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Open Source means that users have the freedom to see how software works, adapt it for the own needs, fix bugs and limitations and contribute back to the community.

CentraLUG: 1-Oct-2007: Michael Kazin shows Nagios

By on September 24, 2007 in CSS, LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Ruby, Technology

The Central NH Linux User Group returns to the Library after a summer hiatus at the Sybase offices in Concord. The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central NH GNHLUG chapter, happens the first Monday of most months at the New Hampshire Technical Institute‘s Library, room 146, at 7 PM. Next month’s meeting is on October 1st at 7 PM. Directions and maps are available at http://www.centralug.org Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.

At this meeting, Michael Kazin will be presenting Nagios, the Open Source monitoring service. From http://www.nagios.org, “Nagios® is an Open Source host, service and network monitoring program.” Written in Perl and controlled by text configuration files, Nagios offers the ability to alert administrators to a huge number of possible problems with connectivity, speed, or performance. Nagios offers a web interface for close-to-real-time monitoring, email/pager alerts, the ability to launch other programs, etc.”

Michael is a computer consultant at a well-known consultancy working for well-known companies in the military-industrial complex. He is a member of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group’s Board of Directors. Previously, Michael helped run the Rutgers University Student Linux User Group and gained his experience with Nagios by monitoring hundreds of machines in the Rutgers Data Center.

Future Meetings: Currently, we have a couple interesting meetings coming up: November: Ted Roche on Cascading Style Sheets, December: David Berube on Ruby, January: Bruce Dawson on low-power Linux computers. As always, meetings are subject to change. You are encouraged to join the low-traffic announcement list to get announcement and cancellation information.

MerriLUG, 20-Sept-2007: OpenOffice.org Styles

By on September 14, 2007 in Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Jim Kuzdrall, announcement coordinator for MerriLUG, gets to announce himself as the featured speaker this month at MerriLUG:

  1. Who : Jim Kuzdrall, Intrel Service Company

  2. What : Introduction to OO styles and some handy simplifications
  3. Where: Martha’s Exchange
  4. Day : Thur 20 Sep **Next Week**
  5. Time : 6:00 PM for grub, 7:30 PM for discussion

Overwhelmed by formatting choices in OpenOffice Writer? Continually fiddling with formatting that never comes up quite right for your present document? Help is on the way! A diagrammatic overview of the OO style system is the first step. Why are they needed? Where do they reside? How do they interact? Should the defaults be changed? How do templates come in? What are the “Gotchas”? Next, a different approach to style management deftly cuts the styles and templates down to an easy-to-use few. Once you create your small set of custom styles and templates you will rarely revisit formatting details again. (Yes, the scheme evolved from roff macros.)

Driving directions here.

Seacoast LUG Notes, 10-Sept-2007, Ben Scott on RAID and LVM

By on September 11, 2007 in Home Page, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Twelve people attended last night’s session of the Seacoast Linux User Group, a chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group, held as usual on the second Monday of the month at the UNH Durham campus, Morse Hall room 301.

Ben Scott had presented “RAID and LVM” and he had lots of information, and attendees had lots of questions, comments and war stories. There was plenty of participation, and Ben was still going strong when I had to
excuse myself at 10 PM. Ben had some good tables in HTML and diagrams in SVG to show the concepts, and used the network to log into his home machine and the GNHLUG web server Liberty to demonstrate the command line and GUI tools used to manage and maintain LVM and RAID. Side discussions included disaster recovery, pros and cons to reliability, redundancy and downtime, and the use of SMART interfaces on hard disk
drives. I’m sure everyone learned something. I certainly did.

Thanks to Ben for the presentation and Rob for hosting the meeting.

Seacoast LUG 10-Sept-2007: Ben Scott on RAID and LVM

By on September 10, 2007 in Home Page, Linux, OpenSource, Technology
  • What : RAID and LVM storage management
  • Date : Mon 10 Sep 2007 (TONIGHT)
  • Time : 7 PM to 9 PM
  • Where: Room 301, Morse Hall, UNH, Durham, NH

For the September 2007 SLUG/Seacoast/UNH/Durham meeting, Ben Scott
will be speaking on storage management using RAID and LVM.

=== About the presentation ===

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) and LVM (Logical Volume
Manager) let you do more with your disks than create partitions and
filesystems. With RAID, you can combine disks to make larger
filesystems, and/or add redundancy to help protect against disk
failure. LVM takes that a step further, by letting you create
arbitrary Logical Volumes (to hold filesystems), which can be easily
reallocated, resized, moved, and copied (snapshots).

Ben will be talking about some of the concepts, review the tools and
techniques available, and (hopefully) doing a live demonstration of
some of the things you can do. The specifics will be flexible, in
response to attendee demand.

=== About the speaker ===

Ben is a local Linux user, enthusiast, and advocate. He handles the
care and feeding of the GNHLUG Internet server, and is a GNHLUG
Bored^W Board Member.

=== About SLUG ===

SLUG is the Seacoast Linux User Group, and is a chapter of GNHLUG,
the Greater NH Linux User Group. Rob Anderson is the SLUG
coordinator. SLUG meets the second Monday of every month, same time,
same place. You can find out more about SLUG and GNHLUG at the
http://slug.gnhlug.org/ and http://www.gnhlug.org/ websites.

Meetings take place starting at 7:00 PM. Meetings are open to all.
The meeting proper ends around 9ish, but it’s not uncommon to find
hangers-on there until 10 or later. They take place in Room 301 (the
third floor conference room), of Morse Hall, at the University of New
Hampshire, in Durham.

Schedules Direct supplies TV/cable schedules for MythTV users

By on September 10, 2007 in Home Page, LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, Technology

“Schedules Direct is a non-profit organization that provides raw U.S./Canadian tv listing data to Free and Open Source Applications. Those applications then use the data to provide things like PVR functionality, search tools, and private channel grids.” Recently, the Tribune Media Services company Zap2It decided to discontinue their free service that had  provided TV/cable schedules to home hobbiests. Schedules Direct was formed by advocates for the various home-brewed PVRs to step in and supply the content. After negotiations with a number of vendors, they ended up back with TMS as their supplier. In a matter of weeks, the Schedules Direct crew managed to set up the infrastructure to provide a 10-day trial membership, a paid subscription service ($15/3 months initially, with a goal of $20/year or less once they establish the viability of the service) and a working infrastructure. Users of MythTV need to upgrade to the most recent (v 0.20.2 or later) version and change their configuration to use the new service. I switched over the weekend, confirmed I could read the new schedules, and paid up for the first three months. What a great example of the community coming together to supply their own needs.

GNHLUG has had several MythTV meetings, and I anticipate more in the future. Jarod Wilson presented a very popular session at the Merrimack Valley Linux User Group last year, and that lead to an effort by Jarod and maddog and others to run a series of MythTV installfests at NHTI.

DLSLUG Notes, 6-Sept-2007: ATTACK of the Nifties!!!

By on September 7, 2007 in CSS, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Bill McGonigle hosted the September meeting the Dartmouth – Lake Sunapee Linux User Group, held as usual on the first Thursday of the month, but at a different location: the Dartmouth Regional Technology Center. Seven members attended.

The night was announced as “Nifties:” short presentations that hope to elicit from the audience just that reaction. Everyone present had something to show off:

I showed the S5 (Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System) developed by Eric Meyer of CSS fame. S5 used standards-compliant CSS, JavaScript and XHTML to generate a slide show with keyboard shortcuts, drop-down slide lists, handout and slideshow formats, additional notes and more. Free as in speech, free as in beer. Nifty!

Bill McGonigle showed off pfSense, following up on a blog entry he had written. pfSense is a spin-off of monowall, the xBSD-based firewall program. Bill talked about how to configure it off a read-only CR, with a small (512 Mb) USB fob holding the configuration file, running diskless on an older computer. The web interface was pretty slick, rich and intuitive, and exposed a huge number of options. Nifty!

Adam showed off some work he had been doing with WebSphere Community Edition (aka Apache Geronimo) and a commercial add-on that provided VT-400 terminal emulation via Java and a browser, to access some legacy machines he needs to maintain. Nifty!

I mentioned that TheOpenCD September 2007 edition was out and available via BitTorrent. We talked about some of the neat software on the disk. PDFCreator seemed most popular, but OpenOffice and WinSCP got good mentions, too. Nifty.

We did NOT mention the OpenEducationCD, a spin-off project, but that got mention at last week’s GNHLUG Board of Director’s meeting.

We talked quite a bit about the OLPC project and I showed off one of the videos available on the RedHat site to great acclaim. Not just “Nifty!” but “I want to work there!!!” There are more videos here, here and here.

Many interesting side discussions, too. Sorry if you missed it; it was a fun night.

Ubuntu kernel panics after partition re-assignments solved!

By on August 19, 2007 in Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Last weekend I upgraded my T40 from the 30 Gb drive it came with to an 80 Gb drive, as I was running out of space and needed to run WinXP under VMWare on my Fedora Core 6 installation. I used partimage to make snapshots of the existing NTFS partition, the WinXP the machine came with, and three ext3 partitions, the FC6 and an Ubuntu boot and root partitions.

I have to grudgingly admit the NTFS was the easiest to move and resize, using nothing but Linux tools. How weird is that? Using Knoppix to capture and rewrite the master boot record, WinXP booted, complained about the size, run CHDSK, fixed itself, and rebooted. Ext3 is a little tougher: it’s a simple but obscure set of commands to drop the journal from the filesystem, turning it into an ext2 system, resizing, and then applying a new journal to the result.

A little fiddling with the grub.conf added the proper menu items, pointing to the new partitions (several had to get renamed to support more partitions, extended partitions, and all that), and Fedora Core 6 came right up. I wasn’t so lucky with Ubuntu.

Ubuntu threw a kernel panic when starting up, and it took a bit of detective work to figure out that the mkinitramfs-tools were the problem. These tools figure out where the swap partition is, and determine if there’s an image there to restore from. The problem was that the old swap partition (/dev/hda4) was now the container holding all of the extended paritions and would throw an error when there was an attempt to read the partition. In the file /etc/mkinitramfs/initramfs.conf or the subsidiary file /etc/mkinitramfs/conf.d/restore.conf, you’ll find a line RESTORE=/dev/xxxx. Change that to the location of your new swap file and presto! You’re back in business!

Hentzenwerke Moving from Windows to Linux

By on August 14, 2007 in FoxPro, Home Page, LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, Technology

MySQL-VFP book cover Followers of the Hentzenwerke Publishing empire know that Whil Hentzen has the largest catalog of Visual FoxPro books and an impressive collection of books bridging the gap from the Windows world into the Linux/Free/Open Source world. Whil’s been working for quite some time to put together a book on working with VFP and back-end data servers other than SQL Server. I was one of the many community members who contributed comments, criticisms and ideas to the book, and was honored when Whil chose to designate me as technical editor. Whil Hentzen announces, MySQL Client-Server Applications with Visual FoxPro now on sale:

After far too long a wait, the eagerly awaited companion to our Client/Server Apps with VFP and SQL Server book from years ago is here. The brand new 414 page MySQL Client-Server Applications with Visual FoxPro covers Client-Server apps from the perspective of the hugely popular open-source SQL database, MySQL. Learn how to install, configure MySQL and then connect specifically with VFP. Then get your hands dirty bringing data – both flat files and DBFs – into MySQL databases. Build a variety of user interfaces. Learn about development and deployment scenarios with this multi-platform backend. Each step of the way, real world problems (‘What if the connection fails?’) and potential solutions will be discussed.

The book is on sale only for a short period. Get your copy now!

Seacoast LUG, 13-August-2007: Panda3D

By on August 13, 2007 in Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Python, Technology

Ben Scott reminds folks about the Seacoast LUG meeting happening tonight:

For the August 2007 SLUG/Seacoast/UNH/Durham meeting, there will be a presentation on the Panda3D 3D engine.

=== About Panda3D ===

Panda3D is an Open Source “3D engine” — software that lets you model a “world”, and then render it in real-time on a graphics display. Think “Doom” or “Half-Life”. It was originally developed by Disney for their massively multi-player online game, Toontown, so it’s got real capabilities. They released it as Free Software in 2002. Carnegie Mellon University and Disney now manage the project jointly. The project emphasizes “a short learning curve and rapid development”.

Panda3D supports the C++ and Python languages, runs on Linux and Windows, and comes with models and artwork to get you started. There is also a library of documentation, sample code, and full projects online, along with what appears to be a reasonably active web forum.

=== About SLUG ===

SLUG is the Seacoast Linux User Group, and is a chapter of GNHLUG, the Greater NH Linux User Group. Rob Anderson is the SLUG coordinator. SLUG meets the second Monday of every month, same time, same place. You can find out more about SLUG and GNHLUG at their respective websites.

Meetings take place starting at 7:00 PM. Meetings are open to all. The meeting proper ends around 9ish, but it’s not uncommon to find hangers-on there until 10 or later. They take place in Room 301 (the third floor conference room), of Morse Hall, at the University of New Hampshire, in Durham.

SCO owns nothing!

By on August 10, 2007 in Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

From Groklaw: http://www.groklaw.net/ Friday, August 10 2007 @ 04:52 PM EDT

Hot off the presses: Judge Dale Kimball has issued a 102-page ruling [PDF] on the numerous summary judgment motions in SCO v. Novell. Here is what matters most:

[T]he court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights.

That’s Aaaaall, Folks!

I, for one, welcome our new overlords, the Novell UNIX-owners. It will be interesting to see what happens next!

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