This month's meeting was hosted by Taos, an IT consulting and managed services company based in San Francisco which has an office in Boise. We met in the Taos office in Boise where we had the opportunity to meeting some of the local Taos staff and we were treated to Pizza, Salad, and soda before the meeting. The meeting started off with a round of introductions and a short presentation by Jayna Weisemann, Taos Relationship Manager, on who Taos is and some of the reasons why they want build a relationship with the members of the Boise Linux Group. Bernee Suydam, IT Recruiter and Resource Manager was also on hand. Our thanks to the Taos team for hosting our meeting and we are looking forward to possible future meetings at their facility.
Following Jayna's presentation, Gregg Bruch then gave his talk on configuring Brother's printers in Ubuntu Linux. He had put together a presentation slide show on the process. Gregg's focus was on using Brother printers that were not "supported" natively by Ubuntu and required downloading the support files from Brother's website and installing them so that they could be configured natively using CUPS (http://localhost:631/) and viewable in the Ubuntu printing tool. His presentation was basically a step-by-step for adding printers and he had tested his procedure with parallel, USB, Wired Networked, and Wireless access to network printers, and verified that the procedure worked in all four environments. The only configuration that he didn't test was where a printer serves as its own wireless access point and is not connected to a wired network. Gregg's presentation in OpenOffice odp format is attached at the bottom of these notes but you must be logged in to download them. At the conclusion of Gregg's presentation, some time was taken for Q&A on his procedure and why. One thing was noted in that Gregg had to use CUPS to configure the printers after installing the drivers because they did not show up in the Ubuntu Printing tool and that might be a result of not logging out or rebooting after installing the printer files.
Following Gregg's presentation, Clint spent a few minutes showing how he had configured his networked printers on his laptop and in using the automatic discovery of printers by Ubuntu 10.04 using dnssd (DNS-Based Service Discovery which discovers printer servers using only standard DNS). Clint also mentioned using older printer drivers that are available in the default installation of Linux that usually work with newer unlisted printers. Martin Torres mention staying away from the "Windows Printers" that were widely available a few years back as they will not work with Linux.
Clint closed out the evening with a presentation on the newly released Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx which he had running on his laptop showing the new features and software installed. Also on his laptop, he was running both Ubuntu Studio and LinuxMint 9, as virtual machines using VirtualBox and he demonstrated them. Ubuntu Studio is a audio and video enabled version of Ubuntu providing a wide variety of applications of interest to audiophiles and video production. LinuxMint 9 is very popular distribution that focuses on a out of the box Windows like ease of use and configuration. LinuxMint also goes under more testing and very stable on release, which usually occurs anywhere to two weeks to a month of more after current Ubuntu release (10.04). Clint had assembled an assortment of useful links in installing and using Ubuntu Linux 10.04:
10 Things to do after installing Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid - http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/04/10-things-to-do-after-installing-ubun...
Step-by-Step Installation: The Perfect Desktop - Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) - http://www.howtoforge.com/the-perfect-desktop-ubuntu-10.04-lucid-lynx
Ubuntu 10.04 New Features - http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/1004features
New Features in Ubuntu 10.04 - http://www.tuxradar.com/content/discover-new-features-ubuntu-1004-lucid-...
What's new in Linux Mint 9 Isadora - http://linuxmint.com/rel_isadora_whatsnew.php
While looking at the forumms for LinuxMint 9, Clint had discovered the availability of Conky (http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/13), a very nice performance monitor that has been a long time feature of PartedMagic liveCD. Clint found that it was in the standard Ubuntu repositories for 10.04 and used Synaptic to install it. Conky uses as .conkyrc file located in the users home directory (/home/user/). Note that the .conkyrc file is a hidden file with the leading period. The default sampleconky file is pretty ugly so Clint had copied the .conkyrc file off the PartedMagic for the demo. Attached to these notes is Clint's final conkyrc.txt (download and copy conkyrct.txt to /home/username/.conkyrc file) and a screen-shot of the resulting display (You have to login in order to download them).
At the close of the meeting, Darin was asked if he would present at the June 3rd meeting and he will be doing a full presentation on using Wine on Linux.
Post meeting usage note: Desktop Folder shortcuts (icons). While browsing my home folder, I found a text file "examples.desktop" which was copied there during installation of Ubuntu 10.04. On the live CD, there is a folder on the desktop called Examples but it doesn't show up on the desktop after installing Ubuntu Linux to the hard drive. Copying this file into my /home/username/Desktop folder resulted in the Examples folder being displayed on my desktop. I have a attached a screen shot called DesktopFolders.jpg which shows three folder shortcuts on the Desktop. The top one is the one displayed from the examples.desktop. The middle one with the windows looking shortcut arrow is a created by "Make Link" right click context menu in Nautilus which will create a linked folder icon which you can then drag to the desktop and give it a more explicit name rather than what was the default "Link to Documents" Make Link is not a very intelligent tool as it creates the Link to based on the folder or file name you are creating a link to and it places the created link in the same folder where you are creating the link so you have to drag it to the desktop or other location where you want the link. A much cleaner link is created by making the name.desktop text file in the Desktop folder. Here is my clints_docs.desktop text file which results in the Clint's Documents desktop icon shown at the bottom of the screen shot:
# clints_docs.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Link
Name=Clint's Documents
Comment=Clint's Document Folder
URL=file:///home/tinslecl/Documents/
Icon=folder
X-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain=Documents
Cheers!