This month's meeting found us back at the Boise Public Library! in the computer lab. We had a great turnout with a total of 15 attendees, almost standing room only and one of the highest attendee count in recent history. Clint Tinsley opened the meeting at 6:35 with a round of introductions given by each of those present.

Leading off the evening's activities was a short presentation by Gaye Kaiser, who works for Integra Telecom, and provided some insight into who they are and what they do. They offer a wide of telecom services including phone and Internet Services. She brought copies of the companies brochures describing their many services and network coverage which covers all the western states plus Fargo, North Dakota, St. Cloud and Minneapolis/St. Paul in Minnesota, along with POP's (Point of Presence or access) in Chicago and Dallas. Their Internet Services include broadband connection for small to medium sized businesses along with VPN and Metro E IP full duplex high bandwidth connections for voice, data, and Internet. They pride themselves on be responsive to their customer needs as well as providing reliable local service.

Following Gaye, member Darin Miller spent the next hour educating us on the finer points of Wine for running Windows applications including games natively on Linux. He started off with a quick demo of some windows application running on his wide screen monitor that he had brought for the occasion. Following that, he went through a slide presentation, that quite well addressed the whys and hows of using Wine. His slide presentation is attached to this blog but you must be logged in to download it. His comments included how well some applications actually run better on Wine and Linux due to better memory management. He then took us to WineHQ (http://www.winehq.org) where you can download the latest version as well as access the Wine Wiki and Application Database. The database provides information on what applications work on Wine and how well they work. A link on the Wiki page will also take you to winetricks (http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks) which provides for the installation of libraries and applications that might not otherwise work with Wine. He also showed a Wine Wiki Page on Installing Wine on a Mac (OS X). Darin also showed us the internals of Wine's wineconfig and regedit fuctions and included a tour of its folder structure in the users home directory. He showed how to use wineconfig in enabling specific application libraries along with configuring audio and video features on a per application basis. He took a few minutes to get into the using winetricks for installing libraries that are not included in Wine. He concluded that part of his presentation to talk about some of the 3rd Party solutions such as Crossover Office Pro, some issues that remain in running Windows applications along with other information of value in using Wine. After taking questions, he then tackled some advance topics in the use of Wine including having multiple instances of wine installed and how to make that work. Concluding his presentation were examples of custom scripts to manage program startup details including per application video resolution and a quick tour of Crossover Office configuration. Darin's presentation was warmly received with a round of applause at his conclusion.

Clint Tinsley then talked about and showed the laptop that he was running Lucid Puppy 5.0.1 (Puppy Linux built on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04). The laptop was only a PIII 800 MHz system with 256 MB of RAM and yet with Lucid Puppy, he showed near netbook performance plus the advantages of this laptop with an older 4:3 1400X1024 video display, something almost unheard of on current laptops. He commented on the Lucid Puppy's support for easy Wireless configuration including network scanning and supporting wireless security through WPA2 and a wireless adapter that he had not been able to use with Linux before. Lucid Puppy also has a very complete Wine implementation with access to all the configuration tools including winetricks from the start menu. He also had an XTightVNC client running accessing a LinuxMint 8 computer at his home from the Library! You can find out more and download Lucid Puppy 5.0.1 at http://puppylinux.org/news/releases/lucid-puppy-from-woof-and-ubuntu-luc... and the release announcement is at http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/puppy-5.0.1....

Next on the agenda was discussion was the status of the Ubuntu IdahoTeam LoCo (Local Community). The next step is setting up regular statewide IRC meetings with other Linux groups and users around the state just as the Ubuntu UtahTeam has done. After some discussion of IRC, its usage, and how many might participate, it was decided that we will have our first Ubuntu-Idaho meeting on June 16th, at 7 PM.

As the final item of business, it was decided that we will have a meeting July 1st, the Thursday night before the 4th of July weekend as the Library! will be open that night.

Thanks to all who attended for the great meeting and turnout.