CentOS), and adding repositories to YUM/YumX. More information on YUM, the Yellowdog Updater Modified, can found on at Duke Universities website. There appears to be some difficulties with using both YUM and YumExtender. First off, if YumExtender has a problem accessing the repositories, the underlying problem is generally not evident until you run YUM in a console or terminal window plus there are some issues are how repositories are accessed or available plus there is a "key" that verifies the repository so there are a number of points of failure where even YUM will fail access the repositories and will not work so you have to keep re-running it until you are successful; this is not necessarily a bad thing but more a result of world-wide community supported project where the repositories are scattered around the world. YUM is still the best tool for updating the system as well as the headers necessary for adding software to FC5 where Yumex is strong in providing more control over what is updated as well as being able to search for software to install in an easy to use tool. Clint then moved on to a short presentation on FreeNAS, a BSD based, Network Attached Storage Linux distribution which provides CIFS (SMB/Samba), NFS, FTP, RSYNC, SSHD/WinSCP services for secure storage of data across a network. FreeNAS provides a webGUI for managing the server. More information, documentation, and the iso download can be found at FreeNAS.org

We had another great meeting on April 6th. Jim Millard gave us an excellent presentation on Upgrading to Fedora Core 5 (FC5) and he provided a handout of his slides of his presentation, done in Open Office Impress, to each person present. He started out by echoing many of our own experience in upgrading Fedora and any many other distros where the only good way of upgrading was to wipe the hard drive and start fresh; with FC5, that has changed as he was able to upgrade his servers and laptop, totally seemless, simple and fun! Jim provided several hints on upgrading including what to backup "Everything you care about" but specifically /home, /etc, and /var/spool. He also provide some insights on using Yum to update Yumex and then using Yumex to update the system. Yumex is the graphical package manager that extends the power of yum. Jim then concluded his presentation on what works (everything) and version levels of KDE 3.52, FireFox and Thunderbird 1.5 along with development ide's included. He finished with It Works!  Thanks Jim for a great presentation on FC5.  Brian, our sponsor at Friends of Children & Family has also now upgraded 3 systems to FC5 and shares his experience in this PDF (requires PDF viewer)and concludes that FC5 is a great distro. Members Martin and Clint then shared their insights into the current status of Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 as work in progress. We then turned to a discussion of the status of Linux in Idaho and what might be done to make it more an alternative to that other operating system. For those wanting to stay with FC4 a bit longer but wanting some of the features of FC5, you might want to take a look at FoXDesktop Professional 1.0 which has just been released, available for downloading on DVD (free), details can be found here (be sure to click on the English button as this is an Italian site).

The March 16th meeting was attended by 7 members. The first 15 minutes of the meeting were spent discussing various DHCP issues and other items on the front patio of one of the buildings there before we moved inside to see what Brian has brought over from his primary facility. A demonstration of the new Kororaa live distribution was planned to show off the new XGL 3D desktop graphics, unfortunately the demo gods frowned and a pc with an adequate (re NVIDIA or ATI) graphics board was not available. We’ll look at a short demo at one of the next meetings. After further discussion of various server and internet connectivity issues, Brian Aldridge did a short demo of his SCALIX mail implementation he uses on his business server.

Our March 2nd meeting was very well attended with 14 present. Member Brian did a great presentation, replete with using a microphone stand as a pointer, on setting a DNS Bind Server and then tying DHCP to it so that workstation names would be available from DNS within the domain. Brian prepared a very informative 6 page HowTO on the connecting DHCP to DNS along his configuration files which are available here. Brian had also put an wireless network which those who had brought their laptops could access and participate in the presentation. Great job Brian! Member Mike had some questions related toconfiguring his Host names, post installation. Another member brought an X-box which hooked up to Brian's network and demonstrated using it as an FTP server.

February 16th Meeting Report - Our main presentations were still work in progress at the start of the meeting. Mike Brown had brought a "broken" Fedora Core 4 machine which he had attempted to upgrade Firefox to 1.5.0.1 and the upgrade had not gone well. The computer did not have a working browser for the internet. Clint reinstalled Firefox rpm from the FC4 installation CD's, CD 2 which gave us the ability to go out to the Internet where Clint Goggled Firefox and FC4 to find 1.5.0.1 rpm which was succesfully installed with the rpm -Uvh command.

Brian was then ready to demonstrate Partimage. Partimage is an imaging package that allows you to image or take a picture of a hard drive (Windows, Linux, DOS, etc), store it on an imaging server, and then restore it back to the original hard drive or another. Brian's purpose was to clone several computers from a common installation image. Brian wrote that the steps to install on his Fedora Core 3 machine were as follows (this assumes that apt-get has been previously downloaded from dag.wieers.com and properly updated):
As root, run
apt-get install partimage-server
apt-get install partimage (optional, but I did it anyway)
Next, navigate to the newly created directory /etc/partimaged and you'll see a single file called partimagedusers. This is a text file where you specify who can connect to the partimaged server. Partimage users must have an account on the server (they must be in /etc/passwd). One user name per line.
Once you've finished editing partimagedusers, it's probably a good idea to restart the partimaged server:
/sbin/service partimaged restart
That's it for the server configuration!
He then ran Partimage from a Knoppix 4.0.2 Live CD to do his restore of an image he had previously created. He still has some work to do as the hard drive would not boot his image at the conclusion of the meeting.
More information on Partimage is here: www.partimage.org
Here some additional links you may find of value:
Using partimage to clone hard disks A really great HowTO in using Knoppix for both the image server and the imaging client.
Partimage FAQ page. Everthing you wanted to know but were afraid to ask.
Partimage Usage Page.

We had a great meeting on February 2nd with about 14 in attendance and great discussions covering a variety of Linux topics including a presentation on vmware by Martin Torres using his laptop and Ubuntu Linux.

December 15th Meeting Report - We started out the evening on Ubuntu Linux showing how both Wine and Crossover Office could be used to run those must have Windows native applications that one cannot live out such as Quicken and Office 2003.  Member Martin had brought in a product called Maxivista from Germany which allowed us to run a display WindowsXP desktop extension from his laptop using Wine.  Our first attempts to do use Maxivista on Linux were not successful and we moved over to the ArkLinux demonstration for evening.  We had the Maxivista client running in Wine on ArkLinux when all of a sudden our desktop changed to WindowsXP as Martin found the errant Microsoft software on his laptop that was blocking the connect and the assumption was that this would have worked on Ubuntu.  ArkLinux 2005.2 is a very user friendly distribution of 3 CD's and looks a lot like windows but runs the latest KDE 3.5 desktop; RPM based but apt-get is supported as Clint demonstrated.  Clint also showed the menu driven software CD's from ArkLinux for adding both desktop applications and server applications to ArkLinux.  ArkLinux was reviewed very favorably at Distrowatch.  Also discussed, but not shown, was Win4Lin which allows one to run a fully licensed copy of the Windows Operating System on top of Linux, if you really need the Windows world to run a particular application.  Martin mentioned that the latest development release of Ubuntu Linux, Drapper Drake 6.02, is out and available for download; link is shown above in the Distrowatch.  Meeting ajourned a little after 8 PM after deciding that the next meeting will demonstrate a thin client lab using Edubuntu as the server and using older hardware with PXE boot as the "thin client" running the Linux desktop.  This is subject to change and we are still open to suggestions for the January 5th Meeting.

December 1st Meeting Report - Evening presentation focused on Ubuntu and Edubuntu.  We took a deep look into the four layers of debian package management structure in Ubuntu/Edubuntu.  At the desktop level, there is easy to use Gnome App installer and Synaptic manager for installing and updating software but these installers require apt-get and dpkg to work properly and configuration of the base /etc/apt/sources.list file and repositories was discussed. We covered a lot different topics on Ubuntu and Edubuntu.  The links below were visited during the presentation:
What Users Want from Linux Survey showing 51% preference for the Ubuntu distribution.
Ubuntu Home Page
Sudo Root User on Ubuntu
Unofficial Ubuntu 5.04 Starter Guide
Building SimpleServer on Edubunto to support Novell's iFolder technology.  SimpleServer is the foundation for iFolder.
Building iFolder on Edubuntu Simple Server.
Edubuntu Home Page
Edubuntu Install
Corporate Ubuntu - Office Server.
Zope 3 on Edubuntu - Zope is a secure webserver technology
Debian Package Managment Cheat Sheet
Debian Package Managment Quick Reference
TuxLabs Tutorial  (PDF)

The evening wrapped up with a look a member Al's laptop, running Fedora Core 4, fixing the display settings and restarting the network [service network restart] after connecting his laptop to his cellular wireless adapter.

A tale of IPv6 - Clint.  I had mentioned at a few of our meetings of the need to make a setting in Mozillla/Firefox that could speed up Firefox (by a factor of 4 according to some). In making my transition to the Linux Desktop at home, it was very important that I be able to access pop3 mail at msn.com but I could not get Thunderbird to work with Linux although I could use it with Windows, on the same machine. I came to a conclusion that it was an IPv6 issue (IPv6 is the new Internet Addressing scheme that is embedded in the 2.6 Linux Kernal). After about 2 hours with Qwappy, a.k.a. Qwest, I was informed unconditionally that IPv6 was not supported and would not be supported by Qwest, for the home user (however, if I was interested in buying a T1 circuit, then it would be supported; talk about spirit of service!) Given this information, I started looking for ways to disabled IPv6 in Linux and once I found the solution, Thunderbird works great and I am moving towards having a Linux Desktop as my primary computer at home. The secret is in one line that can be added to modprobe.conf or modules.conf, depending on your distribution. That line is alias net-pf-10 off. If you have a line that reads alias net-pf-10 ipv6, you must rem it out as #alias net-pf-10 ipv6. You'll need to scroll down through your .conf file and look for the alias net-pf-10 line to see if it is in there; it may not be but ipv6 is still implicitly enabled, you must turn it off. Another benefit, with SuSE Linux and other distributions, I was having difficulty updating and installing software from the Internet, disabling ipv6 fixed that as well making me a very happy Linux user.  Now, as Firefox being a bit slugish on Linux.  I did some research on the Internet and found that I was not alone.  In resolving the issue, I found the following tweak in about:config was the most effective in making Firefox rock on Linux:



network.dns.diableIPv6 is by default set to false.  The fix is to scroll down and doubleclick on it, setting it to true.  Then close Firefox, reopen, and experience real speed in loading websites.

We held two meetings in November.  At the November 3rd meeting, we worked with the "older computers" some more, settling on Ubunto Linux as the distribution of choice in making these computers usuable.  The November 17th meeting was called on the lack of a quorum but we spend some time taking a look at Ubunto and Edubunto, along a couple of neat applications on Ubunto Linux, Alexandria Book Manager and the Gramps Geneology program.

October 20th Meeting Report - We spent the evening (until about 9:30!) attempting to setup Linux on about 5 celeron 500's which have been donated to Friends of Children and Families. We tried a number of different verions of "lightweight" Linux distro's such Feather,Puppy, and Zenwalk but were unsuccesful given a number of challenges which included problems with hardware and at least one bad hard drive. It has been noted that these lightweight can be somewhat problem-matic installing with limited hardware support. Being able to boot the LiveCD version was no guarantee of success either as we were able to boot Puppy but it would not succesfully install. We were able to get one computer completely configured using the latest Ubunto 5.10 release including a WinModem for dialup use. It was concerned that a major distro such as Ubunto with OpenOffice and Mozilla might be too sluggish for this level of hardware but performance was actually quite good. Ubunto 5.10 was quite impressive as we ran the auto-updater, ran applications and then beat it up with a series of different WinModems, rebooting it a number of time with different hardware until we found a WinModem that worked (PCTel WinModem). We had a stack of WinModems but we only found one that was supported "out of the box" with Ubunto 5.10 and we discovered there was absolutely no support for 3Com/USR WinModems of which we had 4 :-( .

One of our members has used Puppy Linux for several months and it was his goal to get Puppy Linux working on one of the machines and he reports that he was getting very close when we started closing down the meeting a little after 9 PM.  Puppy Linux is a very interesting distribution, a little geeky because it takes some work to get things working and the install can be a little challenging.  On Walt's first install, the x-server wouldn't start but on his final install, he was able to get x running but there where some issues with shutting down and mounting the hard drive partitions on boot.  I installed it a AMD 2200+ system in my lab and after I managled the installation by doing it from the command line, it did install fine and I had no issues with booting up or shutting down.  I did have to start the network connection before it would automatically start on boot.  Puppy Linux can be fun, even if a bit geeky, and I have included links above for both the Live-CD and "Chubby" versions above which are small downloads, 60 MB and 91 MB respectfully.  Walt provides this installation help link which will take you into the world puppy love Puppy Install, free to a good home.

Martin Torres took the lead at the October 6th meeting in demonstrating how to use the wireless tools and the ndiswrapper in getting a wireless connection to work on his laptop and connect to a wireless router.  Martin's laptop is an Acer and has a wireless adapter that is not supported "natively" by Linux and requires the use of the Linux ndiswrapper and a ndis "windows driver" that supports the wireless adapter.  Martin did the demo using Mandriva's new 2006 "Free" edition, release candidate 2 for the presentation which comes with the Linux ndiswrapper package so we didn't address the issues of downloading, installing and getting the ndiswrapper to work.  Clint mentioned there were some issues with RedHat Fedora Core 4 kernal as it is setup for 4K blocks and a lot of the ndis drivers/adapters require 16K blocks to work;  FC 4 Kernel-Dev is one possible workaround for this (check the links below for more information).  Martin then showed the 4 commands for configuring Linux to bring up the wireless interface manually; these can be setup in the distribution to run on startup to run automatically and were showed to demonstrate the process.

1. "iwlist wlan0 scan" - this command will go out via the wireless adapter and locate any reachable wireless access points inclding determining if the they are open or closed (secured) connections as well as their ESSID id's.
2. "iwconfig wlan0 essid clint" - Clint had provided a wireless router with an ESSID identifier of "clint" which was used at the meeting.
3. ifconfig is used for checking the ipaddress configuration
4. "route -n" which is used used for checking to make sure you had a valid gateway; beware if the gateway is reported as 0.0.0.0 as you will not get anywhere with this.
5. "iwconfig wlan0" will report the active configuration for your wireless network adapter.

Note that all this has to be done as the "root" user on your system.  Martin then demonstrated some of the graphical tools available in KDE for checking your wireless connection.  Martin provided a handout which went over the basics, which we will post a link to here shortly.  Some other links of value in configuring wireless connectivity:
1. Quick HOWTO Linux Wireless Networking
2. NDISWRAPPER Install Howto specific to Mandriva.
3. Ndiswrapper How-To(Follow it precisely) Mandriva example remove and install of the Ndiswrapper.
4. NdisWrapper source website that includes links to other resources as well as downloads.
5. NdisWrapper List for supported wireless network adapters.
6. Fedora Core Installation howto for FC 3 & 4.

Other topics discussed included USB wireless connection devices and one member mentioned that he had been succesful in connecting to his wireless access point using a USB device with Linux.

The second part of the meeting was given a discussion opened by Brian Pete in having an "install fest" for next meeting where we would "recycle" about 5 computers by installing Linux on them; these would be given to Friends of Children and Families member families for use at home. These are older computers, Celeron 500's with 128 MB of RAM, so most of the discussion centered on making these machines "usable" with different flavors of Linux and applications that would run efficiently on the hardware. There is also some concern about the hardware support, particularly the winmodems. We discussed the various mini disto's such as Puppy, FeatherLinux and DSL (DammedSmallLinux) that might work well. We attempted to boot one of these computers with an older version of Knoppix 3.3, which failed, but FC4 did start the graphical installer and it appeared that it would install okay, which was encouraging. We decided that we would proceed with having "install fest" at our next meeting with hopes of success and also that we would learn a bit it was assured.

September 15th Meeting. For the first presentation, Clint spent about an 45 minutes demonstrated the partitioning and resizing tools that can be used in configuring the hard drive. He led off by showing Linux's FDISK tool and gdisk (free version) and then followed that with a demo on using QtParted and Symantec's PartitionMagic. For the second presentation, Clint demonstrated RC1 from Mandriva, which had been just been released on the 14th. Turns out that this was actually RC2 (Release Candidate 2). Looked great and is free for the downloading and use however there are the usual hooks for subscribing to the Mandriva Club which is the business model Mandriva is now using and the only way to get the supported versions of Mandriva (Mandrake). Clint had two hard drives in the computer, one fully loaded with Mandriva and a second with WindowsXP so that the installation for installing a dualboot of Mandriva could be demonstrated.

September 1st Meeting. We spent about the first hour going over Samba Domain Controller setup and the available resources.  Clint had brought two computers, one with Fedora Core 4 and one with Windows 2000 for demonstration.  The DomainHOWTO has been posted on our site and has been updated for one identified procedural error. Also, during the demo, Clint created a new user using Webmin and then in attempting to login the workstation, it was realized that he had forgotten the third step in creating a samba user and that was to set the password!  Clint did the demo using Fedora Core 4 (FC4) because Samba was recently updated to 3.0.20 from 3.0.14a and the update was so radical, that the Samba team jumped the versioning sequence to the .20 release.  FC4 is the only distribution for which there are 3.0.20 rpms available. Clint also noted that the latest releases of both theOfficial Samba3-HOWTO and Samba3-By Example, available for download in PDF and HTLM formats from Samba.Org as well as in print form from booksellers, have been updated to reference 3.0.20 which was after the books were released to printing as "2nd Editions."  It was noted that the books at over 900 and 600 pages respectively, it would not be prudent to print them out but cheaper to buy the books, howver the PDF downloads are very searchable for specific answers and well indexed. Two outher Samba resources worthy of mention are the Samba Authenticated Gateway HOWTO: Linux box setup and the presentation slides from the Samba team. Finally, Clint had the opportunity to meet Jerry Carter of the Samba team at LinuxWorld and attended his presentations which included printing support.  Jerry had succesfully demonstrated a printer migration tool from Microsoft that was very effective for loading printer drivers for downloading from a Samba3 server to client workstations just as if those printers were on a Windows computer.

Clint was very impressed by Fedora Core 4 in that he found it to be extremely stable, so stable that he was able to move his hard drive from a AthlonXP 2200 to an old Athlon 1000 for the demo with a different video card, network adapter, system board, etc and it just booted up and work, graphical interface and all.  However, there are a few challenges and one good resource that should be checked is Stanton Finley's Fedora Core 4 Installation Notes which is a 38 page very good HOWTO and excellent reference reading before installing FC4.

As promised, Clint then distributed goodies he had brought back from LinuxWorld which inluded 3 copies of Garne's Moving to Linux, 2nd Edition, 2 RedHat hats, 2 SUSE hats, and 3 classic chocolate candy Shadow Bars from RedHat.  The free (as in beer) department, Clint also noted that you can download Linspire 5.0 (a $50 value) until September 6th from Linspire and that also, another way of getting Linspire free is found in the details at TAPCUG.  A slick free monthly magazine designed for new Linux users is available from TUX Magazine.  At LinuxWorld, Novell announced OpenSUSE.Org where you can download a full free (DVD) copy of SuSE 9.3 professional as well as beta releases of version 10.

Clint finished off the evening with some comments on the Debian Common Core Alliance in the future of Debian which looks to be very good as Debian is not owned by any corporation and enjoys wide community acceptance.  The DCCA is moving to a September release of a Linux Standards Base (LSB) which will be based on Debian Sarge (3.1).  Having such a "Standards Based" distribution will allow developers to write applications that will run on any distribution that is certified to the LSB.  Clint also had some comments on the ways MEPIS is leading the charge in getting Linux into the business enterprise space.

Brian Pete provided this report of our August 18th meeting: The Samba domain controller project was wrapped up, not without a few glitches along the way. The original Samba server that had been started at the previous meeting was subsequently completed and put into production use several days later, and thus became unavailable for further SIG use, so for this meeting the goal was to validate a mini-HOWTO that had been put together to document how Samba could be configured as a Windows domain controller in as little as 8 steps, using mainly GUI tools.

A mini lab was set up, with one Linux server running Samba, and two Windows 2000 workstations, which would be joined to the newly created domain after the Samba configuration was complete. One volunteer performed the steps listed in the mini-HOWTO to configure Samba, and two other volunteers took the necessary steps on the Windows 2000 computers to join the domain.

The mini-HOWTO includes the sample smb.conf file. Problems developed immediately, as even after following the steps in the mini-HOWTO, joining the Windows 2000 workstations to the domain failed repeatedly. The remainder of the evening was spent troubleshooting. As it turned out, two critical configuration parameters were missing from the sample smb.conf file:

security = user
passdb backend = smbpasswd

Upon, restoring these parameters, the problem was solved and the workstations were ultimately joined to the domain. It is still uncertain how these parameters came to be omitted from the sample config, as the text was a straight copy and paste from a working Samba domain controller. However, aside from the sample config, the mini-HOWTO itself was apparently successful in documenting the steps needed to create a domain controller using Samba. The mini-HOWTO will be revised and updated to ensure the missing parameters are included in the sample config.

An interesting aside is how webmin and SWAT seem to interact: during the troubleshooting stage, there were times that changes using webmin seemingly were not recognized or were overwritten by SWAT, and vice versa. The actual steps that were taken to finally resolve the problems did not involve use of either tool at all; rather, the smb.conf file was edited by hand, a telling indication perhaps of the still-evolving nature of the configuration tools.

The Samba -3 Domain Notes from our March 3rd meeting provides some additional information on this subject.

In our meeting of June 21st, we took a look at Knoppix 4.0 after taking poll to see if there were any German language users in the group ... This is a 4 gigabyte distribution for Knoppix and has a lot of neat stuff including eye candy for the desktop. Knoppix is based on Debian and here are some useful Debian resources: Reference Card, User Guide, Securing Debian. We also visited www.kde-look.org where you can get more eye candy and screen savers for the KDE desktop.  A look was taken at the latest SimplyMEPIS version that now features "Traveller Disc" which stores your entire desktop world, home directory, application settings, etc, all on a USB thumbdrive so you can carry your Linux World with you.  Checking the MEPIS website, this feature has been enhanced and will be called " Desktop OnTheGo" where users will be able to run their entire home directory, including settings and identity, from a USB device. Desktop OnTheGo will also feature optional AES encryption and will be included with upcoming releases of SimplyMEPIS 3.3.2 and MEPISLite. We discussed SimplyMEPIS a few months back in conjunction with the book Point & Click Linux; here is the latest User Guide, which was just published in May.

Meeting Notes - July 7th.  Tonight's focus was on CUPS (Common Unix Printing System).  As a unplanned extra, Fedora Core 4 was recently recently and Clint was pretty excited about that.  Fedora Core 4 is four CD's and features Gnome 2.10 which has a new look in having Applications, Places, and Actions as the menu drop down choices and many of the menu items have been relocated for better functionality.  FC 4 also comes with a several new software packages including IBM's 40 million dollar donation to open source, the Eclipse Development Environment!  It is available for downloading from one of many Fedora Mirrors and comes on both one DVD or 4 CD's plus a rescue CD.  Clint was also very impressed by the new hardware compatibility of FC4 as he had built FC4 on another computer he had at work and then when he brought the hard drive home to put it in the demo computer for the meeting, he was really expecting problems or at least going through Kadzu removing/configuring at least three of the major changes in hardware (network, video, and sound) but FC4 booted up without even stopping to ask if it was okay!  Try doing that with Windows or any other operating system with similar capabilities. http://fedora.redhat.com/download.

CUPS is the standard printing system for most distributions of Linux.  Using the Linux Terminal Server Project  Fedora Core 3 version 4.2.1 distribution, Clint demonstrated setting up a printer first using RedHat's Printer tool to create the printer as recommended by RedHat.  Then opening the CUPS web administration screen at http://localhost:631, the printer configuration could be viewed on the printers tab. Clint then explained that there are two ways of printing to a CUPS printer, one using GhostScript (PostScript) and the other using "PrinterRaw" where you can use Windows drivers and have a lot more control on the print job. A good reference for printing from Windows2000/XP can be found at owlfish.  Clint showed how to create a "PrinterRaw" using the web interface.  He had done all this at home first and handed out a graphic printout of printer property settings in WindowsXP for both http (port 631) printing and SAMBA printing to the same CUPS printer on the demo system. I have done some more work in my lab on this which includes configuring a USB Deskjet Printer. A couple of footnotes. Deskjet printers don't work well in network environment (no suprises there for me as we have long banned them as such in the school district) however, I was able to get to work as a postscript driver in full color using the MS Publisher Color Printer Driver. Also, when you create the printers in the RedHat printer tool, make sure that you make them shareable and that the shared icon does not have a the red symbol across it! I have provided some screen shots here from meeting and my subsequent work Screen Shots. I was also able enable remote web administration from other machines in my lab. In doing this investigation into CUPS printing, I have a definite preference for the http:// or IPP printing functionality over Samba although Samba does make the printers browseable in Windows. CUPS printing seems to be faster and Samba requires that you have the Samba services running on your system.  We wrapped up the CUPS demo showing how the smb.conf file was modified for printing with these two changes:
     load printers = yes
     printing = cups
We then spent some time looking at the Webmin web administration tool as installed from the Linux Terminal Server Project using YUM.  Webmin allows you to manage and configure many of the servers/services running on your Linux system including the SAMBA service. IBM has an excellent docuement Introduction to Webmin as a way of getting started with this tool.  When you use webmin, it will add it's own modifications to the smb.conf file such as:
    printer name = PrinterRaw
A point was made that you should routinely backup configuration files as you move use different tools to make changes (in case something breaks) and at some point settle on one tool but that is not always possible.  FC 3's SAMA configuration tool does not even allow for printer settings so you either have to use webmin or manually edit the files. In searching out an answer to a question on using banner sheets, we found that theThe CUPS web administrator does not provide for management of the jobSheets entry in the CUPS printer.conf which defines printers so that has to be done manually, either by editing or using a command line to make the entry.  We ended the CUPS part of the evening a look at the Documentation tab of the web admin tool which provides links to all the CUPS documentation.

Wrapping up the evening, Clint then swapped hard drives so he could show Fedcora Core 4 which he installed that afternoon.  One comment he had was up2date doesn't seem to work in either FC3 or FC4, stalls out a lot so he used YUM UPDATE to update the FC 4 installation to make sure it was current.  He was a bit surprised that the update was 334 MB in size for something that only been out a month!  But it went smoothly and then he noticed that up2date was still complaining that his system wasn't completely up2date so he ran up2date, it worked, and added about 3 more packages that needed to be updated.  Gnome seems to be a lot faster on FC4 but KDE seems slower were a  couple other initial observations.

There was some discussion of SuSE Professional 9.3 as a Linux of choice but that it wasn't free but then a new visitor to the group mentioned that was free for the downloading now from Novell.  The Oregon mirror is the recommended download site.

Our June 16th meeting started off with a demonstration XEN 2.0 running on SuSE Linux 9.3.  SuSE 9.3 Professional includes a full integration of XEN 2.0 into the shipping product.  XEN is a machine virtualization environment which allows you to simultaneously run multiple linux “machine” Domains with very little overhead. The SuSE documentation included is a readME for configuring XEX 2.0 along with a 50 page Users Manual and a 25 page Interface Manual which provides additional configuration information and troubleshooting hints.  The SuSE readME provides a starting point for configuring the XEN Domain 0 from which the other “machines” or Domains are started and can be monitored.  However, the readME was not complete and Clint filled in the gaps in configuring the Boot loader necessary to starting the XEN 2 Domain0 session.  Clint then showed how to setup and run ttylinux (a different flavor of linux) in a separate Domain so that he had two versions of Linux running on the same computer.  Here are several links that Clint found helpful in getting XEN 2.0 up and running:

http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/index.php?showtopic=15849
http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/index.php?showtopic=16146&st=0&#entry95466
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-xen/
http://www.suse.de/~garloff/linux/xen/README.SuSE - SuSE readME.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/index.html - XEN Website.
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-xen/ - An excellent paper on configuring XEN on RedHat which also provided insights in making XEN work on SuSE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xen
http://www.sci-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=34175
http://www.kvadratrot.net/~xen/
http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/

Clint then demonstrated a liveCD running XEN 2.0.6 (Debian) which is all setup to run the Domain 0 hypervisor session and 4 Debian sessions in separate domains.  The liveCD also includes the 2.0 User Guide and by looking at the configuration files (shell scripts) used to startup the 4 domains, much can be learned about how XEN works.  4 LiveCD’s were given out for use by the group members.

An interest had been expressed in PostgreSQL and Clint had obtained a LiveCD which a fully configured Postgres Server, client, and a web based Administration tool – phpPGadmin.  This LiveCD is an excellent tool for learning howto use SQL, write queries, etc.  In preparing to demo this, Clint found the following information helpful:

phpPGadm Login: User is postgres, no password